For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The Death ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of Death portrays a figure shrouded in black robes, his face hidden beneath a dark helmet. His hands are open to receive the gifts offered by the tiny human figures who kneel before him. One gives him a golden crown, another a pile of coins. The third, a child, hands him a flower. Behind this dark figure a leaden river flows. On the near side of the river the earth is cracked and barren. On the far shore, the land slowly brightens and turns green beneath a rising sun.

The River Styx, which means ‘hated’, was envisaged as a leaden and forbidding river, because it represents a stage we must pass through in order to reach the riches of the underworld. This is the state of sadness and mourning, which are as necessary to life as joy and celebration.

The rising sun suggests a new future, although the souls who kneel before Hades are still unaware of it. The child who offers the flower is an image of the childlike trust in change which can help us to deal with the process of mourning. Only the child is unafraid of expressing grief.

Major Arcana ~ The Death

Here we meet the dark god Hades, lord of the underworld, whom we first encountered in the card of the Empress as the abductor of Demeter’s daughter Persephone. In myth, Hades was known as the Invisible. He was also called Pluto, which means ‘riches’, because his realm was full of hidden wealth. Hades was a son of the Titans Cronos and Rhea, who was rescued by his brother Zeus when Cronos had disgorged his children. Zeus then gave Hades the kingdom of the underworld as his share of the inheritance. Over this domain the dark god ruled as absolute master. When he emerged into the daylight world, his helmet rendered him invisible, so that no mortal could see him. The rites of death required that a gold coin be placed in the mouth of the corpse, for without offering Hades his due the soul would be doomed to wander forever on the shores of the River Styx which bounded the underworld kingdom.

Although Hades was accorded less status than his heavenly brother Zeus, he possessed the greater power, because his law was irrevocable Once a soul entered the kingdom of Hades, no god, not even the king of the gods, could retrieve it again. Although certain heroes such as Orpheus and Theseus made illicit entry into Hades’ realm, tricking the ancient boatman Charon and managing to avoid the terrible three- headed dog Cerberus who guarded the gates, none of them returned to the upper world the same. Such was the irrevocable power of Hades that the gods swore their oaths by the waters of his river Styx, which was both deadly poison and also conferred immortality.

On an inner level, Hades, lord of Death, is an image of the permanent and final end of a cycle of life. When we change, a new attitude or new circumstances may come, but the old way is dead and will never return in its original form. Thus Hades is a symbol of that finality which we experience with all endings, and also, portrayed by the dark robes, a symbol of the experience of mourning which is necessary to prepare for the new cycle. In the card of the Hanged Man, we encountered the experience of voluntary submission to the hidden laws of the psyche - the decision to let go of something in the hope that a new phase of life might emerge. Hades, the lord of Death, represents that in-between state where we are brought face to face with the complete irrevocability of our loss, before the sense of new growth has begun.

The card of Death does not necessarily symbolize a ‘bad’ ending. The experience of irrevocable ending can accompany such joyful events as manage or the birth of a child. But these events not only connote a new beginning; they also mean the death of an old way of life, and that loss must be acknowledged and mourned. Thus we have such modern rituals as 'stag parties' to acknowledge the loss of the bachelor state.

Women (and men, for that matter) are often unaccountably depressed at the birth of a child, because there has not yet been an acknowledgement that a phase of life has died at the same time that a new thing has been born. Thus, coin must be paid to Hades, because he presides over all endings and new beginnings, and the ending is as important as the beginning and must be recognized and felt. We go naked into the underworld, for we cannot bring with us our previous patterns and attitudes which have provided us with security. Thus the card of Death is not a description of physical death, but rather an image of the inevitable changing cycles of life which always contain endings.

Through the eyes of Hades, life can be seen as a constant procession of deaths, beginning with the leaving of the comforting waters of the womb for the harsh reality of separate physical existence. Never again will we live in the blissful paradise of the mother s body. Childhood must die for adolescence and sexual development to begin, and youth, however strenuously we prolong it with diet, exercise and cosmetics, will eventually die to make way for the maturity of middle age. Every relationship, even the best, has its cycles of endings and beginnings, for our feelings change as time passes and our understanding of another person grows. We leave our single state behind in marriage, and our eternal youth behind with the birth of children who remind us of our own mortality. Thus Hades, the lord of Death, is our invisible companion throughout life, to whom we must pay our due.

On a divinatory level, the card of Death implies that something must come to an end. Whether or not this experience is painful depends upon the person’s capacity to accept and recognize the necessity of endings. The card of Death can augur an opportunity for a new life, if one can let go of the old one. Thus the Fool enters the underworld, leaving behind him his previous life, to prepare for an unknown future.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]