MAJOR ARCANA · TRUMP XIII
Death
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Endings, transformation, transition, clearing away.
REVERSED
Resisting change, stagnation, fear of endings.
The card
A skeleton in black armour rides a white horse, carrying a banner with a white rose. King, maiden and child fall before him; the sun rises between two towers.
Death is trump XIII of the twenty-two trumps of the Major Arcana.
In the Golden Dawn's attributions it carries the Hebrew letter Nun (נ), “fish”, and the sign of Scorpio. On the Tree of Life it is path 24, joining Tiphareth and Netzach.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Death, XIII.
In Waite's words
Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew, and explained it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). His text, with his spelling:
DIVINATORY MEANINGS End, mortality, destruction, corruption; also, for a man, the loss of a benefactor; for a woman, many contrarieties; for a maid, failure of marriage projects.
REVERSED Inertia, sleep, lethargy, petrifaction, somnambulism; hope destroyed.
The picture and its symbolism
The veil or mask of life is perpetuated in change, transformation and passage from lower to higher, and this is more fitly represented in the rectified Tarot by one of the apocalyptic visions than by the crude notion of the reaping skeleton. Behind it lies the whole world of ascent in the spirit. The mysterious horseman moves slowly, bearing a black banner emblazoned with the Mystic Rose, which signifies life. Between two pillars on the verge of the horizon there shines the sun of immortality. The horseman carries no visible weapon, but king and child and maiden fall before him, while a prelate with clasped hands awaits his end.
There should be no need to point out that the suggestion of death which I have made in connection with the previous card is, of course, to be understood mystically, but this is not the case in the present instance. The natural transit of man to the next stage of his
being either is or may be one form of his progress, but the exotic and almost unknown entrance, while still in this life, into the state of mystical death is a change in the form of consciousness and the passage into a state to which ordinary death is neither the path nor gate. The existing occult explanations of the 13th card are, on the whole, better than usual, rebirth, creation, destination, renewal, and the rest.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), Part II § 2 and Part III § 3. Public domain; text from the 1922 printing on Wikisource.
Related cards
The numbered cards it governs
Five of Cups: a decan of Scorpio · Six of Cups: a decan of Scorpio · Seven of Cups: a decan of Scorpio
In three historical decks
The same card as it was painted in fifteenth-century Milan, printed in the French pattern of the Tarot de Marseille, and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.
In the Tarot de Marseille: La Mort (the card is often left unnamed), XIII.
Learn more in the lessons
- The Twenty-Two Paths & the Tarot · 18 min
- The Major Arcana Journey · 18 min
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
Images: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909 (public domain); the RWS1909 scans on Wikimedia Commons. Lequart, Paris, c. 1890 (public domain); scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons. Attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, mid-15th century (public domain); scans by David Madore, via Wikimedia Commons.