This is a card of…

Transformation

Harvest

Change

End of a cycle

New ground

“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”

-Isaac Asimov

Key 13 may be the most famous of all the Tarot cards, certainly in the cinema. If a deck of Tarot cards shows up in a movie, it’s a pretty safe bet the Death card will get some screen time. It’s a dramatic image and a dramatic word- death.

Luckily at DPT we don’t do fortune-telling, so no need to worry about keeling over before midnight. But even readers who do use Tarot for divination emphasize that this card does not, or at least almost never, means the actual physical death of a person.

So this card wants us to meditate on what? That can be unlocked by considering the card above it in the first line. The Empress offers nature in all its bountiful fertility and reckless excess. The process of nature continually growing, flowering, and bearing fruits depends on the death and transformation of what came before. Key 13 is the less photogenic side of the fertility of the natural world. While not as pretty as Key 3, it is absolutely vital to the survival of any ecosystem (and any psyche.) In the previous majors we have been preparing to look into the cold empty eye sockets of this reality. Things pass out of living: they die. Their bodies transform into the raw material of things yet to be born.

Consideration of this process can extend far beyond ecology. Aspects of our life and identity must pass away for the new to come into being. The end of a relationship causes grief, a feeling of bareness. Something made by two people but somehow more than the two people has come to an end. Denial, pain and mourning are passed through- then one day the two see that the relationship’s end provided the raw material for a subsequent higher level of wholeness. A job treasured as not merely a source of income but as an identity is lost and the individual stands on an empty plain, directionless and unsure of who she even is now. Years later she looks back on that limited sense of identity, glad she endured the loss and found that her sense of self could be so much more than a job.

Often when we self-sabotage during periods of change it is due to fear that becoming the new us means the old us will go through some sort of death. Change always brings some sort of loss. Death’s folkloric representation as a reaper is important to this interpretation- the scythe violently and mercilessly cuts down the harvest so that the field can become fertile again.

Without this reaping, sickly overipeness and rot would destroy our beautifully tended rows anyway. If we are clinging to something as if our life depends on it- a relationship, a job, a home, an ideology- we must face that our life does not depend on it. And that no amount of clinging will stop the natural progress of time. Rather than letting it rot to uselessness around us, we can at least get out with a few bushels of apples.

Advice:

Don’t fear the reaper

Embrace change

Let nature take its course

Warning:

Don’t cling to a season that has past.

Don’t forget your time on earth is finite.

Resisting the inevitable only wastes energy.