How Predictive Readings Can Revitalize Your Life, Even with Death in the Deck
When you look into the future, you have an opportunity to act on that knowledge to impact your life. You can reinforce or alter the trajectory of events, or you can sit back and let things play out. The choice is yours. But pulling the Death card can stop you in your tracks if you read it literally as death.
What the Death Card Means (and Doesn’t)
In contemporary tarot land, you’ll run into this phrase or something like it: “The Death card doesn’t mean death.”
The idea is meant to reassure beginners and people whose experience of tarot is based in fear and ignorance: it’s a way of saying that tarot isn’t all about darkness. But of course, tarot is about darkness if you’re doing it correctly and ethically. It’s just not only about darkness.
So hold onto your hats because I’m here to tell you that the Death card can and does mean death sometimes. It just doesn’t usually mean the permanent death of a mortal body, and there’s a good reason for that. Seeing death in your reading isn’t especially helpful. Yes, people will ask, “When am I going to die?” of predictive readers, but most readers I know can’t or won’t answer that question. Even if you believed that the future were written in stone, what are you supposed to do with that information?
Divination the way I practice it—even the predictive kind—is about eliciting information that you can use to help live your life in the way you want. The Death card needs to be part of that, and there’s nothing like a looming deadline to get someone moving.
In popular culture, the Death card may be used as comedy to terrify someone who’s worried about dying in the near future, and then the tarot reader has to placate them by explaining that Death is about endings and an opportunity for rebirth. Some modern decks, such as the Light Seer’s Tarot (one of my all-time favorites), rename Death to Rebirth or Change. And while these are important aspects of the card, Death-as-death can be a useful tool for taking control of your life.
Even when you translate Death into Rebirth, remember that rebirth doesn’t happen in the middle of a life that continues as is. You have to die before you can be reborn. The caterpillar dissolves into goo before it reforms as a butterfly. The deadwood decays before fertilizing new growth. That is uncomfortable, but it’s also incredibly powerful for focusing the mind.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
We’re all going to die at some point. That’s a given. Most of us don’t think about that fact because it’s frightening, and fear is paralyzing. If we constantly worry about dying, we can’t live.
For the same reason, it’s not super helpful to predict death in your readings. It feels much safer to shift the Death card into a self-reflective mode where a metaphorical death can be more productive for using divination as a coaching tool.
The Death card in tarot can signal that it’s time to end old habits or cut unhealthy cords and prepare for transformation. That part of its meaning in tarot is often embraced because most people using tarot want to experience transformation at some point on their tarot journey. It’s a sign of things coming to a close, naturally and inevitably.
But skimming over the whole “death” thing provides an easy way to avoid having difficult conversations with yourself about what’s going on in your life. And you miss out on the kind of discomfort that could lead to revitalizing growth.
After all, when you are made aware of the fact that your time in this life is limited, you may be inspired to make the most of it. That’s the whole idea behind the bucket list, right? There are plenty of stories that use death as a catalyst for helping people live a meaningful life with whatever time they have left. They get out of sleep-walking their way through dull routines and start doing the things that they love the most.
Death, the Fool, and the World
In stories where time is running out, there can be an element of the Fool’s carefree approach to life. If you’re going to die soon, you don’t have to save for retirement or worry about what your grandchildren will think of what trouble you got into or play it safe in case you run for office or whatever. In this way, signs of death can be freeing. It’s not for nothing that the Fool and Death are depicted in similar positions in the Tarot de Marseille.
But the Fool’s laissez-faire attitude to life is one extreme end of the spectrum: the Saturnian World oversees the other. An awareness of one’s mortality can also help you achieve what you think is most important. It can help you prioritize the things that are important to you and for the world you leave behind, whether that’s having a large, loving family or completing some important work that helps better humankind.
When you see the Death card, ask yourself how your actions align with your limited time. Maybe it’s time to shape up, or maybe it’s time to let loose. Something is ending: how can you make the most of your time?
Of course you don’t need to see the Death card to align to your values, but it can be a powerful reminder that there’s no point waiting until tomorrow to do what matters to you. And “what matters to you” is key. It’s easy to try and translate “make the most of your time” into productive labor because making the most has capitalist undertones. I’m not say that you have to crank out 10% more widgets. No. Productivity may not matter to you—and it’s fine if it does!—so that isn’t necessarily what I mean what I write “what matters to you” or “make the most of your time.” You get to decide what that means. (And if you’re not sure what that means, I encourage you to turn to some deep tarot journaling or an intensive reading that helps you explore that kind of thing.)
Moving Beyond the Body
I know that I wrote “The Death card can and does mean death sometimes,” but this wisdom from the Death card doesn’t have to relate to your physical body’s natural end state. That’s just the inspiration for thinking in terms of bigger stakes. You can extrapolate it into the relationship that’s coming to an end or the garden that needs pruning or however the Death card is showing up in your reading.
What do you want to wrap up or enjoy or save while there’s still time to make those decisions? Because Death in a predictive reading means that something is inevitably going to “die.”
Getting Real
Let’s look at examples of how Death can appear in a reading and how it can help to think of it as the full complexity and not just as a “let’s skip to the good part” card of transformation. It’s important to feel the suck of things while also seeing the silver lining.
A Tarot Reading with Death
For this mini sample reading, I had no intention or question other than wanting cards that would be instructive and determining how I would pull the cards. It’s a good exercise when you want to practice your tarot reading but don’t have a pressing question.
If you’re curious as to what I did, I intended to (and did) shuffle the deck and then look through the cards to find Death. I then took the card before Death and the card after Death to tell a story about what’s coming to a difficult but necessary end and what that death illuminates.
The Queen of Pentacles, Death, and the Knight of Cups (along with the 2 of Swords) from the Life Line Tarot.
The cards are the Queen of Pentacles (reversed), Death, and the Knight of Cups (reversed).
Since I didn’t have a specific question, I chose another card at random to be the topic, and it was the reversed 2 of Swords. This is a situation in which someone is unable to decide what to do next, stuck in between two options that seem equally appealing.
In this context, I would expect Death as the reaper to cut one of those options down, dead in its tracks. For someone who genuinely feels that both options are good and worthy, but they can’t decide, that’s going to be a painful message. But it’s necessary, and it will allow them to move on with their life in a way that lets them commit whole-heartedly to the surviving option, which was seen as an equally valid option (hence the indecision). And if they act on that advice before it happens naturally, they can claim personal power for the decision, and that’s useful in psychological terms.
With the reversed Queen of Pentacles, I read this option-that-needs-to-die as a venture that requires a lot of attention and financial investment that just has not shown any real returns. Everything about it feels like a far-off fantasy that might make lots of promises but has yet to deliver—that’s some serious reversed Knight of Cups energy right there.
The Queen of Pentacles is an excellent bookkeeper, and she knows how to take care of herself and her surroundings, whether that’s her garden or her family. And she’s practical and grounded with Capricorn energy. But in reverse, the card gives me the impression that she’s been planting and planting and planting, and there is nothing to harvest but disappointment and broken dreams. Thankfully Death is good with a scythe.
The effect of Death coming to knock out that unsuccessful venture is a cold, hard lesson in seeing your fantasies and delusions about this venture for what they are. That may sound terrible, and it will probably feel shitty when it happens. Death is not a happy card. But that slice of truth and unhesitating swing of the blade allows you to focus your attention on the better option, the one that isn’t a rollercoaster of emotions full of empty promises and impractical dreams. You should still dream, but you would now focus those dreams on the remaining option.
Of course, tarot can’t and shouldn’t make your decisions for you. You have to choose.
So if you were doing this reading for yourself and you knew that you couldn’t let go of that heavy-investment/low-return dream, then the two options you thought were in balance really weren’t. And now you know the option you actually want to pursue. (Since the cards are pretty clear, I would recommend investigating why you’re so attached through deep shadow work, as well as logical analysis. Maybe it’s a great idea whose time hasn’t yet come. But maybe it’s an ego thing.)
In the scenario where you double-down on the dream that isn’t meeting your practical needs, this reading also helps you focus on what you have to do before the option dies of natural causes. You now know that you have to get real about this thing that sets your heart aflutter and of which you can’t let go because it’s not just going to magically succeed on its own. Once you accept that you’ve been a bit delusional about that dream up till now, you can figure out how to make it a practical reality that actually supports you and doesn’t just drain your resources.
After all, the Queen of Pentacles waters the ground around her, whereas the Knight of Cups goes flying down the river, taking everything with him that isn’t firmly rooted. Dreams are important to moving forward, but in this case, you don’t want to let them sweep you out to sea without a life raft.
Whichever direction is chosen, there is transformation in the querent and their focus on the future. And there is the potential for something to be reborn, such as the impractical dreamy venture becoming grounded in reality. But these changes come from actually assessing the painful death that must happen first.