Fear of Death: The Tarot’s Thirteenth Major Arcana Card

(Based on the representations found on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.)

Students of Tarot know better than to fear “Mean Number Thirteen.” In fact, for followers of a spiritual, cosmic, or other centering practice, the themes of birth, growth, culmination, decay, death, and rebirth are accepted as a necessary adjunct to our personal and spiritual development. Just like the changing seasons, our lives are all subject to change: the metaphorical budding of new life, the blossoming of summer, the falling away of the old in autumn, and the bareness of winter which inevitably gives rise to spring once again.

The last time that I pulled the Death card I was in the throes of a (small?) existential crisis. If life has its seasons, our psychic evolution has its trajectory too, which, at some point, can recognize a profound disconnect between our social persona and the yearnings of the soul. As we go through life in this constant cumulative process of “becoming,” we may find ourselves entirely contented with the direction in which we appear to be headed, or we may find ourselves feeling — as Carl Jung put it in his discussion of the regressive restoration of the persona — “disorientated, like a rudderless ship that is abandoned to the moods of the elements.”

Through this process of “becoming” — finding ourselves, finding meaning, the pursuit of happiness, the new identity that we are trying on like an elusive glass slipper — we may encounter challenges from within and from…