AUTHOR’S NOTE: One of the most difficult challenges in professional tarot reading is grappling with the presence of the Death card in a spread when an anxious client is waiting expectantly for a constructive explanation. There is an inevitable fixation on its gloomy portent and our own mortality even when nothing of the sort is forthcoming in the immediate future.

I’m reminded of my two favorite cultural metaphors regarding death, one by Terry Pratchett and the other by George Carlin. In the first one, Pratchett’s DEATH character always speaks ominously in CAPITAL LETTERS, even though his granddaughter Susan is trying to reform him into a kinder, gentler harbinger of doom. In the other, a man with halitosis receives a bottle of Scope mouthwash in the mail from an anonymous person and becomes suicidal: “What’s this? Death? Death?? DEATH??? Arrrgh!”

Conventional (and somewhat watered-down) wisdom advises that Death seldom means physical demise, only that a major change or even a life-altering transformation of some kind may be coming. At worst, the implication is usually that it could be necessary to cut one’s losses and move on from an untenable situation; it doesn’t have to invoke the fatality of that other cynical aphorism, “Life sucks, and then you die.” I’ve never been entirely satisfied with this convenient deflection because sometimes an ending is “just an ending” and nothing more. Consequently, there may even be an opportunity hidden in it

In the I Ching hexagram Fou (Stalemate), the commentary for the fifth line contains the dire words “Perishing, perishing . . .” In her analysis, Benebell Wen observes that “Perishing, perishing” . . . “suggests a spiritual death. A spiritual death is a life stage where past delusions, superficiality and ignorance are shattered and transcendent insight is gained. Thus, one is reborn awakened into a new consciousness.” The fifth line “is the light of transcendent realization.”

This is one of the most uplifting interpretations I have seen for the symbolic experience of death because it suggests a “metaphysical make-over” and not “the Grim Reaper,” so I intend to use it in my tarot readings. Taking the concept of the Death card to the spiritual level largely negates the distressing import of the classical image. We can then look at it in a more abstract, philosophical light instead of a purely physical one, an alternative view in which its terminal impact is “denatured” to a large extent. One doesn’t object too strenuously to a thorough “drubbing” when all that is at stake is a dramatic change of perspective. The old ideas are still there for reference, but the new ones should ideally be more compelling.

Rather than as a profound end-of-life, whether literal or figurative, I see the symbolism as an expression of “molting” akin to that of a serpent, the main theme of Scorpio and thus emblematic of the Thoth Death card. We must all change if we are to grow, and it’s not always by choice. Just as a tiger can’t shed its stripes, we can’t wholly deny our past (unless we lie about it to ourselves and others); but we can certainly transcend it. Therefore, as a “game-changer,” Death can illuminate a wide-open spiritual landscape that offers an opportunity to remake ourselves in a more enlightened style. All we have to do is get our culturally-ingrained preconceptions out of the way for the message to penetrate. In one of my previous posts I likened the skeleton in Death to a gardener who is cultivating a “bumper crop” of heads, hands and feet. If we think of each one as a spiritual “seedling,” perhaps our clients’ aspirations will be among them.