The Death Card

A friend of mine once told me she was interested in Tarot and had even bought her own deck, but she would never get a professional Tarot reading for herself because she was scared they’d tell her someone she loved would die.

I think it’s possibly a fear that’s developed because there have been many who have used Tarot (and other divination tools such as palm reading) as a way to carry out mystical blackmail on their querents…think ‘you have a curse, but you’re in luck because for x amount of money I can remove it for you’..

But also.. there is literally a card in the Tarot deck that features the Grim Reaper riding a horse above fallen people waving a black flag. The Death Card. We’ve just had a full moon eclipse in Scorpio (the sign of transformation) so maybe it’s a really good time to have a little chat about this card and its purpose in the Tarot deck.

Before I dive into the card itself though I want to tell you a little bit about me because I think it will help explain my relationship with the death card a little.

 I grew up on a farm in outback South Australia. I went to school with 16 other kids in a school across the road from my Grandma’s. I spent my weekends going camping in the creek with my cousins. We would build a fire, find twigs of mallee root that we could smoke like cigarettes and sleep in swags under the stars.

Then I went off to boarding school in the city and my Mum and Dad moved to a cattle station in the middle of Australia. I was still hopelessly optimistic about my future. Even though at age 16 I’d never had the chance to take a ballet lesson I really wanted to be a ballerina when ‘I grew up.’

 I lived in three different states in Australia before moving to the UK in a relationship I knew was doomed but the tickets were already booked, and I didn’t want to travel Europe alone.

I travelled Europe and fell in love with Italy, I kept a diary during the weeks I was there and years later when I read it back it was just a detailed description of everything I ate. The relationship ended and all alone across the other side of the world from my family, I felt sad and uncomfortable but like everything was vivid and potent, I was alive.

There have been hundreds of different versions of me in this lifetime already. Sometimes I sit in my  workplace in a private medical centre in central London and think did I really use to sleep outside on a thin mattress wrapped in canvas and think that was no big deal? I like to imagine all the different variations of me still moving around; the Lisa who’s on the journey home after a night out in Camden, she’s got headphones in and catching a night bus home and her slightly drunk pisces heart loves the adventure of it all, then the Lisa who came a few years later is making her way to an early morning yoga class. Like a sliding doors movie where they are all crossing paths oblivious to one another.

 These different versions of myself will never cross paths though, because for the next version to emerge the old version had to end. We live hundreds of different lives within the one life of the physical body we were born into.

 My point is the Death card isn’t just about the death of your physical body and the exit from this Earth, in fact in my experience it hardly ever is about that. It’s the hundreds of little deaths that occur as part of our evolution within this one life. I grieved when I realised, I probably wasn’t going to become a ballerina when I finished high school (even though I’d never had a ballet lesson). It sounds ridiculous but it’s still true. The death of a naive dream and some of my childish innocence but the birth of real possibilities and growth. For something new to begin something often has to end. We can’t carry on with the beliefs we have always held or keep doing the same things we’ve always done if we want to grow and learn and become better versions of ourselves.

 For me the Death card is one of the juiciest in the deck. When I pull the Death card, I’m thinking what is ending? Who am I becoming? I once pulled the Death card in an online Tarot course as an answer to the question ‘what is Tarot?’ The words I heard immediately in my head were ‘a tool for transformation,’ which makes perfect sense to me because truly what is more transformative?

So, if you are not getting a Tarot reading because of fear of the death card showing up, then I would urge you to reconsider. You will go inevitably go through ‘a death phase’ whether you get a Tarot reading or not and you will usually feel it when you’re in one. Sometimes it can be lovely to have someone affirm what you are feeling and to have some guidance on how to honour and move with the energy and to get some reassurance that there will be a rebirth on the other side.

If you have any questions about the Death card, drop them below. I’d also love to know how you feel about it coming up in a reading!