Does the Death Card Actually Mean Death?

Anyone who has watched a tarot reading in a film knows the beat. The cards go down, a skeleton turns up, and the music tells you someone is doomed. Anyone who has sat through an actual reading knows the counter-beat: the reader smiles and explains that Death does not mean death. It means transformation, an ending that clears the ground.

Which is it? The short answer is that the reassuring reading is a real and well-documented tradition among tarot writers, but it is an interpretation with a history, not a fact about the card, and the most cited authority for it is less consistent than his admirers suggest. The longer answer requires looking at what A. E. Waite put on the page in 1911.

Two Answers in One Book

Arthur Edward Waite devised the deck that William Rider & Son published in London in 1909, with pictures by the artist Pamela Colman Smith; both belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an esoteric society.¹ Waite's companion volume, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), discusses each of the twenty-two trump cards, the "Greater Arcana," twice: once in a chapter on their inner symbolism, and again in a chapter of "Divinatory Meanings" for use in fortune-telling.

In the first chapter, his account of card XIII is the source of the comforting modern view. He describes the new design: "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."² And he states what he thinks it signifies: "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."²

"Rectified" is the telling word. Waite is announcing that he has corrected the card. The older image was a skeleton with a scythe; he has replaced it with a rider out of the Book of Revelation, precisely so that it will say transformation and not mere mortality. He goes further, speaking of a "mystical death" that is "a change in the form of consciousness," to which "ordinary death is neither the path nor gate."²

Turn to the divinatory chapter, though, and the entry reads in full:

"13. DEATH.--End, mortality, destruction, corruption also, for a man, the loss of a benefactor for a woman, many contrarieties; for a maid, failure of marriage projects. Reversed: Inertia, sleep, lethargy, petrifaction, somnambulism; hope destroyed."³

No rose, no sunrise. "Mortality" is the second word. If a client in 1911 had asked Waite's book what the card foretold, this is the list they would have been given.

Why the Split?

The book itself supplies the explanation, in its structure. Waite cared about the cards as a symbolic system for contemplation, and he treated fortune-telling as a lower use for which he was nevertheless obliged to supply meanings. The divinatory lists gather conventional significations of the kind that had circulated among cartomancers; the symbolic chapter is where he speaks in his own voice. That is an inference from how the two chapters differ, but it is a modest one, and it accounts for an author contradicting himself within a single book.

So when a present-day reader says "Waite tells us this card means transformation," that is true of Waite the mystic and untrue of Waite the compiler of fortunes.

How Transformation Won

The softer reading became the standard one later. The writer Eden Gray, whose popular handbooks did much to shape tarot practice in the English-speaking world, interpreted the card, according to the summary in Wikipedia's article on it, as "a change of thinking from an old way into a new way"; the same article reports the view of Gray and other authors that "it is uncommon that this card actually represents a physical death, rather it typically implies an end, possibly of a relationship or interest."⁴

Notice what happened. Of Waite's two voices, later writers kept the symbolic one and let the fortune-teller's list fall away. That is a defensible choice. It is also a choice, made in the twentieth century, by identifiable people.

And Before the Occultists?

It helps to know how young all of this is. Tarot cards were invented in northern Italy in the fifteenth century for playing a trick-taking game. The card historian David Parlett, writing for Britannica, puts it this way: "Tarot decks were invented in Italy in the 1430s by adding to the existing four-suited pack a fifth suit of 21 specially illustrated cards called trionfi ('triumphs') and an odd card called il matto ('the fool')."⁵ In the game, trump XIII did what trumps do: it beat the cards ranked below it and lost to those above.

On the question of divination, the historian and philosopher Michael Dummett's conclusion, as quoted in Wikipedia's survey, is that "there is no historical evidence of any significant use of tarot cards for divination until the late 18th century."⁶ The esoteric reading of the pack dates from the 1780s, when French occultists "made elaborate, but unsubstantiated, claims about their history and meaning," tracing them to ancient Egypt.⁶

None of this makes the image innocent. A skeleton with a scythe was, for a fifteenth-century Italian, an instantly recognisable figure of mortality, and some old packs, the Tarot de Marseille among them, leave this one card without a printed title.⁴ Why they do so is often explained as superstition; no source consulted for this article documents the reason, so treat that as a guess. What can be said is that, as a playing card, Death "meant" death only in the way the King of Hearts means monarchy. The card carried no message for the player holding it.

The Answer

Does the Death card actually mean death? The question assumes that cards have fixed meanings waiting to be discovered, and the history suggests otherwise. For about three centuries it was a picture of death on a game piece and foretold nothing. From the late eighteenth century it acquired divinatory meanings, and those meanings, as Waite's own list shows, plainly included mortality and loss. In 1909 Waite redrew it to express spiritual transformation, and later writers made that the prevailing interpretation.

So a reader who tells you the card signifies change is faithfully reporting the modern tradition, and is on firm ground in saying so. A reader who tells you it has never meant death has not read the second of Waite's two entries. Whether any card can foretell anything at all is a different kind of claim, one that history cannot settle and that this article does not assess. What history can show is that the meaning of card XIII was not found. It was argued for, and the argument is still visible in a single book, if you read both chapters.