Death

The Rider-Waite-Smith version, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909, shows a skeleton in black armor riding a white horse. A white flag with a five-petaled rose — a symbol of purification — is carried in one hand. On the ground: a fallen king, a bishop in prayer, a woman looking away, and a child holding flowers toward the horse. A rising sun sits between two towers in the background. The king is already dead; the bishop is next. The child doesn't flinch. Upright, Death marks the close of a chapter that genuinely cannot continue — a relationship, a career phase, an identity. Reversed, it usually means the ending is happening but the person is white-knuckling the old situation. It's not the same as The Tower (sudden shock) or The Hanged Man (suspension) — Death is the moment after the decision has already been made.

The Death card appears in the earliest known tarot decks — the Visconti-Sforza cards produced in Milan around 1450, where the figure is a skeletal archer on foot. French Tarot de Marseille decks from the 17th–18th centuries labeled the card simply with the Roman numeral XIII, no title, which amplified its feared status. Antoine Court de Gébelin, writing in 1781, was among the first to argue that tarot carried esoteric significance, and Eliphas Lévi's 1854 writings linked the Major Arcana systematically to Kabbalah and Hebrew letters — associating Death with the letter Nun. Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith redesigned the imagery for the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, adding the white rose flag and the rising sun to emphasize transformation rather than finality. Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris's Thoth Tarot (completed 1943, published 1944) renamed the card simply 'Death' and rendered it as a skeletal figure with a scythe amid swarming life forms.

Rachel Pollack's *Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom* (1980) gives one of the clearest readings of this card — her chapter on Death is worth reading before you try to interpret it for anyone else. Mary K. Greer's *Tarot for Yourself* (1984) includes a journaling exercise where you write out what you're actually being asked to let go of, which cuts through the abstract fast. Pull Death alongside the card before it and after it in a three-card spread: what ended, what's ending, what comes next. Biddy Tarot and Labyrinthos Academy both have solid free breakdowns of upright vs. reversed meanings if you want a quick reference before a reading.