Tarot
Death means ending, change, clearing. What it means upright and reversed, the four ways readers handle reversals, and the Scorpio attribution the Golden Dawn gave it.
Pamela Colman Smith drew Death as a skeleton in black armour on a white horse, a bishop and a child in its path, and a sunrise showing between two distant towers. Start there rather than with a keyword list. The scene is the reading, and it is the reason this deck took over from every deck that showed the Majors as plain allegorical figures.
Something is over. The card is about the admission rather than the loss, and the admission is usually the part being avoided.
The question it actually puts to you: what you are keeping alive past its usefulness, and what it costs to keep doing that. That is the useful part. A card that only tells you what is happening is a horoscope; a card that asks you something is doing the job.
| If the question is about | Death upright | Reversed |
|---|---|---|
| Love | A chapter closing. Not necessarily the relationship, often the version of it. | Read it as the same thing blocked, inverted or taken too far |
| Work | A role ending, which in practice is frequently a relief. | Usually the delayed version rather than the opposite |
| Money | A clean break with an arrangement that stopped working. | Check the cards either side before deciding which |
An ending being dragged out well past the point where anyone believed in it.
That is one reading of it, and readers do not agree on how reversals work. There are four common methods, they give different answers, and nobody who tells you theirs is the correct one is describing the tradition honestly.
| Method | What the reversal means | When it fits best |
|---|---|---|
| Blocked or delayed | The upright meaning, not available yet | The most common method. Works on almost any card |
| The opposite | The reverse of the upright meaning | Cards with a clear opposite, like the Sun or the Ten of Cups |
| Turned inward | The upright meaning, happening privately | The feeling cards, and most of the Cups |
| Too much of it | The upright quality in excess | The strong cards: Strength, the Emperor, the King of Wands |
Plenty of readers shuffle so that reversals never occur, and read the surrounding cards for the same information instead. That is a legitimate method, not a shortcut.
Every Major Arcana card has a planetary, zodiacal or elemental attribution in the Golden Dawn system, and Death takes Scorpio. The card is the sign in a single image. Everything Death is credited with in a reading, ending, change, clearing, is also on the list for Scorpio.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Number | XIII (13) |
| Arcana | Major |
| Attributed to | Scorpio |
| Kind of attribution | Zodiac sign |
| Keywords | Ending, Change, Clearing |
If you want the longer version of what Scorpio does, the Sun in Scorpio covers the sign at its most undiluted, and Scorpio rising covers how it behaves as a first impression.
The Tower. Death is an ending that was coming. The Tower is a shock that was not.
Worth knowing, because most pages present card meanings as though they were handed down from antiquity. Playing cards reached Europe in the fourteenth century and the earliest surviving tarot decks were painted in northern Italy in the fifteenth, as a card game. For roughly three hundred years that is all they were. Divination with them is first clearly documented in the late eighteenth century, in France.
The meanings in use today in English are almost entirely the Rider deck's. It was published in London in 1909: Arthur Edward Waite wrote the scheme, Pamela Colman Smith drew all seventy-eight cards, and she was paid a flat fee and went uncredited on the box for most of a century. Her decision to give every pip card a scene rather than a plain arrangement of symbols is the single reason modern tarot works the way it does, because a picture can be read by somebody who has memorised nothing.
Both of them were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which is where the astrological attributions on this page come from. Those are a genuine system with internal logic, and they are a little over a century old rather than ancient. Saying so costs nothing and it is the difference between a page you can trust on the rest of the detail and a page you cannot.
A card describes a situation. It does not know anything about you specifically, because the deck is the same deck for everybody who picks it up. A birth chart is the opposite: it is built from your date, time and place of birth and it describes one person. Here is how to find your birth time if you do not have it.
Death means ending, change, clearing.
Readers use four different methods for reversals: blocked, opposite, turned inward, or too much of it. The article sets out all four, because they give different answers and no single one is the correct reading.
Scorpio, in the Golden Dawn system the Rider deck was built on.
No. A card describes a situation and asks a question about it. Nothing in the tradition names a date, and nothing in it should stand in for medical, legal or financial advice.
RubyAstro writes about astrology for reflection and self-understanding. Nothing here is medical, legal or financial advice, and none of it is a prediction of events. Read our full disclaimer.
Rising SignsA Scorpio rising sets your first impression and fixes every house in your chart. Your chart ruler is Mars, your seventh house is Taurus, and your tenth is Leo. Here is the whole structure, and how to check yours is right.
Planets in SignsSun governs identity and purpose, and Scorpio is a water sign in fixed mode. Here is what the placement does, its shadow, and the real dates Sun is in Scorpio.
TarotThe Sun means clarity, success, visibility. What it means upright and reversed, the four ways readers handle reversals, and the Sun attribution the Golden Dawn gave it.
TarotThe Five of Cups means grief, regret, what remains. What it means upright and reversed, the four ways readers handle reversals, and the Mars in Scorpio attribution behind it.
TarotThe Six of Cups means memory, nostalgia, old kindness. What it means upright and reversed, the four ways readers handle reversals, and the Sun in Scorpio attribution behind it.
Dreams & SymbolsDreaming about death is usually read as an ending, and almost never a literal one, and tends to show up during the end of a role, a job, a phase or a version of yourself. What is actually known about dreams, why dictionaries do not work, and how to read your own.