Death: disintegration and the initiatory passage
“The man of flesh and bone—the one who is born, suffers, and dies—above all, dies—and not the man as idea, is the subject and the supreme object of all philosophy.”
Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life¹
Death in the Thoth Tarot is a symbol of radical disintegration: a necessary passage in which form breaks down so that transformation, loss, and recomposition may occur within the initiatory path.
Before setting out to write about Death, I first wrote about Temperance and The Hanged Man, because it seemed necessary to construct a framework that would allow Arcana XIII to be read in its full density, considering the stripping of meaning it has suffered in recent times with the exponential spread of the tarot reader’s trade.
By first examining the inversion embodied by The Hanged Man, the tarot reader can recognize that the transformation brought by Death is preceded by renunciation; by also addressing Temperance, it is emphasized that any authentic disintegration entails a subsequent alchemical recomposition. Writing in this order is equivalent to framing the initiatory experience, for the suspension that opens the possibility of seeing, and the decomposition that forces one to contend with loss, thus avoiding the symbolic dislocation that turns Death into a soothing slogan. This operative continuity within the Hero’s Journey and the Tree of Life offers the conceptual and ethical context necessary so that the confrontation with the end is neither a spectacle nor a banal promise.
Continuities and Transformations in the Iconography of Death
“Our lives are the rivers
that flow into the sea,
which is death;
there all lordships
end
and are consumed;
there the mighty rivers,
there the others, the middle
and the small ones,
gathered together, are equal—
those who live by their labor
and the rich.”
Jorge Manrique, Coplas on the Death of His Father (Copla II)²
The figure of Death already appears in the early trionfi series. In decks such as those attributed to the Visconti³ family circle, it is depicted as a skeleton or as a Fate figure equipped with attributes - the bow, the scythe, the horse...- that make manifest the universality of death, impartial and equitable.
In the transition toward the major modern models, the iconography becomes more complex; one example is the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which preserves the image of the armored skeleton on horseback but adds, in the background, a rising sun between two towers - a compositional symbol that allows Death to be read as both a final point and the simultaneous emergence of a new cycle.⁴
This visual staging of ‘darkness and dawn’ is one of the reasons why, in popular culture, Death has come to mean transformation more than literal annihilation. This is very strange, because at the horse’s feet lie fallen figures from different estates - the dethroned king, the bishop, the child, the commoner- emphasizing radical equality before death and the annulment of social, moral, and spiritual hierarchies. The rising sun on the horizon does not allude to better times to come, but to the ‘here’ of the living and the ‘beyond’ opened by disintegration: it is in that context that the idea of journey, process, and transition is introduced. That path forces one to traverse loss, to acknowledge its harshness, and to allow the light - the integration into Tiphareth- to illuminate what remains. Thus, the sun does not negate the rawness of the scene.
On a personal level, it is not that I am against the cards being re-signified: the very history of the Tarot shows that re-signification has been the rule, not the exception, and many reinterpretations have legitimately served to teach and to bring people into contact with deep truths.
The problem of our time is that those re-significations rarely aim to endow the symbols with new operative forms for confronting what is deeply human grief for parents, the loss of a spouse, one’s own illness, the fear of death, the anxiety about the mystery of the beyond. Instead of constructing interpretive resources that allow the querent to inhabit pain and uncertainty, all too often the cards are translated into slogans of immediate consolation that function as a symbolic anaesthetic. Today, re-signifying does not mean improving, unfortunately.
Death within the Tree of Life
Traditionally linked with Nun and the Death motif, the path from Netzach to Tiphareth represents the necessary dissolution of entrenched forms so that vital energy can be gathered, purified, and reintegrated into the Tree’s center.
"Death, the grey horror and awful fear of mankind, and the last despair of the philosophers, is transcended. Only the body dies." Israel Regardie, The Tree of Life⁶
In the Hermetic tradition inherited by the Golden Dawn, the twenty-two Major Arcana are linked to the twenty-two Hebrew letters and to the paths of the Tree of Life.⁷ Within this symbolic framework, Death is classically associated with the letter Nun and with the path that connects Netzach to Tiphereth.
In The Book of Thoth, Aleister Crowley develops a particularly dense reading of the card from an alchemical and astrological perspective. Nun, the Hebrew letter associated with Death, refers—according to its etymology and to the symbols linked to the fish and to water in the kabbalistic tradition—to continuous movement and to life in transit. To this is added its zodiacal correspondence with Scorpio, the fixed water sign traditionally associated with corruption, putrefaction, and profound regeneration.⁸
This double aquatic and scorpionic inscription reinforces the idea that the operation described is not a sudden destruction, but a process of intense and sustained dissolution: putrefactio, the indispensable phase of the alchemical work that precedes all true renewal. In Crowley’s Thelemic-alchemical articulation, Death is not a benevolent metaphor for change, but an act governed by the rigorous laws of the universe, in which the decomposition of form is a necessary condition for something essential to survive and reorganize itself. In this sense, the card stands in direct opposition to any reading that reduces it to a “comforting message” or to a promise of transformation without loss or cost.
The Netzach–Tiphareth placement is also essential for understanding its psychological nuances: Netzach governs impulses, desire, and affective dynamics, while Tiphareth is the point of ethical-spiritual integration. The passage through Nun implies the renunciation of immediate gratification—that is, ceasing to orient one’s conduct according to reactive appetites, pleasures, or instant achievements, so that the center may be reconfigured. Affective, libidinal, and even identitarian impulses must come to an end in their tyranny in order to become part of a broader concept of integrated beauty, so that impulses of consumption or immediate survival may be transformed into forces that serve a harmonized and responsible center, and a mature form of beauty.⁹
Ritual meaning, natural pain, and critique
“Late modernity has lost the tragic sense of existence without gaining, in exchange, any true wisdom.”
Rafael Argullol, The Attraction of the Abyss¹⁰
The symbolic displacement of Death cannot be understood apart from the contemporary cultural climate. Various thinkers have pointed out that we live in an era marked by immediacy, an intolerance of limits, and a difficulty in sustaining negative experiences without neutralizing them.¹¹
In practical and ethical terms, when a Tarot¹² reader avoids acknowledging the real pain that transformation entails, or when the rite of mourning is replaced by a mantra of ‘letting go’ without communal accompaniment, a symbolic amputation takes place. Death loses its social function of providing a framework for loss, remembrance, and even the celebration of those who are no longer present, honoring their memory. All of us who have lost someone know that we must learn to live with the gentle sorrow of longing.
I could continue speaking about symbols, magical correspondences, iconographic genealogies, kabbalistic relationships, and established authors. The material exists and is abundant. However, my intention in writing about Death was not to accumulate erudition or to dispute readings and interpretations, but to formulate an explicit call to new tarot readers and to those who consult the Tarot - or, more broadly, to the community that practices and consumes it.
The reading I propose is not a defense of Tarot itself, but of the suffering human being: the one who needs to express pain when words are no longer sufficient, the one who inhabits a society whose collective values no longer sustain them.¹³
Tarot readers, in this sense, are mediators, guides, psychopomps.
For Miguel de Unamuno, death is not an abstract concept but a permanent wound in human experience, inseparable from the desire for meaning, immortality, and community. This reading is especially pertinent in light of contemporary tendencies to soften, psychologize, or symbolically neutralize what constitutes, precisely, the tragic core of existence. In The Tragic Sense of Life, he states that the fact of knowing we are going to die distinguishes us from animal forms of life and that this awareness is the root of spiritual life.
Coplas on the Death of His Father ( Coplas por la Muerte de su padre) by Jorge Manrique stands as one of the undisputed pinnacles of Spanish-language literature, both for the beauty of its form and the depth of its thought. Manrique succeeds in transforming personal grief into a universal reflection on time, memory, and death. The clarity of its imagery and the cadence of its verses grant the poem an uncommon dignity, capable of accompanying mourning and providing a shared language with which to contemplate the inevitable.
The Visconti family was one of the most powerful and influential dynasties in northern Italy during the Late Middle Ages, particularly in Milan, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their rule was authoritarian but culturally fruitful. The Visconti distinguished themselves as patrons of art, architecture, and courtly culture. It is within this context that the Visconti-Sforza tarot decks are situated: commissioned for the courtly elite and conceived as objects of prestige, play, and symbolic representation of the social and moral order of their time.
The compositional solution of the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot must also be read in light of the artistic transitions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when symbolic languages inherited from classical schools and late Romanticism coexist with the first gestures of rupture of modern art. Late Victorian imagery, particularly in its Symbolist strain, tended to superimpose closure and continuity within a single scene: ruin and dawn, death and regeneration, decline and promise. Before the radical fractures of historical modernism, these images still retain a legible narrative structure, in which the symbol neither denies pain nor finitude but reinscribes them within a cosmic or moral order. The rising sun between towers in Death belongs to that moment of transition.
In order not to refer exclusively to figures from a century ago, I would point out that there are contemporary Tarot scholars and practitioners whose work demonstrates that it is still possible today to engage with Tarot with rigor, depth, and symbolic responsibility, without falling into the dominant superficiality. Mary K. Greer, in dialogue with the Golden Dawn tradition and with decades of reflective practice, emphasizes the ontological and therapeutic dimension of Death, insisting that it must be read with solemnity and not through soothing euphemisms; in her approach, ritual respect for death—both physical and symbolic—is an ethical condition of tarot reading. Rachel Pollack, for her part, offers an interpretation that combines literary sensitivity with structural precision; in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom and other texts, she underscores that the Major Arcana constitute an initiatory narrative, and that Death marks a point of profound inversion in the subject’s story, a real closure that makes possible a new opening, but not a consolatory device in the face of trivial fears. Among Spanish-speaking authors who have addressed tarot symbolism, several examples could be cited, but I am particularly drawn to Enrique Ezkenazi, who offers a reading that is at once historical and operative, rigorous and contextualized, in which his refusal to trivialize the experience of grief and loss—or to turn it into a therapeutic tool—is evident. Incidentally, this serves as a healthy wake-up call for those who claim that there is no solid bibliography or reliable references in Spanish: it is not that they do not exist, but rather that the pedagogical rigor and demands of Enrique’s work are not as exciting as the insubstantiality of Alejandro Jodorowsky.
This phrase does not carry a consolatory tone; within the context of the Golden Dawn, does not refer to personal continuity, but to a reorganized state of consciousness that can only be attained after the effective dissolution of the previous form. This is why the quotation functions as an initiatory threshold rather than as a denial of pain or of the definitive character of death on the human plane.
The correspondence between the twenty-two Major Arcana, the twenty-two Hebrew letters, and the paths of the Tree of Life becomes consolidated in modern Hermetic tradition beginning with Éliphas Lévi, one of the first authors to explicitly formulate the relationship between Tarot and the Hebrew alphabet as a unified symbolic system (Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, 1854–1856), a scheme that would later be developed and systematized by the Golden Dawn.
In Hellenistic and medieval astrology, Scorpio is a fixed water sign, associated with deep moisture, with processes of corruption and regeneration of matter, and with that which operates invisibly beneath the surface. Classical authors such as Dorotheus of Sidon and, later, Firmicus Maternus, link Scorpio to dissolution, sexuality, death, and irreversible transformations, always under the rulership of Mars - in later readings, of Mars and Pluto- as a principle of active force within the hidden realm. In Renaissance and nineteenth-century Hermetic tradition, this aqueous quality is not understood as superficial fluidity, but as stagnant, deep, and penetrating water, capable of decomposing and of engendering new life.
In Hermetic Qabbalah, Netzach is the sefirah of active energy, impulse, and the persistence of life in its most immediate form; it is victory, but also excess, repetition, and attachment to form. Tiphareth, by contrast, is the heart of the Tree: the place where opposing forces find balance, proportion, and beauty. The passage through Nun, associated with Death, marks the necessary dissolution of forms of energy that can no longer be sustained, so that this vital force may be gathered, purified, and redirected toward the center. It is not a matter of annihilating Netzach, but of allowing its potency to cease expanding without measure and to be integrated in service to the equilibrium of the whole. In kabbalistic terms, this is an act of correction (tikkun) of an energy that does not disappear, but rather changes level and function ( the entry, The Rose as an Emblem of Beauty and Mystery in Esoteric and Cultural Traditions, points to the association of the rose with Netzach, the sefirah linked to affective impulse and victory, with triumphant beauty within the Tree of Life.)
In The Attraction of the Abyss (1983), Rafael Argullol analyzes how modern thought oscillates between the desire for transcendence and the awareness of finitude, noting that the abyss is not destruction but a place of truth where illusions of control, progress, and meaning are put to the test. His reading is useful for thinking about Death as a necessary confrontation with that which exceeds the subject and compels a redefinition of one’s relationship to time, loss, and identity.
Fernando Savater, for example, has insisted that one of the paradoxes of late modernity is the loss of familiarity with death as a formative experience: death ceases to be thought of as a common destiny and as an occasion for ethical reflection, and instead becomes an accident that must be concealed, medicalized, or psychologically cushioned. Along the same lines, Latin American philosophers such as Bolívar Echeverría and Néstor García Canclini have described how the logic of consumption and therapeutic culture tends to transform even the most radical symbols into products for immediate use, stripped of their constitutive negativity. Read from this framework, it is hardly surprising that, driven by the need for quick consolation and a rhetoric of well-being, contemporary discourse has tended to strip Death of its painful, limiting, and ceremonial dimension. In much of today’s mass tarot practice, the card becomes a sweetened ‘change’- or its more refined version, ‘process’- a symbol of personal growth that avoids confronting the internal and communal violence of sorrow, grief, and the farewell rituals that accompany- indeed, must accompany- any authentic transformation. Academic scholarship on the cultural history of tarot clearly shows how its meanings have progressively shifted from playful and ritual uses toward commercial ones, and how this shift, far from being neutral, simplifies the symbol and empties it of its capacity to confront people with finitude, fear, and the mystery that every culture, at some point, must be able to sustain.
I am deeply glad that many people today own a tarot deck and learn to read the cards for themselves. However, reading for others is not exactly the same as reading for oneself, and I do not say this because technical knowledge might be lacking - skills can always be learned- but because, as with other professions - teaching, for example- the work requires the development of human and ethical qualities that are not inherited: the capacity for emotional containment, patience and active listening, clear boundaries, crisis management, a certain sensitivity, discipline, ethics, and, above all, the awareness that one fulfills a social function that goes beyond the mere transmission of content (which is what constitutes true teaching vocation). Of course, there are also bad teachers, but good teachers assume a commitment to communal responsibility.
Death tends increasingly to become a clinical and institutionalized act; the recent approval in Uruguay of a law regulating euthanasia is a tangible example of how the final passage is now organized through medical procedures and administrative frameworks rather than through shared communal rites. Likewise, this process coexists with the other end of life: births have also been widely medicalized and hospital-centered in recent decades, with a very high proportion of deliveries taking place in healthcare facilities and cesarean section rates that, according to national reports, frequently exceed 40–50%. This underscores the extent to which both the beginning and the end of life are now inscribed within institutional and technical spaces.
The original version, along with related articles, is available on my blog, Sal Gema de Tarot por Kema (originally written and published in Spanish)
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