Death
Trump XIII of the tarot: in older decks a skeleton mowing with a scythe, in Waite's a rider on a pale horse. A. E. Waite read it as end, mortality and destruction.
Meaning
Older cards show a skeleton with a great scythe mowing a field in which heads rise from the ground, one of them crowned. Waite replaced him with a horseman carrying a black banner marked with a rose, before whom king, child and maiden fall. In a Milanese pack in the British Museum the card has no title at all.
What does the Death card mean?
Waite's meanings are "end, mortality, destruction, corruption"; reversed, "inertia, sleep, lethargy, petrifaction, somnambulism; hope destroyed". He noted that the "alternatives allocated to the symbol are change and transformation", and rated the occult readings ("rebirth, creation, destination, renewal") better than usual.
In older decks
Papus joined the card to the thirteenth Hebrew letter, Mem.
See also
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
Last reviewed September 27, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research