Major Arcana · 13
Death
La Mort · La Morte · The Reaper
The Death tarot card meaning runs through both orientations: upright, transformation, endings, transition; reversed, resistance to change, stagnation, fear of endings. Below, its imagery across the Rider–Waite–Smith, Thoth, and Marseille decks, and what the tradition’s writers said about it.
- Element
- Water
- Planet
- Pluto
- Zodiac
- Scorpio
- Hebrew
- Nun
- Numerology
- 13
- Timing
- Scorpio season (October–November); within a season; transformative timeframes; new moon energy.
Upright
- transformation
- endings
- transition
- rebirth
- letting go
- metamorphosis
Reversed
- resistance to change
- stagnation
- fear of endings
- incomplete transformation
Death Tarot Card Meaning
Upright
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Reversed
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The image, three ways
Rider–Waite–Smith
A skeletal figure in black armor rides a white horse, holding a black banner with a white five-petaled rose. A king lies fallen; a child, a bishop, and a maiden face the rider. The sun rises (or sets) between two towers in the distance; a river flows.
Thoth
A skeletal scythe-bearer dancing amid swirling fish, scorpions, and serpents — symbols of regeneration. Crowley emphasizes Death as the gateway, not the gate.
Marseille
La Mort (often unnamed — the only card sometimes left unnamed in the Marseille tradition out of superstition) — a skeleton with a scythe stands in a field strewn with limbs and heads. Brutal, agricultural.
Four ways a reversal speaks
After Mary K. Greer, Tarot Reversals (2002)
01 · blocked
Refusing the necessary ending; gripping what is already dying.
02 · delayed
The transformation paused mid-passage; stuck in chrysalis without exit.
03 · denied
What is over treated as still alive; the corpse propped up in its old chair.
04 · karmic
An ancestral pattern coming to its long-overdue close; generational death asking to be honored.
What the tradition says
A.E. Waite · 1910
The Pictorial Key to the Tarot
End, mortality, destruction, corruption; for a man, the loss of a benefactor; for a woman, many contrarieties. Waite is grimmer than later interpretations.
Aleister Crowley · 1944
The Book of Thoth
Death as Scorpio — the deep regenerative water. The skeleton dances; transformation is celebration, not tragedy.
Rachel Pollack · 1980
Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
Death is the moment when the seeker realizes that change is not interruption of life but its substance — that we are made of endings as much as beginnings.
Sallie Nichols · 1980
Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey
Nichols reads Death as the alchemical nigredo — the necessary blackening that precedes the gold. The skeleton on the white horse is psyche stripped to structure; everything inessential is taken so the essential can emerge. To meet Death without fear requires having something underneath persona that is not afraid.
Mary K. Greer · 1984
Tarot for Your Self
Greer asks the Death querent to write their own elegy for what is leaving — to honor what was real before allowing it to go. Death without ritual leaves the bones unburied; the card's medicine includes the formal goodbye, not just the parting.
Shadow
The grim reaper internalized — calling everything dead too soon, ending what could heal; or the inverse, refusing every ending and accumulating ghosts.
Archetypal role
The Reaper / The Initiator into Mysteries / The Lord of Endings
Historical notes
Death was the most feared card in early decks — sometimes left unnamed (the 'unnamed arcanum' of Marseille). Its consistent appearance in 13th position predates the cultural taboo around 13 and may have helped create it. Crowley emphasizes the alchemical nigredo — putrefaction is generative, not terminal.
Neighbouring arcana
Death combinations
Bring this card into a question
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