Each time you experience change in your life, you feel at least a tiny death has occurred. What you had in the past is gone ad what you seek for the future has not happened yet. You are in an in-between moment when movement is stilled.However, nothing stays still for long.
Even as you absorb a loss, you begin to perceive the opening – the space – it creates in your life for something new. The Death card is far more about rebirth and renewal than about death and loss.
When the Death card appears in a reading, expect to find a fatalistic attitude in your own thinking or in the thoughts of others. One period of your life is ending, to allow the next period to enrich your mind and heart.
About Death
"In many primitive societies, each year
the old king is symbolically killed, dismembered, and ritually
"eaten" to ensure the fertility of the new crops and the revitalization
of the kingdom. Christian churches today preserve a similar
idea in the Holy Communion, wherein the parishioners partake
of bread and wine, symbolic of the body and blood of Christ.
"The idea of revitalization and renewal
is more than hinted at by the profusion of new sprouts everywhere.
"Even viewed symbolically, as an instrument
of change within the context of our earthly life, [this card]
is hard to accept. At the most superficial level we resist change
in our everyday lives - even changes we ourselves have consciously
planned."
- Sallie Nichols
"Aries is the beginning of the zodiac, where the circle is completed
and the cycle of one life ends in the strt of another. And thus
is Aries Brahma as well as Siva, both creator and destroyer."
- C. C. Zain
"For know ye, O Israel,
That what men call life and death
Are as beads of white and black strung upon a thread;
"And this thread of perpetual change
Is mine own changeless Life,
Which bindeth together the unending series
Of little lives and deaths.
- Paul Foster Case
Religions celebrate Spring as a time of renewal, and Death is
an integral part of this celebration. Easter follows the Crucifixion;
Passover symbolizes God's mercy to His children as well. This
is a good time to meditate upon what you desire for the coming
year and to develop plans for manifesting that desire. The power
of personal though to manifest in reality is well known - it
is the essence of prayer and spiritual treatment.
Sources
Zain, C. C., The Sacred Tarot. Los Angeles, The Church of
Light, 1936.
Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot:
An Archetypal Journey. York Beach, Maine, Samuel Weiser, 1980.
Case, Paul Foster, The Book of Tokens: 22 Meditations on the Ageless Wisdom. Los Angeles, Builder of the Adytum, 1968. Quoted with permission from Builders of the Adytum, 5101 North Figueroa St., Los Angeles, CA. 90042; http://www.bota.org/. Permission to use Builders of the Adytum images in no way constitutes endorsement of the material on this site.
De Angelis, Roberto, Universal Tarot Deck. Torino, Italy: Lo Scarabeo, 2003. Lo Scarabeo has graciously granted permission for the use of the Tarot images on this site. Copying the images without their permission wuld be a violation of copyright law.
