One of my dear friends and colleagues is a backer of my Kickstarter campaign and she asked me after I had announced my excitement over the Death card being chosen as one of the “stretch goal” designs, “Why do you like the Death card so much?”

I guess it seems a little morbid?

I love the Death card. Maybe it’s because I was born on the 13th day of the month and the Death card is the 13th card of the Major Arcana? Maybe it is because I have always loved skulls and skeletons and Halloween/Dia de los Muertos accoutrements? Maybe it’s because I am married to a Scorpio and the Death card is associated with the sign of Scorpio?

The truth is, and how I tried to explain it to her, is that my obsession with the Death card is a link to my obsession with death itself. I am lucky. I am so friggin’ blessed to have not been close to death. No one close to me has died and I’m knocking on wood as I type this, save for my grandmother and my aunt. I didn’t attend their funerals due to being several thousand kilometres away. The deaths I have experienced most intimately were those of my cat, Fatima, and my partner’s cat, Felix, two years apart. Fatima was 17 years old, I had had her from kitten hood and she was ready to go. Felix passed away suddenly and unexpectedly, in the prime of his life. Those were sad and scary but not the same as losing a parent or lover or friend.

The Death cards from the Smith-Waite tarot deck (aka Rider-Waite) on the left and the Morgan Greer Tarot on the right.

You know those people who seem haunted by death? They have many family members who have passed away, sometimes in clusters. They have near death experiences. They deal with grief and loss as a part of life. That is what I am trying to touch when I am holding the Death card. Perhaps in anticipation of a time when I too, inevitably, will be touched by Death’s bony finger, I want to know the way it feels to lose and to be lost. I know that when that day comes, I will know how naive I was, how I asked for something that no one should want.

The Death card deals with our fascination with and aversion to death. The Death card, as I mentioned, is the 13th card in the Major Arcana. There are 22 cards in the Major Arcana and some might wonder why Death is not at the end. Death is in the middle and it represents the passage of life from one form to another, not unlike birth. It is a portal to our personal and collective underworlds.

The Death card is passive and active. Death is a thing that happens to you but it is also a thing that you must actively accept. It is a process. Just as compost is not an inert thing - you must add organic matter, turn it over, and keep it warm, in order for it to change into new soil - so too death is a process.

In the classic, Smith-Waite version of the card Death is portrayed as a skeleton in a suit of armour riding a white horse and holding a black flag with a white rose and radiating shafts of wheat. In the background is a sun setting (or rising) between two towers in the distance at the end of a long winding road through hills and mountains. In the foreground are four figures: a person kneeling, a religious figure standing with arms extended, a child holding out a flower, and a body, presumably a king, lying on the ground with his crown knocked off and looking rather dead. Death comes for all of us, the innocent child, the “man of God”, and the king on high. Death does not discriminate.

In readings the Death card will often signify a time of great changes but often these changes are of the kind that can be anticipated and embraced. The Death card will rarely indicate the death of an individual but can more symbolically imply the death of a part of yourself, a shedding of skin, so to speak, and the ever-changing seasons of life. The end of a relationship, a job, a way of life, or a transformation like pregnancy or gender transition can fall in in the realm of the Death card.

In my interpretation of the Death card I included a skull, a scythe, and a flower being cut from its stem. One of my very favourite Death cards, from the Morgan Greer tarot, pictured above, features these same elements. The scythe being a symbol of death as represented by Saturn, the great harvester and the inspiration for the “Grim Reaper”. The flower is a memento mori, a reminder that all beautiful things wilt away and grow again in turn.

On the reverse of the pendant, the sigil I have created is an hourglass to signify Time, another of Saturn’s domains. The hourglass is punctured by an arrow driving through it towards the earth. The arrow signifies not only the weapon of Death but also Cupid’s tool of love. (Place, 2011, p179.) The fletching of the arrow is a shaft of wheat for the harvest, the changing of seasons, and the wheel of the year. All that ends begins again.