Death Tarot Card

Trump XIII

But thought's the slave of life, and life time's fool
and time that takes survey of all the world
must have a stop.
--Henry VI, William Shakespeare

The Death tarot card is, along with the Devil, the most feared card in the deck. Its occult meaning must be very dark and dangerous. To make matters worse, it is trump number thirteen--and thirteen, as everyone knows, is the unluckiest number!

In divinatory tarot, the Death card usually marks a transformation or change––for better or for worse. But this is not the card's historic meaning.

Early tarot decks show death as a skeleton with some sort of weapon. The Visconti-Sforza deck shows Death holding a bow. Marseilles-style decks show it wielding a scythe. Two disembodied heads, one crowned, sometimes sit at the bottom corners of the image––a reminder that death comes for all.

During the Renaissance, death was often depicted as a skeleton murdering the living--especially in "Triumphs of Death," a then-popular allegorical image, seen below.

In I Trionfi, death's emissary, "a lady clothed in black," appears before the virtuous and advises them, in no uncertain terms, that the end is near. "I am," she says,

She, whom they, fierce, and blind, and cruel name,
Who meet untimely deaths; 'twas I did make
Greece subject, and the Roman Empire shake;
My piercing sword sack'd Troy, how many rude
And barbarous people are by me subdued?

Pieter Breughel's Triumph of Death, a masterpiece of Flemish Renaissance art, shows a horde of skeletons slaughtering the residents of a town. It is not related to the narrative of Petrarch's poem, although it expresses the same idea: death's power over all living things.

The veil or mask of life is perpetuated in change, transformation and passage from lower to higher, and this is more fitly represented...by one of the apocalyptic visions than by the crude notion of the reaping skeleton.

This interpretation has been adopted, in various forms, by modern tarot readers. The Death card can represent loss, but it can also represent progress: "the death of the old and the birth of the new." Though most tarot decks (Waite clones aside) have used the "reaping skeleton" as the card's central figure, the Death tarot card is not seen as a grim harbinger, but a signal of something's end––perhaps a necessary end, leading to a new beginning.

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