Death · La Mort

Pamela Colman Smith drew the thirteenth trump as a procession, moving at a walk. A skeleton rides in black plate armor, visor up, the bone-yellow skull grinning out of the helm, a red plume at its crest, gold gauntlets. The white horse wears a breast strap of skulls and crossbones. The banner is black, charged with a white five-petaled rose, XIII in the upper corner.

Under the forefeet a king lies dead in ermine, his gold crown fallen into the grass. Three meet the rider: a bishop standing in a jeweled gold cope and mitre, one hand lifted; a woman kneeling in grey, a wreath of red roses in her hair, her face turned away; a child kneeling in blue, holding flowers up. Behind them a river carries a red-sailed boat, and a yellow sun rests between two grey towers.

Climbing or going down, the drawing will not say. The sun keeps the same frame as the body in the grass.

Nothing is being killed on the page. The killing is finished; the card is about the aftermath. Classically it is read as an ending, the close of a cycle; the Golden Dawn gave it to Scorpio, fixed water, the school of descent and return. The white rose carries the defense: the cut takes only what was already over.

Upright, the card is a clean close. The job, the arrangement, the season that is finished gets to be finished, with dignity, while grief takes the time it takes.

Reversed, the hands will not open. The tradition names this the held corpse: the ending refused, never over, a life spent keeping what stopped being alive. The rider does not turn back.