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Death

MAJOR ARCANA · XIII

Death is card XIII of the major arcana. A skeleton carrying a black banner rides a white horse; before it a king has fallen and people come to meet it. Far off, the sun rises between two towers. The name sounds frightening, but the card does not stand for literal death. Upright, it stands for endings, closure and transformation; reversed, for resisting change and letting things drag on.

Name and number

Upright meaning

Keywords: endings, closure, transformation, renewal, letting go

What the Hanged Man paused and let go of now has its curtain clearly drawn. Death is that kind of closing card.

Upright, Death stands for the end of a chapter: a job, a home, a relationship, a way of thinking. Its ending may be sad, but without endings nothing new can begin. Like the sun rising at the back of the picture, an ending prepares a new beginning. It is read as a time to let go of the old and be reborn.

Reversed meaning

Keywords: resisting change, dragging on, stagnation, lingering attachment

Reversed, Death is read as something that should end and does not.

Being unable, out of fear or attachment, to let go of a relationship or habit you know cannot continue. Things dragging on without closure. Keeping a new beginning away out of fear of change. Some read it the other way: a long stagnation finally ending, and recovery beginning.

What the picture shows

• The skeleton on the white horse: death comes to everyone, whatever their rank.
• The white rose on the black banner: in the Rider–Waite–Smith deck a five-petaled white rose, said to be a sign of purity and of rebirth beyond death.
• The fallen king and the people meeting him: the king has fallen, the cleric joins his hands, the child looks straight up: read as different ways of facing an ending.
• The sun rising between two towers: the new morning that comes after an ending.

History

Death has been one of the cards from the earliest tarot.

In the fifteenth-century Italian Visconti–Sforza deck, it is a skeleton holding a bow and arrows. At the end of the Middle Ages, when plague struck again and again, the "dance of death" was widely painted: king and pauper alike are equal before death.

In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Tarot of Marseille, a skeleton swings a great scythe, with severed heads, hands and feet scattered on the ground. This card alone has nothing written in its name space, only the number 13. That is why in France it is called "the nameless arcanum."

The Rider–Waite–Smith deck redrew the scythe-wielding skeleton as a rider advancing with a banner, and added the rising sun behind. When divination books explain that "Death is the card of change," it comes from this picture and from esoteric interpretation since the nineteenth century.

Correspondences

Previous and next cards

• Previous: 12 The Hanged Man
• Next: 14 Temperance
• The major arcana

Lucky colors for Death