Queen of Tarot

The ancient wisdom of the cards

Death Tarot Card Meaning and Art Alleged Tarot Deck

Designation

Death

About the Deck

Alleged Tarot Deck

A modern digital cartoon deck featuring traditional symbolism in a whimsical stick-figure style.

Provenance

Damian Cugley. Web, 2002. Used with permission of the artist.

Tags

trumps-13, death

Meaning of Death from the Alleged Tarot Deck

Upright

change, ending, new life

Reversed

traumatic change, delayed change

According to Many Schools of Thought

A. E. Waite's Secondary Meanings

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.

S. L. MacGregor Mathers's Divinatory Meanings

Upright

Death, Change, Transformation, Alteration for the worse

Reversed

Death just escaped, Partial change, Alteration for the better.

Papus's Divinatory Meanings

Death.