Death

The Plate

The banner is black and the flower on it is white — a five-petaled rose, drawn with as much care as anything on the card. The rider who bears it is a skeleton in dark armor, but the horse under him is white and it walks, it does not charge, and the procession it walks through has already sorted itself: a king lies fallen with his crown beside him, a bishop stands and prays, a young woman turns her face away, and a child looks up openly and offers flowers. A river crosses the background with a small boat on it, and between two distant towers the sun sits on the horizon. Waite (1911) calls what shines there "the sun of immortality," and declines, like the plate, to say whether it is rising or setting.

The Reading

The school's standing instruction is to read this trump as an ending in life, never the ending of the reader. Nobody at the table dies; something at the table completes — a season, a role, an arrangement that has finished its work — and the four figures show the range of receptions available: refusal, ceremony, aversion, candor. Only the child, who defends nothing, can look directly at the rider. The horse's pace is the other teaching. It walks. Endings of this kind are processions, not ambushes, and there is usually time to close things properly, mourning included, before the field clears for what follows.

Reversed, the card shows the ending refused: the position defended after the war is over, the season propped up past its death. The rider does not turn back for this. The walk simply lengthens, and the cost of the delay runs on.

In the School

Death carries Water, the sign Scorpio and, in the school's tables, Pluto. The tarot course sets it second in Degree V, after the Hanged Man and before Temperance and the Devil: the suspension, then the clearing, then the mixture, then the chain.