13. Death
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Number: 13
Card Title: Death
Esoteric Title: The Child of the Great Transformers
Lord of the Gates of Death
Astrological Atttribution: Scorpio
Elemental Attribution: Water (cold, wet)
Dates & Timing: October 23 to November 21
Hebrew Letter: Nun Fish 50
Color: Blue-Green
Intelligence: Imaginative Intelligence
Esoteric Function: Movement
Qabalistic Path: Path 24: 6 Tipareth to 7 Netzach
Translation of Path: The Beauty of Victory
Keywords: Letting Go, Death Of Ego, Change, Rebirth, Renewal, Endings, Evaluate & Revamp, Ending, Elimination, Metamorphosis, Opposites meld, Motion, Transformation of Consciousness.
Ill-Dignified:Decay, Grief, Holding, Disaster, Destruction, Upheaval, Depression, Self-loathing, Resisting Transformation. Temporary, stagnation, death of political figure or upheaval. Changes for the worse.
Interpretation: Let those doors close. Endings & new beginnings. New conditions and opportunity. Don’t resist sudden change. You will have strength for a new situation. Worry will get you no where. End of old life. Rebirth of the soul. New awareness. Freedom from old enslavement’s. Total change. Birth of new ideas. Destruction of old. External change. Endo of your awareness of something. No death without birth. Loss of perception. Gaining new perspective. I now say yes to death, yes to my self. Integration and Manifestations Occur, Rebirth of Soul w/o Physical Death.
Reversed Interpretation: Not moving on when you should. Situation that needed change has been going on for too long. May be forced to make change. In Limbo. Loss of pretensions. Fear of change. Enforced sacrifice. Fear of material insecurity has basis in lack of faith in self.
Rider-Waite Imagery
Death rides a pale horse.
The Pictorial Key to the Tarot by Arthur Edward Waite (1911)
Part I: The Veil and its Symbols
13. Death. The method of presentation is almost invariable, and embodies a bourgeois form of symbolism. The scene is the field of life, and amidst ordinary rank vegetation there are living arms and heads protruding from the ground. One of the heads is crowned, and a skeleton with a great scythe is in the act of mowing it. The transparent and unescapable meaning is death, but the alternatives allocated to the symbol are change and transformation. Other heads have been swept from their place previously, but it is, in its current and patent meaning, more especially a card of the death of Kings. In the exotic sense it has been said to signify the ascent of the spirit in the divine spheres, creation and destruction, perpetual movement, and so forth.
Part II: The Doctrine Behind the Veil
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
The Tarot of the Bohemians by Papus; tr. A. P Morton, [1896]
Chapter X. The Symbolical Tarot
13. ?
13th Hebrew letter (Mem).
ORIGIN OF THE SYMBOLISM OF THE THIRTEENTH CARD OF THE TAROT.
The hieroglyphic meaning of the Mem is a woman, the companion of man, it therefore gives rise to ideas of fertility and formation. It is pre-eminently the maternal and female, the local and plastic sign, the image of external and passive action. Employed at the end of words, this letter becomes a collective sign ? (final Mem). In this case it develops the being in unlimited space.
Creation necessitates equal destruction in a contrary sense, and therefore the Mem designates all the regenerations that have sprung from previous destruction, all transformations, and consequently death, regarded as the passage from one world to the other.
The Mem is one of the three Mother letters.
THIRTEENTH CARD OF THE TAROT. Death, or the Skeleton Mower.
The ideas expressed by this arcanum are those of destruction preceding or following regeneration.
A skeleton mows down beads in a field, from which hands and feet spring up on all sides, as the scythe pursues its work.
The works of the head (conception) become immortal as soon as they are realized (heads and feet).
The 13th arcanum is explained by the 10th (Fortune) and by the 16th (Destruction), between which it stands. 10 + 16 = 26 26/2 = 13. 13 is therefore the centre between the Yod (Principle of the creation) and the Ayin (16), Principle of destruction. The 13th arcanum is completed by the 18th, its complementary, as the fifth was of the second, and the twelfth of the seventh. (See the 8th and the 5th arcana.)
13. Death is completed by
13+18 = 31
31 = 4 = 10 = 1
18. The Moon
14. Temperance is completed by
14+17 = 31
17. The Star
15. The Devil is completed by
15 + 16 = 31
16. Destruction
The thirteenth card of the Tarot is placed between the invisible and the visible worlds. It is the universal link in nature, the means by which all the influences react from one world to the other. It Signifies–
God the transformer–THE UNIVERSAL TRANSFORMING PRINCIPLE. Destructive and creative.
The negative of realization–DEATH.
The Astral light accomplishing the function of the Creator–THE UNIVERSAL PLASTIC FORCE. (Balancing death and the transforming force.)
13. ? Death.
Affinities
Primitive Hieroglyph: The Woman
Hebrew Letter: Mem (one of the 3 mothers)
Significations
THE UNIVERSAL TRANSFORMING PRINCIPLE: Destroyer and Creator
DEATH
THE UNIVERSAL PLASTIC FORCE
Major Arcana Signification from the Divining Point of View
13. Death signifies DEATH.
The Tarot by S.L. MacGregor Mathers [1888]
Symbolism of Each Key
13. Death. A skeleton armed with a Scythe (wherewith he mows down heads in a meadow like grass). He signifies Transformation, or Change.
Meanings of the Cards
13. Death.–Death, Change, Transformation, Alteration for the worse; R. Death just escaped, Partial change, Alteration for the better.
The Symbolism of the Tarot by P. D. Ouspensky [1913]
What is the Tarot? Card XIII.–”Death”.
Another aspect of Life. Going away in order to come back at the same time. Completion of the circle.
CARD. XIII. DEATH.
Fatigued by the flashing of the Wheel of Life, I sank to earth and shut my eyes. But it seemed to me that the Wheel kept turning before me and that the four creatures continued sitting in the clouds and reading their books.
Suddenly, on opening my eyes, I saw a gigantic rider on a white horse, dressed in black armour, with a black helmet and black plume. A skeleton’s face looked out from under the helmet. One bony hand held a large, black, slowly-waving banner, and the other held a black bridle ornamented with skulls and bones.
And, wherever the white horse passed, night and death followed; flowers withered, leaves drooped, the earth covered itself with a white shroud; graveyards appeared; towers, castles and cities were destroyed.
Kings in the full splendour of their fame and their power; beautiful women loved and loving; high priests invested by power from God; innocent children–when they saw the white horse all fell on their knees before him, stretched out their hands in terror and despair, and fell down to rise no more.
Afar, behind two towers, the sun sank.
A deadly cold enveloped me. The heavy hoofs of the horse seemed to step on my breast, and I felt the world sink into an abyss.
But all at once something familiar, but faintly seen and heard, seemed to come from the measured step of the horse. A moment more and I heard in his steps the movement of the Wheel of Life!
An illumination entered me, and, looking at the receding rider and the descending sun, I understood that the Path of Life consists of the steps of the horse of Death.
The sun sinks at one point and rises at another. Each moment of its motion is a descent at one point and an ascent at another. I understood that it rises while sinking and sinks while rising, and that life, in coming to birth, dies, and in dying, comes to birth.
“Yes,” said the voice. The sun does not think of its going down and coming up. What does it know of earth, of the going and coming observed by men? It goes its own way, over its own orbit, round an unknown Centre. Life, death, rising and falling–do you not know that all these things are thoughts and dreams and fears of the Fool”?
The Tarot Trumps by G. H. Soror, Q.L.
XIII. DEATH
The sign of transmutation and disintegration. The skeleton which alone survives the destructive power of time, may be regarded as the foundation upon which the structure is built, the type which persists through the permutations of Time and Space, adaptable to the requirements of evolution and yet radically unchanged; the transmuting power of Nature working from below upwards, as the Hanged Man is the transmuting power of the spirit working from above downwards. The colors are blue-green, both dark and pale, the two dominant colors of the visible world, and the flashing colors of orange and orange-red.
Book “T” The Tarot
Brief Meanings of Twenty-Two Keys
14. Time, age, transformation, change involuntary (as opposed to 18, Pisces). Or death, destruction (only latter with special cards).
