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 tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
This week’s reading is about endings and new beginnings.
Whenever Death appears in a reading, I look at the surrounding cards to explain the quality of that death. Death rarely means physical death. Here, it feels like a death of a part of the self that no longer serves: a death that makes way for a new energy in the way of creativity and connections.
Although liberating, Death is rarely an easy process to go through. When a part of what we are familiar with is giving way — a habit, a belief, a way of life, a relationship — it may even feel like we are dying. Fears can start to crawl out of the woodwork; anxieties, new and long-forgotten, make an appearance; the world can feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable. These are the states that accompany the shedding of an old skin and the emergence of a new one. The ego identifies with the loss and believes its time is up. What it is experiencing, however, is simply a humbling and the stripping back of defences that were, themselves, the very obstacles to growth.
In the first card, Death rides into the picture, harbinger of change. It might be clad in black armour, but its horse is white, and it carries on its flag a white rose. There is a sense of yin and yang here. That in everything there is balance, and with loss comes renewal. What seems particularly important here is the sense of ceremony. There needs to be a mourning period for what has passed, symbolized by the figure praying beside the prostrate body of a man. The sun rises above his mitre. The observance of loss brings in new light — new life.