The Major Arcana and the Hero’s Journey: Death, Part III

When Death appears in a tarot reading things suddenly get very serious. The querent’s warm, happy feelings about having someone tell him all about himself vanish and dread settles in. He reaches out and touches the card. “This doesn’t look good,” he says. The reader swoops in with the comforting words, “This card doesn’t actually mean death, it means transformation.”

About thirty years ago, Death appeared as a future card in a friend’s reading. I reassured him that the card “just” meant that he would experience a life-altering transformation.

A week later his father died.

But this is the only time in all my years of reading tarot that Death has actually predicted a physical death—at least to my knowledge. I have no way of knowing what happened to the strangers I’ve read for who pulled Death. This is one reason I really like reading for people I don’t know.

So, if it almost always signifies transformation and not physical death, why not call the card Transformation and spare the querent all the drama?

Because that wouldn’t be playing fair. Transformation is high drama and it doesn’t just happen out of the blue. For any true change to occur, something needs to die and fall away. If the Death card appears in a reading, change is inevitable, the querent is going to lose a part of his life. The process can be slow and excruciatingly painful or quick and joyous. It mostly depends on how hard he tries to hang on to the thing that’s dying. The reader’s job is to be a cheerleader and convince him to let go, embrace the transformation, and get on with the rest of his life. He needs to be reminded that he is the hero in his own journey, and transformation is the difficult but necessary means to becoming the best person he can be. But that first step into the unknown is always terrifying.

In The Wizard of Oz Dorothy loses her old life. It literally falls away from her as the tornado carries her house to the Land of Oz. Although she’s terrified, she embraces her new life and does what she can to get home. In the process, she transforms into a more capable, complex character who will be able to cope with whatever Kansas throws at her. But to gain this experience, she had to let go.

In his book The Writer’s Journey, Mythic Structure for Writers Christopher Vogler agrees with the Major Arcana and places Death in the middle of the journey. He calls this the central crisis point or ordeal. The hero is faced with the thing he fears most, which is often death, and manages to survive where all others have failed. He does this by using skills he has learned from his mentor and/or through co-operation with allies. But he doesn’t just escape with his life; this close encounter with death changes him and the way he sees the world and deals with it throughout the rest of the journey, and it gives him the ability to meet the challenges of the final climax.

The story of Perseus and Andromeda is a perfect example. Polydectes, the King of Seriphos, falls in love with Perseus’s mother and presses her to marry him. But she is in love with Dictys, Polydectes’ brother, and so Perseus opposes the marriage. To be rid of Perseus,

Polydectes sends him off to kill the dreaded Medusa, whose hair is a mass of writhing serpents and whose slightest glance turns men to stone. No one has ever returned from Medusa’s cave.

Perseus wisely consults Athena before heading off on his deadly mission. She gives him a polished shield and tells him how to go about assembling all the other stuff he’ll need. The Hesperides give him a knapsack to safely contain Medusa’s head, Zeus gives him an adamantine sword, Hades gives him his helm of invisibility, and Hermes loans Perseus his winged sandals.

Perseus uses Hermes’ sandals to fly to Medusa’s awful lair. Hundreds of men wearing expressions of terror surround the entrance. They are all made of stone. Walking backwards into the cave, he catches her reflection in Athena’s shield, whacks off her head with Zeus’s sword, and shoves it in the Hesperides’ knapsack. When Medusa’s sisters come after him he escapes by donning Hades’ helm of invisibility and flying away.

This triumph over certain death is the crisis point of the story. It transforms Perseus, giving him the ability and self-confidence to succeed at the final climax of the story. Andromeda’s parents, the king and queen of Ethiopia, have chained her to the rocks as a sacrifice to Cetus, a horrible sea monster. Because of his past experience, Perseus is able to kill the monster and save the maiden.

Death can also appear in the hero’s journey as an ally, a mentor, a shadow, a gatekeeper, or even a hero. In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld book, Reaper Man, Death gets depressed as he ponders existentialism and his Discworld bosses decide that it’s time for him to retire. While Death is having the time of his life putting his scythe to a whole new use, chaos reigns in Discworld. Widdle Poons, the oldest wizard on the faculty of Unseen University has been looking forward to his death for quite some time. He’s tired of his same ol’ same ol’ life and is longing for a fresh start in the afterlife. But it’s not happening. Death has retired. An enraged Widdle leads an army of the undead and unemployed off to find Death and put him back to work.

Without Death there would be no point to the hero’s journey at all. There would be no monsters to slay, no fears to overcome, and no need or reason for transformation. In fact, without Death, life itself would be fairly pointless.