Death

✦ 13. Death

✦ Associations

Water / Scorpio (Pluto)

✦ Keywords

The cycle of life/death/rebirth, transformation, necessary endings, change, releasing what no longer serves.

✦ Quote

And as to you Life I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths, (No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.) — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

✦ Meaning

Death, one of the most feared cards in the deck, is also the simplest, I think, because it’s the most natural. If you know anything at all, you know all living things die. We see it in nature constantly, in the drifts of brittle leaves in autumn, in the cold and dormant grave of winter, in the baby bird fallen from its nest, in the unwelcome spider crushed under boot, in the food that we kill and consume in order to continue living.

✦ Acceptance in Nature

We (most of us) accept death in nature, but when death comes a-knocking on our human door, we bolt the latch and tremble. As if we are not each a child of nature. As if our flesh and blood is not made of the rich elements of the earth itself.

✦ Fear of Personal Death

Before anyone panics about pulling this card in your daily reading, I should say that the Death card does not herald literal physical death. (Or, while that's not completely out of the question, I've never seen it happen.) But physical death is a necessity to talk about when we talk about this card, because it is the archetypal framework beneath the card's esoteric and divinatory meanings. Fact: death is unavoidable. So we might as well stop avoiding it and make our peace.

✦ The Difficulty of Transformation

Many Tarot readers and writers gloss over the real difficulty of the Death card in a good-hearted effort to comfort their querents and audiences—which I understand because I've done it. It's far more pleasant to call Death a change or a transformation and then skip ahead to the lovely rebirth bit. (The new you! Fitter, healthier, and more productive!) But that does everyone involved a disservice, because it elides the exquisitely painful and laborious process of Death's rebirth. Death is indeed a transformation, but we must not brush the phoenix's ashes prematurely under the rug. We must look plainly at the engulfing flames and hear the bird's piercing cry; we must sit beside the dead, cooling ashes, and we must wait while those ashes rest, as rest they must, before they rise again. Because while Death heralds new beginnings, it first demands endings.

✦ Types of Endings

The endings that Death demands can range from quitting a job to leaving a relationship to shedding a part of our personality. I find that most often it's the latter, and the career shifts and relationship changes and everything else are necessary sacrifices that precede or follow that big-time ending: the death of a part of the self, which is usually a significant ego-death, as well. I'll give a personal example to help elucidate my meaning.

✦ Personal Example (Move to Portland)

In 2017, I moved across the country from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Portland, Oregon, with my new partner (now my spouse). That move was one kind of death (death 1). We'd both quit our jobs (death 2) and given away all our furniture and the majority of our possessions (death 3). I had also recently finalized my divorce from my ex-husband (death 4), which coincided with, but was not due to, the realization that I am way way gayer than I thought I was (death 5). I thought I was done with the endings and beginnings, but as we found an apartment and jobs in Portland and set up our lives here, little did I know that the real Death was only in the making.

✦ Tectonic Shift and Identity

A slow but massive tectonic shift was occurring deep in the bedrock of my understanding of myself, including (but not limited to) my gender identity, my spiritual beliefs, and my career. The simplest and most complicated thing about Death is that each of these transformations contains an ending and a beginning at once. The gleeful burgeoning understanding of myself as nonbinary was simultaneously a solemn farewell to my identity and self-image as a woman, which I had in equal parts chafed at and cherished for so long. As I began actually considering Tarot as a legitimate career path, and as I delved deeper into my occult interests, I lit the match on the funerary pyre of the cynical mistrustful atheist safety blanket that I'd cleaved to since 2004. In the end, the hardest part to release was my career as an academic tutor, a gig I had landed in by accident in college but loved for the bulk of my fifteen years in the job, but which was now standing in the way of fully committing to the far more artistic and far more taboo work that I truly wanted to do. That, and my identity as a fiction writer, which I clung to even though I hadn't published or written short fiction in any meaningful way for several years, were the hardest things to release. (Deaths 6–13.) But that's Death, is it not? The hardest goodbyes are the ones we don't want to make. Loss is only loss if we've loved.

✦ Making Room

All of these endings, even (especially) the ones years in the making, were necessary in order to make room for the beginnings to come through. I am one-thousand percent confident that without each of those deaths, this book you're reading right now would not exist, and neither would the Fifth Spirit Tarot deck. This deck and this book, which are my babies, which are the best things I've created to date, only came through the veil because I made room for them. Death makes room for birth.

✦ Death and Creation

Death sucks, but/and it's also beautiful and cathartic and absolutely necessary for life itself. As I've mentioned previously in the Empress chapter, so many of the goddesses of life, sex, and creation across time and culture were also the deities of death, war, and destruction. A French term for orgasm is la petite mort, “the little death,” because of the spiritual release of life force in the moment of sexual climax. As mortician and death-acceptance advocate Caitlin Doughty notes in her excellent memoir Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory, whenever a person gives birth, they are “creating not only a life, but a death.” Samuel Beckett wrote that women give birth astride of a grave. Mother Nature is indeed a real mother, creating and destroying in a constant loop. Birth and destruction—they're woven together like lovers, like the chicken and the egg, like the double helix of our DNA. Nothing is born if nothing dies, and all new things are nurtured on the bones of the old. Refusing death is refusing life.

✦ Card Imagery

In our card for Fifth Spirit Tarot, we see the cycle of life from babe to adult to elder to skeleton, which is crowned because Death is the king of kings, taking us all in the end. The baby nurses at the breast of their parent, who freely gives of their milk and their body in order to foster the growth of this new life, as both parents give of their energy and life force upon becoming parents. The elder, who is also the Crone, has the waning crescent moon behind their head, suggesting the crescent headdresses of goddesses of creation/fertility and destruction/death such as Astarte, Diana-Artemis, and Shiva. The moons in various stages of the lunar cycle also recall the cycle of life/death/birth that repeats in the skies thirteen times a year, thirteen being the number of the Death card. The snake likewise connects us to the cycle and the process of transformation since, to quote Campbell from The Power of Myth: “The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon its shadow to be born again. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again.” The butterflies and the infant are reminders of that rebirth end of the cycle, through which we eventually merge after we go through the vale of Death and are transformed. Lastly, I have to give homage to the woman upon whose image I based my Crone, the Grande Dame of creation and destruction herself, she who never averts her eyes, the inestimable author Margaret Atwood.

✦ Integration and Guidance

When we're in the Death card, we're in the belly of a larger cycle that's too big for us to comprehend while we're in it. What the Death card is really about is the myriad shifts and openings those minute deaths dilate within us, the spiralic chain of constant unfolding as our labor builds toward birth. The Hanged One has prepared us for this—the comfort in discomfort, the trust in the unknown—so that we may allow the threshold to open within us without knowing what awaits on the other side. Instead of resisting these endings, as is so often our fearful egoic instinct, Death asks us to partner with them, to be active participants in our own releasing, to be the doula of our own becoming, to push when it's time. And if we do, we'll break through on a wave of blood and screaming into a newness and wholeness that we cannot fathom now but that is already within us, a twinkle in the eye, waiting till it's time to come through.