About the Death Card

The most important message this card provides is that when one’s heart is open, innocent and free, like the little child with the flower symbolizes it, we can freely and utterly accept death as a natural occurrence, helping us on our path. Death is therefore nothing to fear, it is the ultimate end of things, before new things can emerge. Something has to end, through the metaphysical death, before something new can start.

So the Death in Tarot reminds us to be brave and to offer him flowers and your beautiful, open and radiant heart. If you learn to open up to the energy of ending something through death, you start loving and caring, and you will ever be thankful when this card and energy pops up in your life.

Death in Astrology and Tarot

This Energy is for Scorpio very familiar, and it brings the much-needed renewal in the depth of one’s personality. It is one of the reasons why Scorpio is considered the most intense Zodiac sign of all, through his all or nothing attitude. It is the attitude of either die or reach heaven, all or nothing, like a fanatic lunatic. Scorpio and the Tarot Death Card are so intense energies that it can, at best, transform the deepest hidden energies within one’s personality. At worst, it can bring death and destruction through sexual misconduct, meanness, greed, grief and all kinds of fanaticism. (religious, social, economic, you name it…)

Scorpio is considered one of the most deep going and intuitive signs in the zodiac, and is perfect for everything that has to do with death. Very direct, mysterious and strong, like the death itself. Perfect Jobs for a Scorpio are: Detective, Analyst, mortician undertaker, surgeon.

And you would not consider a scorpion as diplomat, they probably would make it worse, through their direct nature.

Death from a Yogi perspective

I am associating the Death card with the energy of Lord Shiva, the last part of the holy trinity where Brahma is the creator, Vishnu the preserver and Shiva, the dissolution.

Shiva, also considered as “the destroyer of illusion” is just another description of the Death in Tarot. Death comes to us, when we are hopelessly trapped in our body, feelings, emotions or thoughts. This energy invites us to open up and to be thankful for an ending, even if it hurts, because something much more beautiful is coming to us. Shiva is a good god, he has mercy and comes to help us out of our illusions, but at the same time, it is entirely up to us what we create in our life’s and how dear we hold on to it. The more we consider it a battle against death/Shiva/god, the more we suffer from our own illusion.

In German there is a word called “Ent-täuschung” (disappointment) and it literally means “The End of the Illusion” – so when we would like to keep up our own lies, conscious or not, we will suffer from our illusions, we created on our own and therefore no one is to blame but ourselves.

Shiva, Scorpio and Death are beautiful helpers on our path to get rid of our well-loved and kept illusions, if we learn to invite death with love, peace, flowers and a radiant open heart, we can break free of all illusion – that is the Path of Scorpio, nothing more, nothing less.

Symbolism

• Closely associated with Scorpio
• Associated with Lord Shiva, the Destroyer of illusion
• Boaz and Jachin, the two pillars of the temple of Salomon in the background where the sun goes down in between
• Death symbolized as a knight, with cold and hard armor walking slow and careful through the fields.
• An apocalyptic horse and a red saddle, symbolizing the earth and Muladhara-Chakra in yoga, the foundation of our bodies.
• A child kneeling and happy to see death and offering flowers, symbolizing that children are naturally ending things without hesitation
• A young child next to the small child is not open anymore for the natural death of things, and turns her head away in disgusts
• The priest trying to pray for mercy in his golden cape
• Death is holding a black flag, that represents the nucleus’s, that holds everything together, he brings therefore the natural order of things back to the world.