Tarot Card Meanings: Death

‘All our times have come
Here but now they’re gone
Seasons don’t fear the reaper
Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain
We can be like they are
So come on, baby (don’t fear the reaper)
Baby, take my hand (don’t fear the reaper)
We’ll be able to fly (don’t fear the reaper)…’

‘Don’t Fear The Reaper’ by Blue Öyster Cult (Roeser)

Welcome to my circle of death (which is, in many ways, a circle of life!) If you’ve landed here searching for the Death Tarot card meaning, the good news is that the Death card very rarely predicts a literal physical death! Instead, it usually points towards endings, transformation, release, and the difficult but necessary process of letting go. Unlike some of the other “bad” cards, Death comes up quite a lot in readings I do for other people. Which I guess speaks to how routine – how ordinary, really – loss is to the cycle of our everyday lives. But while we know on some level that all things end, and that often this is for the best, it still feels gutting, like a scythe to the soul, when we’re in the midst of it. While Death might be a card of transformation, the process of loss and growth is often hard and painful. As Bakara Wintner says in WTF Is Tarot? the Death card signifies a loss “and a significant one, and it probably fucking sucks”.

But it is important not to lose sight of the potential the Death card offers for new growth, new life, rebirth. As a wise man (Seneca, one of the OG wise men, lol¹) once said, “every new beginning comes from another beginning’s end”. Without death to clear the way, nothing new can find a place. Old leaves must wither and fall from the trees, leaving them bare and stark for a while, before new green buds can appear. All that we have must be stripped away sometimes, down to the bare bones. This scouring is how all great transformations start – from the pruned-back dead garden new life starts to stir.

Symbolism in the Death Card

Death is one of those Major Arcana cards where there’s so much busywork going on in the late, great PCS‘s artwork for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, it’s hard to know where to start. But I got you, bestie!

‘The Skull Beneath The Skin‘: Death Himself

First up, we have Death himself, usually represented as a skeletal figure. As well as being an obvious symbol of mortality, the skeleton reminds us that death is the great universal leveller. Beneath our unique trimmings and trappings – our skin, our hair, our musculature, and all the other things that make us recognisably us – our skeletons are remarkably alike, regardless of race, sex, or colour. Kings and beggars, saints and sinners – eventually, we’re all reduced to much the same bones.

Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas Regumque turres

[Pale Death, with impartial foot, knocks at the cottages of the poor and the palaces of kings]

Horace (65-8 BC), Odes [Carimina], Book 1

And I think the skeleton also humanises Death. He isn’t some otherworldly demon or distant god, standing apart from humanity. He is us. Or rather, he is what remains of us: the earthly detritus that can endure for decades, centuries, even millennia after the rest of us has returned to the sea and the soil. In that sense, Death isn’t an outsider who comes to claim us. He has been silently waiting beneath our skin all along.

Death & The Feather

The RWS’s Death is clad in armour and sports a red feather on his helmet. Interestingly it looks very much like the same feather the Fool wears in his cap, and the one woven into the Sun-kid’s flower crown (and we all know Colman Smith loves a good easter egg so this surely cannot be a coincidence!) So, what do we think it’s doing here?

One interpretation is that the feather represents the life force that threads its way through the Major Arcana. On the Fool, setting out on his adventure, the feather is positively jaunty, lol. On the Sun, it dances joyfully in the breeze, full of vitality and optimism. Death’s feather, however, droops sadly towards the ground. Like autumn leaves or fading flowers, it appears to have reached the end of its natural life. Its colour is significant too. Red is the colour of blood, energy, passion and vitality, making the feather’s gradual (literal and metaphorical!) decline all the more poignant.

There’s another possible layer here too. In Egyptian mythology, the justice goddess Ma’at wore a single feather in her headdress. It was this feather which a dead person’s heart was weighed against in the Hall of Judgement. Only a heart in balance, unburdened by wrongdoing, could continue its journey into the afterlife. It’s prob v. unlikely Waite/Colman Smith had this in mind when she gave Death’s helmet its little flourish, but you never know – the Victorian occultists were pretty obsessed with Ancient Egypt! Perhaps Death’s feather serves as a reminder to travel lightly through life, because one day we all reach Death’s door carrying only what we cannot put down.

‘A Rose By Any Other Name‘: The Black Banner & The White Rose

In the RWS card Death carries a black flag with a white rose emblem on it, and even many decks that eschew that Full Flag Experience still incorporate the white (or sometimes red) rose into their design. Interestingly, while the RWS deck is positively bursting with red roses, white roses appear only twice: here on the Death card, and casually held in the Fool‘s hand. Maddy Elruna writes on this association that, “To me, as pure potential, the Fool represents our soul; that part of us that is there before and after our physical form [e.g. after death].” If the Fool represents the soul before incarnation, perhaps the white rose reappearing on Death hints at the soul’s return once our earthly journey is complete. Especially as that’s two symbols linking these two cards (the white rose and the red feather) – the Fool standing at the threshold of life, Death at the threshold of whatever comes next. And here’s a little piece of Tarot trivia I absolutely adore: in many decks the Death card is left unnamed, while the Fool is left unnumbered. One begins before the story properly starts; the other seems to continue after it ends.

Speaking of the Wars of the Roses, several of my Tarot decks explore the relationship between Death and war. Death in the MindScapes Tarot is one of the most powerful cards in the deck, depicting an overgrown battlefield inspired by Gettysburg. Grass pushes up through old cannons, nature gently reclaiming blood-soaked earth. What struck me most is the stillness of the image, the sense that the worst has already happened, and now the earth is doing its slow, patient work of healing. It speaks to the cycles of despair and peace, the truth that time does not erase what happened, but softens the sharpest edges. You can still hear Death’s echo in this card, but it no longer sounds like screams and gunshots. Now it quietly teaches. And then it lets the wildflowers bloom.

Le Tarot Arthurien takes a very different approach, drawing on the legend of a mortally wounded Arthur‘s journey to Avalon. In the myth Arthur is not quite dead, merely sleeping until his kingdom needs him again when he will return to battle. It captures both death and rebirth without tipping into the rather saccharine optimism that some “transformation” decks lean towards. Meanwhile, the Unveiled Tarot places Death amongst the ruins of war, a lone skeletal witness to everything that has been lost. It’s a reminder that war doesn’t end when the fighting stops, its shadows stretch far into the lives of those left behind

‘So I looked, and behold, a pale horse. And the name of him who sat on it was Death‘: Death’s Horse

Death’s pale horse immediately recalls the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation (6:8). It’s both terrifying and majestic.

Horses have long symbolised power, speed and freedom, making them a fitting steed for Death, whose reach is both swift and impossible to escape. As the old gospel song puts it, ‘you can run on for a long time… [but] sooner or later God’ll cut you down‘. Death cannot be outrun!

Interestingly, while the RWS deck gives Death a white horse, the biblical horse was probably intended to be read as more of a dun or a palomino (it’s Conquest who rides the white horse). The original Greek describes it as chlōrós, a word meaning pale, sickly green or yellow-green (the Greek word is the root of “chlorophyll” and “chlorine”) – the colour of disease (‘green around the gills’), decay, or a corpse drained of life. Waite’s choice of a snowy white horse may be deliberate though. White is the colour of purity, cleansing and transformation, suggesting that Death is not simply an ending but a force that clears away the old to make space for the new.

White horses also appear throughout Celtic mythology as guides between worlds. Zuhawajid explains that the horse goddess Epona was closely associated with journeys, protection, and, in some traditions, escorting souls into the afterlife, “connecting equine figures with the journey of the dead”.

‘Death Comes For Us All’: The Figures in the Death Card

The universality of Death is also emphasised by the fact that he’s not alone on the card – he’s often sketched surrounded by people. (In case you missed it the first 27 times: DEATH COMES FOR US ALL, lol). And in the RWS each of the four figures clustered around Death (and under his horse’s hooves) respond to his presence in very different ways, just like we all respond to loss, change, and grief v. differently in real life.

The fallen king (often linked to the Emperor) with this broken and discarded crown reminds us that no amount of wealth, power or status can bargain with mortality. Some things simply cannot be controlled. The bishop (or Hierophant) stands to meet Death face-to-face. Supported by his faith, he accepts death not as an ending but as another stage of the soul’s journey. The young woman (a visual twin of the maiden in the Strength card) kneels before Death, but turns her face away. She understands what is happening, yet cannot quite bear to look. There is courage here, but also grief. Only the child (coded as the boy in the Sun card) greets Death directly, offering a small bouquet of flowers. Unburdened by fear or expectation, he accepts change with a trust that the adults around him seem to have lost. Rachel Pollack saw these figures as four different ways of meeting profound change. The rigid ego may collapse beneath it, while faith, resilience, innocence, or acceptance allow us to move through it with greater grace. Death comes for us all; what differs is how we choose to greet it.

At first, I found some of the Death cards from the older Tarot decks in the de Marseille tradition super creepy – all those severed hands, feet and faces poking out of the ground. But the more I read about them, the more I came round to them. Wayne Limberger suggests that this Death isn’t “harvesting souls” at all. Rather, he looks like he’s cultivating them. The field around him becomes a strange, symbolic garden (‘And now [grass] seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves‘) with the severed body parts planted like seedlings in fertile soil, ready to grow into something new. It’s a wonderfully hopeful reading, transforming Death from a grim executioner into an unlikely gardener (the constant gardener, perhaps). Sallie Nichols similarly observes that the hands and faces planted in the earth are “already springing to life” and that, by the Judgement card, “the seeds of Death’s harvest will have reached maturity… we shall see rise a new human being, reborn from the dark earth”. In Nichols’ vision, we might imagine Death performing an act of husbandry, preparing the ground for an eventual resurrection rather than simply bringing lives to an end. I particularly love Limberger’s suggestion that, with a little imagination, we might picture Death’s scythe “hammered into a ploughshare”. It’s a beautiful inversion of the image. The same tool that appears capable of cutting life down also prepares the earth for whatever will grow next.

Death comes to me again, a girl in a cotton slip.
Barefoot, giggling. It’s not so terrible she tells me,
not like you think, all darkness and silence.

There are wind chimes and the smell of lemons.
Some days it rains. But more often the air
is dry and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase
built from hair and bone and listen
to the voices of the living.

I like it, she says, shaking the dust from her hair,
especially when they fight, and when they sing.

‘Death Comes To Me Again, A Girl’ by Dorianne Laux

The River Between Worlds: Boats, water, and towers in the Death Tarot Card

Many Death cards feature a river winding between two towers, with a small boat sailing towards a rising (or setting) sun (more on that later). If these towers look familiar, it’s because they crop up all over the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Seriously, Tarot looooovvvvveeesssss those two towers, in a real ‘why are you so obsessed with me?’ kinda way. They appear most prominently on the Moon, but also echo the pillars of the High Priestess, Justice, and even the Hierophant. Pamela Colman Smith clearly had a favourite architectural feature ;-)!

Waite tells us that the towers “signify the ramparts of the visible world, and the space between them is the issue into the unknown.” The term ‘ramparts’ implies these towers are defensive structures, erected to protect us from this great, wild unknown – the darkness of our own psyches, the weirdness and chaotic wonder the world has to offer if we take the time to gaze below the surface of things, and, also here perhaps, the greatest mystery of all: death itself. The towers, then, are a protective barrier between the invisible and the visible, the rational world and the dim dreamworld of intuition, life and after-life. But the river leads us on, slowly but inexorably, past these defences, towards Death.

In Kabalistic tradition, the two towers are often identified as Jachin and Boaz, the pillars that formed the entrance to Solomon’s Temple (the first temple in Jerusalem). They have also come to represent two complementary aspects of justice: mercy and severity. Mercy offers forgiveness and compassion. Severity reminds us that actions have consequences – that, one way or another, we reap what we sow (or, karma if you prefer!)

Both ideas are deeply entwined with death. They pull on the idea that death is both a mercy, a sweet release, the natural end of a life well-lived, and, at other times, a devastating blow, a punishment, an abject cruelty, the end to all potential. It is easy to write about the unfairness of Death, its harshness (and trust me, I will, at great length, haha), but it is important to note that this is not always what death is. It can be a comfort, a relief, a release, the loosening of a grip that has become painful to hold. Even longed for. The spiritual teacher Ram Dass once said “death is like taking off a too tight shoe”, a line beautifully borrowed by Kae Tempest in ‘Grace‘. BABY DON’T FEAR THE REAPER!

Crucially, however, the towers are not the end of the road. The path – or in this case the river – continues between them. Death is not a brick wall, but a gateway. Before the towers lies one state of being; beyond them, another. Whatever waits on the far side remains hidden from us, but the symbolism suggests not annihilation, merely passage.

The river itself is also significant. Water almost always speaks of emotion, intuition and transformation in Tarot (hello there, Cups!), so it’s fitting that Death’s journey unfolds upon it. Rivers are also wonderfully liminal places, forever changing and yet somehow eternal. As the philosopher Heraclitus famously observed, no one ever steps into the same river twice (though props to Disney: my first encounter with this little nugget of pre-Socratic philosophy came via Pocahontas, not On Nature 😂)

It’s hard not to think here of the great rivers of myth. Perhaps this is the River Styx, carrying souls from the world of the living into the underworld. Or perhaps it recalls the Egyptian solar barque, transporting the dead towards new life with the rising sun. The precise mythology matters less than the shared symbolism: death is not a destination but a journey. That idea crops up elsewhere in the Tarot too. The Six of Swords also shows a small boat crossing a river, and has long been understood as a card of transition, healing, and rites of passage. By including rivers, the Death card again reminds us that death is not an end, only another place on the cyclic flow

Some Tarot cards, like the Tempest Tarot, focus on the boat itself – and I like boats as a metaphor for death. They’re liminal spaces, neither here nor there, existing solely to carry us from one shore to the next.

And in other Tarot traditions, boats are hinted at. The Thoth‘s Death card, for example, is very watery because it draws on the story of Isis searching for her husband Osiris‘ chopped up remains after he’s been drowned and dismembered by Set. She collects all the pieces but his penis, which was chucked in the river and promptly swallowed by a Nile Carp (sucks to be Osiris) – hence the Hebrew letter associated with the Death card, Nun, meaning ‘fish’. So the Thoth Death card has a fish, a seabed, fluid, swirling forms which look like currents. Crowley’s Death figure weaves the karmic tapestry of souls before him with his scythe, but I remain utterly convinced that the threads and loom are deliberately drawn to resemble the rigging of a ship. You may disagree. I, however, am prepared to die (ahem) on this hill ;-).

I am standing upon the seashore. A ship, at my side, spreads her white sails
to the morning breeze and starts
for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength.
I stand and watch her until, at length, she hangs like a speck
of white cloud just where the sea and sky come to mingle with each other.

Then, someone at my side says, “There, she is gone.”

“Gone where?”

Gone from my sight. That is all. She is just as large in mast
and hull and spar as she was when she left my side.
And she is just as able to bear her load of living freight to her destined port.
Her diminished size is in me – not in her.
And, just at the moment when someone says, “There, she is gone,”
there are other eyes that are watching for her coming, and other voices
ready to take up the glad shout, “Here she comes!”

And that is dying…

‘Gone From My Sight’ by Luther F. Beecher

The Death card seems to suggest much the same thing as Beecher’s beautiful prose poem. Death is not the voyage’s end. It is simply the point at which those left on one shore lose sight of the boat.

Finally, in the course of researching this deep dive I came across another fascinating little Pamela Colman Smith easter egg, that’s very ‘is she or isn’t she?’ but that I can’t quite bring myself to let go of. If you look closely you’ll see the prick spur at Death’s heel looks less like a riding spur and more like an arrow, pointing directly towards a little cave tucked away on the riverbank.

It feels as though it might be purposeful, rather than simply a bit of lazy sketching (or an unfortunate ink blot!), because caves have long symbolised places of death, transformation, and rebirth. Most famously, perhaps, in the symbolism of the Resurrection: Jesus emerging from his cave-like tomb (note also the crucifixion/graveyard type crosses on the foreshore), or calling Lazarus from the cave where his body had been laid, effectively raising him from the dead. In Greek mythology, caves often mark entrances to the underworld, but also to hidden wisdom. Plato, meanwhile, imagined humanity living inside a cave, mistaking shadows for reality until someone finally emerged into the light. Different stories, perhaps, but all built around the same archetypal idea: sometimes we must first enter the darkness before we can truly see the light.

‘The Sun Must Set To Rise’: Sun imagery in the Death Tarot card

Lastly, many Death cards feature a sun on the right hand side, just kissing the horizon. Waite describes it as “the sun of immortality”, and its daily cycle reminds us that death, too, is part of the natural rhythm of existence. In modern UK culture (where I’m from) we see death very much as an end, but in other cultures death is just a natural and important (though sad) part of an on-going cycle. Winter comes so there can be a Spring, and we can only appreciate what we have when we know what loss is. Death can represent a period of sorrow and mourning, but it is not forever – our sadness will end in a sunrise, in a new-born phoenix rising from the ashes of the old. Afterall, the sun on the horizon in the RWS Death card is in the east – though death may feel like an end, the sun is rising, not setting.

It should be noted, however, that some commentators violently disagree the sun is rising, despite its easterly location, and are very much #TeamSunset. They point to the cards that follow Death – the Devil, the Tower, the Star, the Moon, and only then the Sun – suggesting that the Death card marks the beginning of a descent into the underworld, into the darkest corners of the psyche, rather than the dawn of a new day.

Personally, I suspect it’s less a question of who’s right than of what we bring to the card. If, for you, Death speaks primarily of endings and finality, then perhaps the sun is setting. If you see it as a card of rebirth, renewal and fresh beginnings, then it may well be rising. And if, like me, you tend to think of Death as a card of transition, then perhaps it is neither. It simply hangs on the horizon, suspended between day and night, life and death, endings and beginnings.

Either way, it’s all part of the same cycle at the end of the day. (Pun fully intended 😂)

Still lying underneath the stormy skies
She said oh
I know the sun must set to rise

Paradise by Coldplay (Berryman/Buckland/Champion/Eno/Martin)

Wormfood: Death, Harvest, and Decay in the Tarot

Obviously about a gazillion Tarot cards (though, interestingly, not the RWS) show Death wielding his trusty scythe. In fact, I’d say the scythe is one of those symbols that’s so familiar we almost stop asking why Death carries one. But the answer is interesting, especially if we’re looking for ways to soften this card in a reading without defaulting to the rather saccharine “love and light, hun, it’s just transformation!” school of Tarot.

Our immediate association with the skeleton and the sickle is, of course, the figure of the Grim Reaper. Since the late Middle Ages, Death has been imagined as a skeletal figure harvesting human lives just as a farmer harvests wheat. The image became especially prominent during the Black Death in the 14th Century, when the bubonic plague swept across Europe so relentlessly that people seemed to fall like ripened crops before the scythe.

But the symbolism reaches back even further. Before it belonged to Death, the scythe belonged to Saturn (Roman) and Kronos (Greek) the Greco-Roman god of agriculture and harvest (later also associated with time and old age). That’s easy to forget today, because Saturn has become astrology’s stern taskmaster – the planet of discipline, boundaries, responsibility and consequences. Yet his original tool wasn’t a weapon at all. It was a farming implement. I love Alice Sparkly Kat’s reminder that Saturn is “a wrathful god and one whose consequences become more and more dire the more they are delayed.” She argues that, by trying to dominate and control nature rather than working with its cycles, “we have only postponed payment for our ever-increasing gamble with nature.” Death, then, isn’t simply destruction, it is the unavoidable reckoning that follows whenever we imagine ourselves exempt from nature’s rhythms.

In Greek myth, Kronos devours his own children in a desperate attempt to prevent them from overthrowing him. Later traditions increasingly merged Kronos with the personification of Time itself (Chronos), making the myth a gruesome metaphor for the way time eventually consumes all things. Death reflects the inevitable Saturnian transformation, not literal death necessarily, but a cycle closing. Both Death and the Hermit, the other old man of the Tarot, draw from the same archetypal source: time as the slow scythe that cuts us free from what we once were. I’m minded also of the Wheel of Fortune spinning inbetween them in the Major Arcana – time in solitude, time in motion, time as harvest. Nothing stays the same forever.

But despite the ‘grim’ in his name, the metaphor is surprisingly gentle. Death isn’t hunting with a bow and arrow, or murdering with a knife. Instead, he is reaping. Harvest implies that the crop has reached its natural end. The wheat isn’t cut down because the farmer hates it, but because it has completed its season. And to every thing there is a season, turn turn turn!

Given I’m including La Muerte card from the Loteria Tarot here, it’s worth noting that Mexico has a rather different relationship with the Grim Reaper than much of the Western world. As Christine Quigley observes, “in Mexico, where an annual celebration (El Día de los Muertos) is given over to Death and his victims, the reaper is much more approachable.…Our Grim Reaper is mysterious and cloaked. That of the Mexicans is exposed, befriended, and teased about his boniness.…Unlike [others], who… dread the reaper, the people of Mexico prefer to fraternize with the enemy and thereby steal away some of his symbolic power.” Here Death remains inevitable, but it becomes something we can laugh with, eat with, paint, dance, and share stories about. It isn’t robbed of its sadness, but neither is it allowed to become unspeakable.

Seeing Death as a god of harvest brings us neatly back to the idea of Death as gardener that I touched on earlier. As Charlie Claire Burgess reminds us, death isn’t an interruption to nature but one of its defining rhythms. Every autumn the leaves fall, every winter the earth appears to die back, and every spring life returns once more. Even the food that sustains us was once alive, and “every moment we are alive, we are also dying.”

That’s the paradox at the heart of the Death card. Death doesn’t stand outside the cycle of life; it makes the cycle possible. Without harvest there can be no sowing, without decay no fertile soil, and without endings no new beginnings.

When Death appears in a reading, it may be asking us to become gardeners in our own lives. Meg Jones Wall beautifully captures this idea: “By tilling the soil, by removing the weeds and overgrowth as well as the rot, we give ourselves the space and the resources to plant new seeds.” Sometimes the kindest thing we can do – for ourselves, our relationships, or our futures – is to pick up the scythe and start pruning.

“This isn’t about doom or finality — it’s about compost. The rotting apple that feeds the soil, the forest fire that clears the undergrowth so new green shoots can push through. Death is the turning of the wheel, the chapter break, the essential pause that says: you can’t carry this into the next season.

It asks you — sometimes gently, sometimes with a ruthless swing of the scythe — what needs to end? What outdated skin, stale story, or brittle scaffolding are you still clinging to, even though it’s strangling your growth? Death won’t let you keep dragging that corpse around. It stinks, my friend. Put it the fuck down.”

Aud

One of my favourite modern depictions of this idea comes from the Bonestone & Earthflesh Tarot. The Death card shows the body of a fallen warrior, roots stretching down into the earth while ravens burst from the cavity of the chest. It’s a breathtaking image because life is literally springing from the death wound. Grief and renewal aren’t shown as opposites, but as part of the same living process. Of course, that doesn’t mean transformation is painless. But as bell hooks so beautifully puts it, “The place of suffering… is also a place of peace and possibility. Our sufferings do not magically end; instead we are able to wisely alchemically recycle them. They become the abundant waste that we use to make new growth possible.” Charlie Claire Burgess memorably summarises it: our suffering becomes compost, but, like compost, we must turn it.

Sallie Nichols makes much the same point, reminding us that “between the pruning away of the old and the maturation of the new lies a period of black mourning.” The alchemists called this stage mortificatio – the necessary darkness between one life ending and another beginning. The Death card doesn’t ask us to skip over grief. Quite the opposite, it reminds us that mourning is itself part of the transformation.

“Death is the price paid to have trees and clams and birds and grasshoppers, and death is the price paid to have human consciousness, to be aware of all that shimmering awareness and all that love. My somatic life is the wondrous gift wrought by my forthcoming death”.

Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature: How Life Has Emerged and Evolved

Several modern decks make this idea wonderfully explicit, depicting the body of a dead animal not as something grotesque, but as compost or carrion – an essential part of the food chain. In the Wayhome Tarot, it’s a dead doe, guts spilling on to the verdant forest floor. In The Wild Unknown, it’s the desiccated skeleton of a bird. And in the Ever Ahead Tarot, Death appears as a majestic stag killed in a collision with a car, now feeding the crows that gather around it. The full, unsentimental cycle of life, right there on the roadside.

Lark writes beautifully on the Aeclectic Tarot website about the Wild Unknown card: “Often when I come upon a bird’s body laying in the grass I stop to really look at it, examine it closely. Because it is the only time I can do that when it is perfectly still. And not only can you see the outside, but often the inside as well. I think we do this when people we love die….there is a stillness, an examining of their life and the role we had in it. Death causes us to stop….the world around us to slow down, to bring us into the present moment…it causes an acute awareness of life. And what life means…a glimpse of its precious spark…that is so irretrievable when once gone.”

And then we come back to Death as a kindness.

And God,
please let the deer
on the highway
get some kind of heaven.
Something with tall soft grass
and sweet reunion.
Let the moths in porch lights
go someplace
with a thousand suns,
that taste like sugar
and get swallowed whole.
May the mice
in oil and glue
have forever dry, warm fur
and full bellies.

If I am killed
for simply living,
let death be kinder
than man.

‘Kinder Than Man’ by Althea Davis

Finally, the idea of Death directly feeding new life is given the most ingenious twist in the Urban Tarot; the faceless doctor taking the living heart from a dying patient so that it can be transplanted into someone else, giving them a new lease of life. As the creator, Robin Scott writes, “that’s a very real kind of reincarnation and rebirth.”

“Because of selfless decisions made in their most wretched moments, donors and their families give perfect strangers – who they will most probably never meet – the gift of life. Through me, my donor lives on. Through the people she loved and the people who still love her, she lives on.

I can only hope that I have made her proud. After nearly 24 years, through a practice of radical self-acceptance, I have finally come to realise that by living – and striving to live well – I too am participating in the ultimate act of love.”

Carly-Jay Metcalfe

Dance With Death: Tarot and the Danse Macabre

I’ve always had a soft spot for a dancing Death – and a smiling one, too! Death cards that show Death dancing immediately evoke the Danse Macabre: the medieval motif in which skeletons lead kings, clergy, merchants, and peasants alike in a slow, unavoidable dance towards the grave. It is a vivid reminder that death is the great equaliser, respecting neither wealth nor status.

Indeed, that was precisely the point. As Sophie Oosterwijk notes, medieval audiences were meant to see Death gleefully overturning the social order, reducing kings and commoners to the same bare bones. In a rigidly hierarchical Christian society, this was not an especially comforting image, but a moral warning: death comes for everyone, often without warning, so live well, and be prepared. In the wake of repeated outbreaks of plague, that message would have felt less like an abstract theological lesson than an everyday reality. And while we might be less familiar with death these days, and less scared of meeting him ‘before our time’, the central message still stands. As Charlie Claire Burgess writes, “To understand the Death card, to really get it, we have to look Death in the hollow-eyed face. We have to join the dance, because we’re already in it, whether we like it or not.”

“Mr. Emperor, your sword won’t help you out
Sceptre and crown are worthless here
I’ve taken you by the hand
For you must come to my dance.”

‘Vierzeiliger oberdeutscher Totentanz‘ by Heidelberger Blockbuch, c. 1455/58

This dancing Death doesn’t threaten annihilation, but it does insist on movement. And there is often something surprisingly joyful about such movement. As Laetitia Barbier writes, “Death invites us to dance out our life.” And in doing so, it offers us a chance to end on a flourish – to ‘stick the landing’, as Harley Hefford aptly titles his Death card. Barbier describes the card as a medieval-style memento mori: “remember you will die, everything does,” but goes on to add, “Death is fertile ground; without these ends, no new beginning.” And so Death dances, smiling, playing us onwards – not towards nothingness, but towards whatever comes next.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
    Not to be born is the best for man;
    The second-best is a formal order,
    The dance’s pattern; dance while you can.

    Dance, dance, for the figure is easy,
    The tune is catching and will not stop;
    Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
    Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

From ‘Death’s Echo’ by W.H. Auden

Death’s Sweet Embrace: Death and Sex in the Tarot

Few pairings have fascinated humanity as much as sex and death. Across mythology, religion, literature, and psychology, the two have loooooooong been entwined: the forces that create life are also those that remind us of its inevitable end. It is hardly surprising, then, that many Tarot artists give Death an unmistakable erotic charge. As Ernest Becker puts it:

“Sex is of the body, and the body is of death… This is the meaning of the Biblical account of the ending of paradise, when the discovery of sex brings death into the world. As in Greek mythology too, Eros and Thanatos are inseparable; death is the natural twin brother of sex.”

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Interestingly, biology echoes this symbolic pairing. Bodies that reproduce via shagging are mortal (whereas our little non-sexy pal the amoeba, that reproduces asexually via binary fission, is biologically immortal). Our ordinary somatic cells have a finite capacity to divide – the Hayflick limit – before they enter senescence or programmed cell death. I really like how science and the arts reflect each other here, show this folk wisdom we seem to have always had: that sex and mortality arrive hand in hand.

Tarot adds one final thread to this tapestry. The Death card is traditionally associated with Scorpio, a sign of both mortality and sexuality. It is yet another reminder that destruction and creation are inseparable. Even as something is taken from us, something new is brought into being.

One particularly enduring expression of this relationship emerged during the sixteenth century, when artists began depicting beautiful young (and often naked) women alongside a Grim Reaper type figure. Moore argues that although stories linking love and death are ancient – from Persephone‘s descent into Underworld to Romeo and Juliet and Tristan and Isolde – the Renaissance gave this pairing a new visual language, placing “a humanized form of Death alongside nubile young women, lending these works an air of deadly eroticism the likes of which had not been seen before.” This Death and the Maiden motif has proved remarkably enduring, and many Tarot artists continue to draw upon it.

In the Fyodor Pavlov Tarot, Pavlov depicts Death and the figure in its arms as “wrestling and embracing, pushing and pulling with and against each other. Change is difficult and does not often come without a struggle. But change is also sought, it is transformative.” Rather than presenting Death as a predator or conqueror, the card captures the strange intimacy of transformation: we resist change even as we long for it. Or, as Maddy Elruna observes, “I often find that with Death, we knew the ending was coming, even if we resist the change at the last moment.”

I flirted with you all my life
Even kissed you once or twice
And to this day I swear it was nice
But, clearly, I was not ready

And then, fuck me, the last verse is an absolute kicker: how his mum begged for death in the end, and it teased her back, refusing to come to her and alleviate her of her suffering.

When my mom was cancer sick
She fought but then succumbed to it
But you made her beg for it
“Lord Jesus, please, I’m ready”

It is a heartbreaking reminder that our relationship with death is never straightforward. We spend much of our lives trying to outrun it, only to find there are moments when we beg it to arrive. The Death card reflects that same complexity. It can be cruel, frightening, and painful. But it also asks us to examine our own contradictions and inconsistencies in our relationship with loss, change, and letting go. (RIP Vic, you were a real one).

Other cards take it back to the biological (and practically gynaecological in the Tarot Erotica‘s case!) They link death with birth, pregnancy, and fertility, reminding us that death is not simply the opposite of life, but one of the processes that sustains it.

Around a million of our cells die every second, making way for new ones, even as others remain with us for decades (the neurons of our cerebral cortex, for example), or even a lifetime – as with the cells in the lens of the eye. We are constantly remaking ourselves. Our bodies are not static objects but living processes, forever balancing growth and decay, death and regeneration.

The birth and pregnancy imagery also reminds me of my little fixation with eggs and ovaries. Cis women are actually born with virtually all the primary oocytes they’ll ever have. Those egg cells begin developing before birth, pause in meiosis, and many remain in that arrested state for decades until (if ever) they’re ovulated.

My mum died when I was seven, and never met my kids – her grandsons – so what I love about this fact is that she nevertheless had a physical connection to them, or at least the building blocks that would one day help create them. Obvs the oocytes inside foetal Lucy weren’t complete eggs as we’d usually think of them, and of course there was no sense in which my children “already existed” as people. But the cells that would eventually contribute half of each of their genomes were physically present inside my mum. When she was pregnant with me, there we all were: three generations nested together in one body. We often imagine generations as a straight line, but for a brief moment they’re literally layered inside one another.

When thinking about the Death archetype, I think this captures something important: death doesn’t erase relationship. My mum never met the TarotCupCakes, yet there is a tiny, tangible biological thread connecting them. Not in a mystical sense, but in the astonishing continuity of life itself. Death isn’t outside life; it’s woven into it. We don’t simply begin when we’re born, nor end when we die. We are part of a chain stretching backwards and forwards through time, carrying pieces of those who came before us while passing something of ourselves to those who come after.

And these connections are not merely biological. Long before we understood meiosis or cellular regeneration, cultures around the world were telling stories that entwined sex, fertility, death, and rebirth into a single archetypal cycle. I really love the recurring motif of pomegranates that appears throughout the Tarot, from the High Priestess to the Empress, so I was delighted by Eric Maille‘s decision to depict Persephone in the Death card of the Ink Witch Tarot. He describes how Persephone becomes Queen of the Underworld after eating pomegranate seeds in Hades‘ court and becoming his bride, forever linking sex, death, and rebirth. Yet although she is bound to the realm of Death, she remains a symbol of life, returning each spring as the earth awakens from winter. Maille writes that while this card is “visually one of the darkest cards in the deck, in terms of artistic design, it’s also one of the brightest as a result of the striking red pomegranate.”

The Tarot by Caitlin Mattisson takes this idea even further by depicting Death as Kali, the Dark Mother, the Hindu goddess of time, transformation, and destruction. Holding a sickle and a severed head, while wearing a garland of severed heads around her neck, she initially appears to embody death in its most terrifying form. Yet Kali is not simply a bringer of endings. She destroys illusion, ego, and attachment so that renewal can take place, reminding us that destruction and creation are inseparable. As an embodiment of Shakti – the divine feminine creative force – she also brings this section full circle. Here again, life and death are not opposing forces but partners in the same eternal dance.

Whispers of Immortality: The Skull in Tarot

A lot of Death cards go in hard on the skull, with a tight focus on its bony hollows and slightly uncanny grin. Despite becoming somewhat defanged and diluted by recent cutesy cultural uses, the skull remains one of the most potent human symbols we know, so it’s hardly surprising that it features so heavily on one of the Tarot’s most powerful cards.

As Clarke observes, “the face is the first symbol to be drawn by a child,” and through the head “we perceive and view the world; it is the centre of our perception of reality, our thoughts and dreams.” And when the face has gone, the skull remains – it’s a weird uncanny thing, a skull, not quite person, not quite object. Across many ancient cultures, the head was understood as the seat of the soul or vital life force, and the thought was perhaps some of that essence remains after death – making skulls objects of reverence as well as fear. Rituals involving severed heads, ancestor skulls, and head-hunting reflected a belief that the head retained something essential of the individual even after death. Anne Ross even argued that, for the pagan Celts, the human head was as important a religious symbol as the cross would later become in Christianity.

Humanity’s fascination with the skull undoubtedly stems, at least in part, from our unique awareness of our own mortality. As W.B. Yeats once wrote, ‘He knows death to the bone – Man has created death”. In other words, unlike any other animal, we not only die; we know that we will die. Perhaps that is why the skull has become such a powerful symbol. Kearl points out the skull has become a symbolic shorthand for life’s transience, the body returned to carrion, and death as the great equaliser. But obvs the skull is not merely a reminder of decay. Across cultures it has also served as a threshold object, an intermediary between the worlds of the living and the dead, inspiring reverence as much as fear. It is an object of meditation for Tibetan Buddhists, the focus of Hamlet’s famous contemplation of mortality (‘Where be your gibes now?‘ he asks the jester Yorrick’s skull, ‘your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?’), and, as we have already seen, an enduring emblem of the Death card itself.

Some decks make a point of juxtaposing the living face with the deathly skull. The Death card in the Sasuraibito Tarot is one I find particularly delightfully unsettling. It puts me in mind of T. S. Eliot’s lines on Webster, who “saw the skull beneath the skin”, reminding us that the inevitability of Death is always within us. In the LWB the creator Stasia Burrington quotes William C. Hannan: “I know this transformation is painful, but you’re not falling apart; you’re just falling into something different, with a new capacity to be beautiful”.

These three cards remind me of Charles Allan Gilbert‘s All Is Vanity, where your eye is tricked into flitting between the image of a beautiful young woman at her dressing table and a grinning skull. It is impossible to settle on one image without the other asserting itself. Beauty and death become inseparable, each haunting the other.

The motif proved remarkably enduring. Nearly a century later, Christian Dior’s Poison perfume campaign was still drawing on Gilbert’s visual trick, updating it for the glossy world of fashion advertising. That such an image could be used to sell perfume speaks volumes about the skull’s peculiar symbolic power. It is not simply an emblem of horror or decay, but of beauty, seduction, mystery, and the fleeting nature of life itself.

Perhaps that is why the skull has remained such an enduring symbol on the Death card. It is neither wholly terrifying nor wholly comforting. It confronts us with our mortality while reminding us that death is never entirely separate from life. Beneath every living face waits the skull beneath the skin; a silent companion, and one of humanity’s oldest and most powerful symbols.

Here For A Good Time, Not For A Long Time: Death in the Everyday in Tarot

Many Tarot writers spend a good deal of time reassuring beginners that the Death card is less about actually dying and more about how a person deals with endings. They’re right to do so. Although I guess it can mean literal physical death (literally only happened to me in one reading out of hundreds!), more often the card asks how we respond to endings, and endings are something none of us can avoid. Relationships end, careers end, children grow up, identities shift, and, without us even noticing, one version of ourselves gives way to the next. Death, then, is less about dying than about learning to let go.

Perhaps that reassurance is necessary because the card is so steeped in superstition. In the Tarot de Marseille, and in many modern decks that follow its example, the card has no name at all, identified only by the number XIII, “lest the very word draw death near,” as Charlie Claire Burgess memorably writes.

Some decks take a much more playful approach, grounding Death firmly in the day-to-day and treating it with humour rather than dread. Lost Vegas reminds us that we’re all here for a good time, not a long time (“Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think!”), while Micah Ulrich’s Death Card practically invites us to pull up a stool at the bar, pour ourselves a shot, and light a cigarette. Dangerous pleasures of the flesh they may be, but that’s part of the point. Death is not presented as a reason to fear life, but as a reason to embrace it.

The historian Philippe Ariès had a lot of very interesting things to say about death, which I think are pertinent to an understanding of the Tarot card. For Ariès, our fear of death is, in many ways, a fear of the unknown. He argues that this is a relatively recent development. “In a world of change,” he writes, “the traditional attitude toward death appears inert and static. The old attitude in which death was both familiar and near, evoking no great fear or awe, offers too marked a contrast to ours, where death is so frightful that we dare not utter its name.” What Ariès calls the “household sort of death” of earlier centuries was a “tamed death” – a familiar presence woven into everyday life. Modern death, by contrast, has become “wild”: strange and terrifying.

I think that’s one of the reasons I find myself so drawn to decks that attempt to re-domesticate Death, bringing it back into the ordinary fabric of everyday life. The Gourmet Tarot, for example, represents Death as a simple bowl of rice. In many Asian cultures, a bowl of boiled rice, complete with upright chopsticks, is placed beside the deceased as a final meal for their journey into the afterlife. It’s a wonderfully understated image, and I think rice is a fitting metaphor for the Death card itself. Rice is everyday, ordinary, nourishing. We often try to hide death away, dressing it up as something exceptional or unnatural, but in truth it sits quite boringly at the heart of life, just like a bowl of plain boiled rice.

Other decks achieve the same effect through different everyday objects. In the Out of Hand Tarot, Death is represented by an urn of ashes, something many bereaved families keep on a shelf or mantelpiece and glance at every day (also, once again a shout out to Jamie Sawyer for being the absolute Queen of Easter Eggs! The hidden little nods and winks in that card, I die!) In the Delta Enduring Tarot, it is a ghost bike: the white-painted bicycles left at the sites where cyclists have been killed on the road. Having spent fifteen years cycling in London, they’re heartbreakingly familiar to me. Some very dear friends of mine lost a very dear friend of theirs in just such an accident when we were in our 20s, and I still remember the extraordinary beauty of her ghost bike and her memorial ride through the city. I always touch my helmet whenever I cycle past one. It is a small ritual, an act of honouring both life and death in the beautiful mundanity of living.

To re-domesticate Death is not to trivialise it, nor to pretend it doesn’t hurt. It is simply to make room for it as part of life. As Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt write in Wild Card, “the gift and the challenge of Death is accepting it. When that’s possible, it can liberate you. And when it’s not, it can feel more like an act of vandalism. The tarot might not have the answer to that feeling, but, if it’s a familiar one, perhaps this card is a chance to sit with it for a moment.”

I find it particularly striking that Death is the only card in the deeply moving A Grieving Tarot to feature two figures. The second isn’t quite solid; more like a ghost, an echo, or perhaps even a memory made visible. It beautifully captures the way the dead continue to live within us, inhabiting our recollections long after they have left the world. Acceptance, the card seems to suggest, is not about forgetting. It is about learning to carry absence alongside love.

Perhaps no deck captures this peaceful acceptance of Death more beautifully than Poppy Palin’s Everyday Enchantment Tarot. Her Death card shows an elderly grandmother gently explaining her approaching death to her young granddaughter. It’s one of the most moving pieces of Tarot writing in a LWB I’ve ever read, and rather than attempting to paraphrase it, I’ll simply let Palin speak for herself:

Ah, child, I will miss your precious face! Yet I’ll never be far away, I promise. It’s Granny’s time to leave her body, but she will never, ever leave you. You can come and sit here year upon year, and although you may not see me, I’ll still be beside you, dear. You’ll feel my presence like snowflakes falling gently onto your skin, and there’s nothing scary about a snowflake is there, sweetling? You feel it and know it exists even though you can’t hold onto it—it kisses you lightly, then melts away until its season comes again. When the snowdrop flowers go back into the soil in late spring we think they’ve gone away forever, but just when we’ve given up hope of seeing their tiny pale faces again—pop!—there they are each winter, as pristine and dainty as before.

And see how the trees have no leaves now? Those worn-out dry leaves fell and crumbled away to feed the land, making the trees strong enough to put on their fresh green mantles another day. There are always returns you see—nothing in nature truly dies and we human beings are a part of nature aren’t we? Do you see that Granny’s skin is like a dry leaf now, all crumpled and creased? Granny will take off her old suit of a body like the tree shrugs off its worn-out leaves. No don’t be sad, it will be just like taking off an old coat, see? That worn out part of Granny will be wintering back in the earth, but the real Granny—the one you see when you look in my eyes—that one will be light and free again, able to dance on water like sparkles of sunlight. Her love will get bigger and stronger, just as you’ll grow taller, and it will fill your life. And you’ll have a lovely life, my sweetest one. You’ll have your guardian Granny-spirit with you until we meet again. And we will, my precious petal, we will.

There is so much I love about this passage. Death is neither denied nor sentimentalised, neither hidden away nor dressed up as something else. Instead, it is gently woven back into the ordinary rhythms of life: snowflakes that melt, snowdrops that return, leaves that fall to nourish the earth. It is, in Ariès’ sense, a “tamed” death; one that belongs not outside life, but within it.

And perhaps that, ultimately, is one of the Death card’s greatest lessons. It asks us not to conquer death, nor even to understand it, but simply to make room for it. To acknowledge that grief and love can coexist; that endings nourish beginnings; and that, however painful it may be, death has always been part of what it means to be alive.

The Death card can also be read as an invitation to cherish the everyday. Not because life is short in the abstract, but because we never know when something ordinary will become ‘the last time’. The last walk with an old dog. The last conversation with a parent. The last hug with a friend. As the old saying goes, one day you pick your child up and put them down, never realising it’s the final time you’ll pick them up. There is no countdown or warning. One day they simply outgrow your arms.

When the last time was our last time
If only then I knew
The last time was our last time
Would’ve told you that the last time comes too soon

When the last time was our last time
Should’ve told you that the last time comes too soon

‘Goodbye Mr Blue’ by Father John Misty (Tilman)

And of course, this shows us that endings are NOT easy. Quite the opposite. The Death card points towards transformation, but transformation is often painful because it demands that we relinquish not only people and places, but also parts of ourselves. Old identities, familiar routines, coping mechanisms, even trauma responses can be painfully difficult to surrender, precisely because they once helped us survive. Growth almost always asks something of us first.

Yet, as Bakara Wintner observes, the Major Arcana gently prepare us for this moment. In Justice we discover what needs to die; in the Hanged Man we begin to loosen our grip upon it; and in Death it finally leaves us. Alongside the grief there is often an unexpected sense of relief, of something settling into its proper place. As Wintner writes, “Knowing that something is meant to end does not necessarily make the ending easier, but it does provide context in a space where we could otherwise be swallowed whole by our grief.”

When the Death card comes up in a reading it can serve to remind us that endings are not failures, but the conditions that make new life possible. As Meg Jones Wall writes, “Death is essential. It makes life sweeter, knowing that we have only a limited amount of time on this earth to experience, connect, build, destroy, evolve. In endings, we give ourselves permission to grieve, celebrate, and move forward, rather than desperately clinging to something that is no longer growing with us, something we may not even want anymore.” Chopping off our hair. Leaving our childhood home. Moving on.

When I posted Piehotski’s Death card on Instagram, thelauvster commented with a quotation widely attributed online to Lilies Abounded: “I hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child and fell asleep on the couch during a family party. I hope you can hear the laughter from the next room.” This is a lovely expression of the kind of “tamed death” Ariès describes. Death is still a departure, still a loss, but not an abandonment. The people we love are simply in the next room, beyond our sight but not beyond our love.

As we saw with the Wheel of Fortune, “avoiding the hard things in life means avoiding the good things too” (Charlie Claire Burgess). To love is to risk loss. To dream is to risk disappointment. To live is to accumulate endings. The Death card reminds us that these things are not arguments against living, but reasons to embrace it anyway. The joy was worth the grief, the beginning was worth the ending.

And then, of course, comes rebirth. As Miriam Rachel writes of the Death card, “It didn’t hand me a new sunrise on a silver platter; it shoved me into the graveyard and said, ‘Look around. Accept this. Then, if you choose, you can rebuild.'” The card never promises that transformation will be painless or automatic. It simply reminds us that new life cannot begin until we have acknowledged what has ended.

Yet that invitation only works if we truly let go. As Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt warn, Death may signal an ending, but “you can still go back to pick over the bones or invite the ghosts of the past back to haunt you.” Therein lies the card’s shadow: returning to old patterns, old relationships, old habits, forgetting they ended for a reason. Sometimes the Death card asks us not simply to endure an ending, but to honour it. To leave the bones buried, thank them for what they once gave us, and walk forward into whatever comes next.

So while I’m not especially drawn to Death cards that leap too quickly to triumphant rebirth, brushing past the pain of grief, loss, and change, I do love those that manage to hold both beauty and dread in the same image. The Light Seer’s Tarot is one such card. The radiant, everlasting light glowing within Death’s hood strikes me as every bit as terrifying as it is hopeful. It recalls Wallace Stevens‘ beautiful line that “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams and our desires.” In the guidebook creator Chris-Anne Donelly expresses a similar idea, writing that Death “reminds us that before this new world can take root, something old must cease to be. This is the natural ebb and withering of things that are no longer being nourished, and the dying of one form so that it can shift to another.”

I also love the image of Death opening her cloak to reveal infinity. Inside there is no skeleton or darkness, but the universe itself: stars collapsing, stars being born, the endless cycles of creation and destruction playing out on a cosmic scale. Ana Tourian writes that Death’s “roots dig deep into creation itself, her core is the endless night sky, where stars collapse and are reborn in an endless cycle that she calls home. She is the door that opens when all else closes.”

DeadHeads: Moths and Other Animals in the Death Tarot Card

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate while writing this deep dive is that I don’t dislike Death cards that speak of rebirth – in fact, quite the opposite! Even I’m not that much of a miserable old cynic, lol. I simply prefer those that earn it. Too many modern interpretations hurry past grief, loss, and pain in their eagerness to arrive at butterflies, phoenixes, and fresh starts, as though transformation were a painless makeover rather than something hard-won. As Miriam Rachel observes, “the insistence on sanitizing the Death card into a feel-good ‘glow-up’ moment completely guts it of its real depth.”

Charlie Claire Burgess makes a similar point. Death has increasingly been recast as little more than Tarot-metamorphosis: “The icky part has been glossed over in favour of a beeline to rebirth. Butterfly metaphors abound. But this does us all a disservice by skipping the hardest part of the transformation process: the fear, the grief, the mourning of letting go.” Death, Burgess reminds us, is first a card “of endings, of rupture, of dissolution and decay.” Only by passing through those things can anything genuinely new emerge.

And that’s why I don’t mind butterflies and moths on Death cards, provided they’re honest about what they represent. A caterpillar doesn’t simply grow wings. It doesn’t wake up one morning as a butterfly, having had a nice, affirming personal journey 😂. It hangs itself from a branch, digests itself into an unrecognisable soup of cells, and only then begins to rebuild. The butterfly isn’t a symbol of transformation because it skips over death; it’s a symbol of transformation because it goes through it. It quite literally goops itself down into a paste. The goo is the point. Burgess points out that “this is what Death asks of us: that we too digest the carapace of our former selves, become unmade, become liquid, become unrecognizable so that we may birth ourselves into our next stage, whatever that may be.”

You don’t get the wings without the goo. As Akómoláfé says, “A good journey is about dismemberment, not arrival.”

Other Death cards favour the serpent over the butterfly, but the symbolism is remarkably similar. In the Stunning Tarot, the focus falls not just on the snake visibly straining to shed its old skin, but on the scattered bones of its prey: one death literally fuelling another life. Together, they speak to the uncomfortable truth that growth is rarely painless. Sometimes, to move forward, we have to slough off an identity that no longer fits us, allowing an older version of ourselves to die so that something new can emerge.

Wayne Limberger sees a similar symbolism in the card: “Rather than as a profound end-of-life, whether literal or figurative, I see the symbolism as an expression of ‘molting’ akin to that of a serpent, the main theme of Scorpio… We must all change if we are to grow, and it’s not always by choice.”

Perhaps that is what all of these creatures have in common. The butterfly, the moth, the snake, and the hermit crab all remind us that transformation is not the difficult part. The difficult part is surrendering the old form. As Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt observe, “the aspect of this card that most people tend to struggle with isn’t the possibility of transformation, but the pain of ending; the work of bringing an old life, an old version of you, old ways of being and thinking and feeling, to a close; and, most of all, the act of saying goodbye.” When the Death card appears in a reading, they suggest the question we find ourselves asking is, “Am I ready for this?”

And sometimes, if we’re honest, the answer is simply no.

But the thing is, the Death card doesn’t particularly care!

The last time will always come whether we welcome it or not.

Perhaps that’s why Rachel Pollack’s reading of the card feels so complete: “Death does not actually refer to transformation. Rather, it shows us the precise moment at which we give up the old masks and allow the transformation to take place.” Before there can be wings, the caterpillar must become goo. Before there can be a new shell, the old one must be left behind. Before there can be transformation, there must first be the courage to face the pain of an ending.

But this blank white card also presents all the excitement and opportunity of rebirth, of fresh starts. The clean white page waiting for the first sentence. The fresh snowfall awaiting footprints. The story of your life begins anew. You set off on a brand new journey.

Death leaves us staring into the unknown. Sometimes that unknown is terrifying. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Usually, it is both.

Death FAQs

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Works Cited

Akómoláfé, B. (2017). These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my daughter on humanity’s search for home. North Atlantic Books.
Ariès, P. (1974). Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the present. (Trans. Patricia M. Ranum). Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ariès, P. (1985). Images of Man and Death. (Trans. Janet Lloyd). Harvard University Press.
Becker, E. (1973). The Denial of Death. Free Press.
Bottum, J. (2007). Death & Politics. First Things, June/July, 17–29.
Burgess, C. C. (2023). Radical Tarot: Queer the Cards, Liberate Your Practice and Create the Future. Hay House.
Clarke, D. (1999). The Head Cult: Tradition and folklore surrounding the symbol of the severed human head in the British Isles. Doctoral dissertation, University of Sheffield.
Dore, J. (2021). Tarot for Change. Hay House.
Elruna, M. (2022). Tarot: A Life Guided by the Cards. Matador.
Goodenough, U. (2023). The Sacred Depths of Nature: How life has emerged and evolved. Oxford University Press.
Gravett, C. (2003). Towton 1461: England’s Bloodiest Battle. Osprey Publishing
hooks, b. (2000). All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow.
Jones Wall, M. (2023). Finding the Fool: A Tarot Journey to Radical Transformation. Weiser.
Kat, A. S. (2021). Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the planets through capital, power, and labour. North Atlantic Books.
Kearl, M. C. (2015). The proliferation of skulls in popular culture: A case study of how the traditional symbol of mortality was rendered meaningless. Mortality, 20(1), 1-18.
Moore, K. H. (2006). The Grim Reaper, Working Stiff: The man, the myth, the everyday. Master’s thesis, Bowling Green State University.
Nichols, S. (1994). Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. Red Wheel / Weiser.
Oosterwijk, S. (2014). “This Worlde Is but a Pilgrimage”: Mental attitudes in/to the Medieval Danse Macabre. In S. Katajala-Peltomaa & S. Niiranen (eds.), Mental (Dis) Order in Later Medieval Europe (pp. 197-218). Brill.
Pollack, R. (1980). Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness. Thorsons.
Quigley, C. (1996). The Corpse: A History. McFarland.
Ross, A. (1996). Pagan Celtic Britain. Academy Chicago Publishers.
Waite, A.E. (1911). The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. William Rider & Son.
Wintner, B. (2017). WTF is Tarot? And How Do I Do It? Page Street Publishing.

¹although did he? Well, kinda. But this particular ‘translation’ certainly owes a great deal to 90s indie band Semisonic, lol.