13 Death

(2015), graphite pencils on paper, 5.5"x10.5" backed with digital frame.

Whenever someone does a tarot reading in a movie the Death card inevitably shows up, cue the spooky music, and very soon after someone bites the dust. For some reason this seems to have given arcanum 13 a bit of a bad reputation... In a real reading Death really isn't all that terrible an omen - in fact drawing the Tower or the 3, 9 or 10 of Swords, 8 of Cups or 5 of Disks can be much more painful.

Traditionally the Death card shows death as the grim reaper with a scythe mowing down kings and peasants, young and old alike, and even Crowley stayed true to that imagery. There are variants that show death as the rider of the book of revelations on a pale horse, and in most decks death is depicted as inescapable and apocalyptic event. For modern times this imagery is problematic, because most of our experiences of death seem to have become remote and carefully framed and consumed rather than lived through. Relatives no longer die at home surrounded by family but sequestered in hospices and ICUs. There are plenty of war zones out there and enough media feeding us images and footage of bombings, beheadings, drone kills and disease victims, but the experience feels remote, sensationalistic and almost commoditized (albeit in a rather sick way...) and I think mostly we hope death is something that happens to someone else. To be truly present at someone's death is quite a different experience. Hard as it was to witness my father's death it taught me that there is a progression to it, a step-by-step of letting go, of turning inwards, of ever gathering focus that makes it seem almost akin to giving birth, until one finally lets go, and somehow it feels right, it feels like something accomplished, one last fight fought with all one has to give, something well done.

That's really what the card is supposed to teach us: death is about transformation and change. The transformation can be painful, it is hard work to move from one state to the next, but it is also organic and part of the natural cycle of life. It's something we all undergo, and not just at the end of our lives but at many times in between. For us to become teenagers, some of our innocence of being a child has to die. For us to become responsible adults, some of the feeling of invincibility that we had as teens needs to die. For the next day to happen, the day before has to end. We go through "death" every minute of our existence, every time we let go, every time change  deprives us of something to give us something else in return.

To show this I tried to remove some of the drama of traditional Death cards. The skull of the memento mori still life is a much more quiet and personal experience. Touch your own face and you can feel your own skull beneath. One day it will be revealed, free of the flesh that currently clothes you. To me this is a very private reminder of death. Behind the skull I put a background of poppies - both to show that there is new life after death and because the flowers are so fragile and poppy-milk and its concentrate opium have been associated with Hypnos, the god of sleep. Every night when we let go of our ego and our conscious mind to submerge ourselves in dreams we die a little death, moving one more day closer to the final one.

In a spread the card means that we've reached the natural end of a development and should let go and transform ourselves into the next stage of our existence. Perhaps a relationship has reached its natural end and to try and prolong things will only trap us in a dead end. Maybe our job has reached a point where we cannot grow any more with our current responsibilities and need to seek new opportunities, scary as that may seem. Perhaps our old identity and world-view are no longer valid, and to continue on we need to let go and reinvent ourselves. The true death would be not to transform but to persist in our current situation. We'd give up the chance for renewal in favor of eternal stasis, but that is not life.