The Death Card: Working with change

Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

“I think the fundamental, often conscious, fear that inhabits our hearts and minds when we draw a card like Death … is the one we deal with when we confront our own mortality. … Coming to terms with it is one of the greatest challenges — if not the greatest challenge — in our human experience. When there is no immediate risk of injury or annihilation, are we scared of death or are we in truth afraid of disruption and change?”

In an article I wrote about Death and The Tower over a year ago (Death and The Tower: Good? Bad? Or valuable?), I asked readers to consider the emotional content of Death and what it brought up for them. I’d like to explore this a little more today. It feels fitting, given that so much around and within so many of us seems to be marked by change — which I equate with death in the context of this tarot card. Change feels inescapable. It is inescapable, though we have so many tricks up our sleeves to try and keep it at bay — denial, a subject explored in this week’s Daily Astrology, being just one of them.

So let’s start with this idea of Death as change rather than simply the death of the physical body. As the 13th card in the major arcana (the 22-card section of the tarot deck that deals with the archetypal elements of the psyche, or the soul), Death is rarely about physical death. Far more often, it concerns itself with transition. After all, we go through many transitions in our lives, and only one bodily ending. Death’s appearance and reappearance in readings — others’ and my own — over the years I’ve been working with tarot bears this idea out. It frequently turns up at times when change is taking place, or where it is indicated but not yet acknowledged.

Its seldom being about physical death notwithstanding, Death still has a consistent ability to deliver a swift, unmistakeable kick in the ass. Its imagery is set up perfectly to hit target. The Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck is a case in point: there’s nothing quite like a yellow-boned skeleton juxtaposed with the monochrome of black armour, white horse, and black and white flag, to grab the eye and hold it — and not altogether comfortably. (Another striking image of Death is found in the Thoth Tarot.) Thus, the irony is that Death in a reading often serves to wake us up. It is a visual wake-up call that invites a deeper awakening to what is going on in our lives, to what is not going on in our lives, and to ourselves.

But how can we work with it? Knowing that we are facing death in some form in our lives is all well and good, but is there a way of aligning ourselves with the energy of it so that we can help to ease our passage through it?

Here are a few ideas on how we can actively work with Death in times of transition.

Feel, feel, feel

Death — or the Death Card, the most notorious one in the Tarot — has the ability to bring up a range of emotions inside us, but by far the most prevalent I have encountered is that of fear.

Fear is an interesting emotion because it is the antithesis of love, or joy: while love and joy bring us into the present (try catching yourself when you’re laughing, for example, and see where you are), fear tends to keep us in the past or project us into the future. We are no longer present to ourselves or to others. In other words, fear creates the sensation of separation, even if nothing has changed around us — for example, when we are sitting there contemplating the Death card in a reading and what it means to us. When this happens, our fear could be said to be based on an illusion. But it is a compelling one. Somehow those inbuilt survival systems — which work so well for us in times of real threat or danger — start to work overtime and turn on us. When this happens, the instinct is to run away in whatever way works best for us, and we tend to do this through some form of denial.

But what if we were to sit with our fear and see what else comes in with it? This is where the idea of ‘feel, feel, feel’ comes in. Fear shuts us down; a willingness to feel that fear starts to open us up again. When we do this, we find that fear is not the end of the story; something else lies underneath, and perhaps it is not at all what we imagined it to be.

So, when the idea of Death as harbinger of change makes itself known in your life, why not sit quietly and experience what that change feels like? When an emotion or a thought (which will lead to an emotion) emerges, see if you can partner with it (rather than observe it from afar) and keep it company — even if only for moments. Let it move through your body. There is a lot to be said about the phrase, “there is nothing to fear but fear itself.” What is your felt experience of change, past any fear you might have? Once you have felt it, is there another, newer, feeling underneath? Can you use it?

Invoke the images of Death

There are several key images in the Death card that we can work with, too, in order to experience change in another way, or to harness and transmute it. I’m going to pick out four of them here — you will be able to find others — and see how they can offer assistance when you are encountering a transitional period in your life.

The cleric

The figure dressed in gold and standing behind the three figures on the ground can be seen within the narrow confines of a particular religion, or as representing an institution or idea that can offer support in some way or another. You might attend a place of worship in order to find comfort and assistance. If that doesn’t work for you, conjure up your own idea of assistance. Seek wise counsel from a trusted advisor or a therapist. Be your own wise counsel and ask yourself what you most need. Be open to responses in both your waking and your dream life. Ask for more assistance if you need an objective someone to help you work out for yourself what it is that those responses are saying to you.

The prone figure

There is a lot to be said for considered action. Equally, there are those times when the converse applies. “Don’t just do something; sit there.” Considered inaction can work its own miracles. This is not resistance, but allowing and the relinquishing of control. The figure in the card might be out of the game, so to speak, but he has all of the support he needs in those around him — Death included — even if he is not aware of them. Trust. Let go. Let go some more. Trust some more.

The Sun

The image of the Sun rising between the two towers in the distance speaks of a new day, and new beginnings. The Sun lies at the centre of our solar system, a source of light and life that creeps over the horizon and illuminates the Earth unfailingly, day after day.

Do we have the ability to do that for ourselves in our own lives — to show up for ourselves unfailingly? To shine regardless of the circumstances we find ourselves in? It’s one hell of a commitment, but I’d suggest that it is the commitment itself, rather than the ability to shine, that is our true work: to wake up every day and recommit to life, and to the change that is an inevitable part of it. When we start to do this, we begin to embody the Sun, and our illumination comes from within.

(Note: The two towers in front of the Sun appear in a later card, The Moon. In The Moon, our eye leads out of the landscape where our baser instincts are at play via a winding path. This is the path to the Sun, which transmutes what we have experienced in the shadows and integrates it into consciousness.)

Death

And what of Death itself, sitting astride its trusty steed? Funnily, it no longer seems so threatening. Is that a grimace; or is it a smile?

Here sits black-armoured death on a white horse, holding a black flag with a white flower. Black and white: the balance of opposites. There is as much light as there is dark here. …

The yellow of the sun is reflected in the yellow of the sand beneath the body, and in the bishop’s clothing as it is on death itself. Is death, in fact, a bringer of light, contrary to what his outward appearance (his armour) might suggest? Do we need, perhaps, to take that message to heart instead of succumbing to our first urges to run? Do we need to remain present to what death can bring us?

When we invoke the figure of Death directly, we are ready to embody life in all its opposites, its entrances and its exits. We put ourselves in the saddle; we bear the standard; we move forward, eschewing any outward trappings that might hold us back (the crown at the horse’s feet), and putting aside sentimentality (the supplicating figures of the children in front of it) — which is not the same as putting aside emotion. As Neale Donald Walsch writes, “When everything changes, change everything.” With the cleric, we seek support; with the prone figure, we wait; with the Sun, we show up; with Death, we finally start to act based on what we have discovered along the way.

When Death turns up in a reading — and when change and its concomitant endings and beginnings come into our awareness — we might not be aware of what form it will take, but we can put down a welcome mat in expectation, open the door, and keep the hearth of our inner fires warm. Then we are working with, and not against change; and in that moment, the potential for fear to transmute into something different and perhaps new makes itself known.