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.