Occasionally, I feel called to revisit the tarot and try to decode the images and elements of the Major Arcana that Don was unable to address. I do this exercise using the images published in the Ra Material. While I am an accomplished tarot reader, I categorically do not apply the meanings I use routinely in my spreads for clients. The esoteric meanings of the cards are very different from the usual meanings I apply in my readings.
Today I want to discuss Archetype 13, the “Death” card. It’s been a while since I posted on the forum, and I wanted a relatively simple image to start.
The Skeleton
The figures in these cards tend to be personifications of the self, or aspects of the Self. There’s no reason to think the skeleton here is any different. Thus, the skeletal Death figure is not a personification of the entity Death, but just another image of the Self, or you.
What “self” then?
Well, this skeleton is very definitely not dead. It is not collapsed on the ground as a pile of bones. It is using a tool (scythe). It still stands upright and faces the viewer in the same full-frontal position as the Magician, strongly suggesting that this figure too is completely conscious and aware. Despite being “dead,” this figure is still standing, still moving, still alive.
Ra describes the card generally as the transformation of the body. I posit that this transformation is merely a release or shedding of the temporary aspects of the body (flesh, blood, organs), while retaining its core structural essence. After we die, we lose the earthly garbs of flesh, but we are still, essentially, fundamentally, and always entities with a bodily structure. We do not crumble to dust or collapse into a pile of inanimate parts—we live on.
Hands and feet
This skeleton is harvesting body parts. There is no blood in these images; this is not carnage. These are not literal hands and feet, but symbolic. The hands depicted on the cards are often pointing, suggesting they represent desires. Bare feet depict earthly experiences. (Note how many of the cards have figures doing things in bare feet. When feet are inside shoes, those cards signal that the figure is not an earthly incarnate you, but a representation of a more archetypal entity like raw will/consciousness, see e.g., the Magician).
In this card, the skeleton is harvesting its own earthly desires (hands) and experiences (bare feet).
Severed Heads
In case there was any doubt, there are two upright and very aware severed heads on either side of harvested hands and feet. (The head on the right has an active flame coming out of the third eye. Neither figure has closed eyes.) These decapitated heads seem to be looking at and evaluating the same hands and feet that the skeleton has harvested, but from the two polarities’ perspectives. (The right side head being STO, the left STS.) This evaluation evokes the “life review” each of us experiences upon returning to the Afterlife.
This skeleton figure is not a third-party entity killing you; it is instead just another picture of you, and you are harvesting yourself. Implicit, then, in this animated skeleton figure is that you are the one who chooses the time, place, and manner of your own death. There is no indication anywhere in this card of any third-party actor or event that “takes” your life; instead, it is you yourself who has chosen the transition. (Or, more accurately, I suppose, your Higher Self is the one making this choice for you. Po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe.)
The Sun
The sun in this card is unusual. It is not the full-circle sun of cards 3 or 19. It is a half-circle sun that, to me, looks very much like a rainbow. Seven concentric circles form the edge of this sun, and despite the black and white nature of the card, the thick inner line evokes the purple/indigo bands of the rainbow. If so, the sun here displays the soul’s progression through the dimensions. The fact that this sun intersects the earth also suggests that death/transformation occurs at the crossover point between earth and spirit. Or maybe this partial, rainbowed sun is not meant to depict The Great Spirit (God) but your own glowing Higher Self? Either way, this sun/spirit is an active participant in the body’s transformation.