Letter: Mem = Water (distilled from Earth)
Path: Pelvic crossbar, between Netzach and Hod
Quality: Dissolving, surrender. Pan of Merit, Time
Death portrays the realm of dissolution and surcease, where all structure and differentiation collapse into a seemingly lifeless substrate. The totality of the transformation forces the soul to precipitate and quit the body, whether temporarily or permanently.
The Earth then hungrily devours the nutrients released by the abandoned structures, the bones, and the ashes of the past. The Kabbalists say the letter Mem drives compassion and mercy up the Father Pillar away from the realm of matter and into consciousness (to Chokhmah, the Left Eye of Witness).
We can only attain Divine Forgiveness when all ego ties to the past have been severed. Fascinatingly, Death represents the relative dormancy of the eternal soul while still embedded in the flesh and serving out its incarnated time. An ancient homily holds that an angel cries every time a human is born and rejoices every time one dies.
This expresses the relative spiritual oblivion of incarnation compared to the harmony and peace of the Pleroma. Death marks the third term of our responsive triangle, bringing a synthesis between the two previous Trumps. This is one of the most controversial cards in the Trump sequence, at least in terms of exciting the individual’s superstition. When this card comes up in a reading, people tend to panic.
This is not because it always means a literal death but because of the much more real and frightening possibility of radical and permanent change with no going back. The Death icon presents the necessity to absolutely abandon the past and all of its attachments in order to become worthy of the future that is yet to come. What a paradox for the lower nature: becoming willing to die to the self in order to go forward in the chain of incarnations.
Part of the drama of this card comes because it belongs to the responsive Fire triangle, where we no longer have the perspective of the type that we learned in the Light trine (by which I mean detachment, rationality, learned wisdom, freedom from instinct’s and superstition’s chokehold, plus an understanding of how to use the wheel of destiny through making sensible choices). In the responsive triangle one is thrown back on one’s personal cultivation to date, where the individual’s unique evolution and innate responses make all the difference in how things turn out.
With the Death card we experience intimately the breakdown that makes the alchemical recombination possible. What I mean is, without undergoing the “separation of the quick and the dead” in Trump 13, it is not possible to purify and evolve our “lead” (the lower attributes that make up the denser, more material aspects of the self) into “gold” (which historically symbolizes the highest, most radiant and most integrated of substances).
Now that we understand more directly the ways the alchemical system references astrological and Kabbalistic processes, it becomes clearer that the Death card signals the alchemical furnace of transmutation. After we have run the gamut of stock responses and solutions derived from the past, nothing will serve but to recycle ourselves. In this process everything (our patterns, our attitudes, even our very ground of being) cries out to be rendered back to its constituent parts and recast with a new goal in mind.
Death is the third of three worldly effects of the responsive Trumps within this collective Septenary, coming after Strength (defending what’s worth preserving) and the Hanged Man (rectifying one’s attitude towards suffering). Now in Trump 13 we’re ready to release everything that made it possible for us to exist in the old context, even up to being obliterated from the known universe.
This does not mean that there is no life on the other side of this passage, only that it is necessary to completely reframe our understanding of ourselves, our potentials, even our very purpose for living. Life as we’ve known it is gone. Now what will we do with ourselves? This Death card means utterly dissolving in the compost heap or the melting pot, willingly enduring all the hard parts and sources of resistance inside.
There is no worldly cause so compelling, no tie or bond so profound that Death has no sway over it. This means giving up all hope and allowing even one’s very body to be stripped away. Death is the cosmic pruner, who like the winter wind wields the scythe of Saturn.
For this cycle your time is up. Just as pre-school children encounter a certain day when they have to go off to public school, and the college student has to finally graduate and look for a job, at every stage of life we must outgrow what we’ve known about the self of the past in order to experience a new identity at a higher order of reality.
The above text is an excerpt from our book Tarot of the Holy Light: A Continental Esoteric Tarot - Volume One.
