Death
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
Death is read by tarot readers as an ending that makes room: transformation and the close of a chapter, rarely a literal death. Waite listed end and mortality, destruction and corruption.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as resisting an ending that has already come. Waite gave inertia, sleep and lethargy.
In love
Relationship transformation, old patterns dying, rebirth.
In work
Career change, old projects ending, transformation.
What is drawn on the card
A skeleton in black armor rides a white horse, carrying a black banner marked with a white rose. A king lies fallen beneath the hooves; a bishop pleads, and a maiden and a child turn away. A sun rises between two towers on the horizon.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
- Hebrew letter
- Nun
- Sign
- Scorpio
The letter and sign are 19th-century occult attributions (Golden Dawn), not part of the card’s origin.
Where the card comes from
- Tarot began as a card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest record is from Florence in 1440, and the game is still played today in France, Austria and Bologna.
- Reading the cards for fortunes is documented from Bologna around 1750, with ordinary playing decks.
- In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for it, and he wrote before anyone could read hieroglyphs (1822).
- The Hebrew letters and astrological signs on each card are 19th-century French and English occult attributions; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) fixed the set most readers use.
- The scenes follow the 1909 Waite–Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. The Innerverse cards are our own paintings of those scenes.
Sources: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Morgan Library & Museum, Visconti-Sforza tarot, MS M.630; Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781); A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911).
Draw your own card
Death is one of 78. Draw one card or a three-card spread in the Innerverse, read with the same art and the same sources, free.
Or make it daily: one card each morning, with a private note →Want the whole deck? All 78 cards and the guidebook.
Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.