Cheating the Hitman: Musings on Death (the Card)
“And when the hitman comes
He knows damn well he has been cheated”
- from Twilight Zone by Golden Earring
I was listening to the Golden Earring song this morning and thinking about its implications for the traditional Death card of the tarot, in which the skeleton seems to be harvesting human heads. The modern assumption is that Death doesn’t mean . . . well, death . . . but some kind of significant change in life’s circumstances. My current belief is that the cards of the Major Arcana may not directly auger the occurrence of the event depicted but can certainly create the environment for it. Interpretation then becomes a matter of nuance (aka “hairsplitting”) to determine the extent to which the possibility might spawn the reality. The Tower is a good example; I’ve very seldom seen it presage a traumatic, destructive episode but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen even if we pay close attention to our surroundings. The advice is to keep your eyes open and your head down, staying light on your feet, maintaining situational awareness and trying to duck out of harm’s way (it’s not always possible but why flout the odds by ignoring them?) Eden Gray considered such hardships to be inevitable but I prefer to say they can “neither be avoided nor fully deflected, so the only recourse is to adapt and adjust to the likelihood.”
Another useful example of perception vs. substance is the High Priestess, which is often seen as a reservoir of empathy and mystic sensitivity to our emotional needs but is in fact a chilly, abstract card with an exalted perspective to which it can be difficult to ascribe concrete and practical implications; her sights are set well above the realm of mundane affairs and she is largely unmoved by human frailty. I’ve seen the symbolism described as a pristine concentration of binary “Two-ness:” harmony and equilibrium in their purest, most eloquent form creating an utterly calm, poised peace of mind and a perfect state of mental/emotional felicity (some might call it “grace”). This is an archetypal ideal rather than a “working model” and to approach her we must strive to become like her. Although it corresponds esoterically to the Moon, any “nurturing” in it would be in the name of maintaining this tranquil, spotless condition of “mental hygiene” regardless of external misfortunes.
Regarding Death, I know people who think that optimistically proposing “transformation” as the only outcome are passing too light a sentence. “Change” is one thing and “transformation” something even more powerful, but it may be that neither adequately conveys the profound impact of the situation. So how do we remove our neck from the chopping-block and gracefully sidestep the Grim Reaper? One way is to proactively pinpoint what is most dysfunctional in our life and expedite its removal without waiting for radical excision. Another is to steel ourselves and just let the ax fall, pushing through the period of greatest risk with as much panache as possible, with our fingers crossed that if the worst does threaten we won’t be laid low. I always see this as a sobering card and don’t want to understate its potential while also not “crying doom” on the querent’s hopes for dodging the blow. It can be a tough “empowerment” call.
Noblet Tarot, used courtesy of Shell David
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on November 25, 2022.
