Readings with LightOn the first two days of November a good part of the world visits its dead. In Mexico it is Día de Muertos, with photographs and marigolds on the family altar. In Brazil it is Dia de Finados. In Poland, once night falls on All Saints', the cemeteries glow with candles. Across much of Catholic Europe it is All Saints' and All Souls'. The customs differ, but the instinct is the same: for a day or two, death is not hidden. It is invited in, fed and spoken to.
Tarot has a card for exactly this, and it is the most misread card in the deck. So on a day when many of us are thinking about the people we have lost, it seemed the right time to look at Death again: where the card comes from, what it shares with these holidays, and a gentle way to use it.
Two ways of facing the same fact
Many modern habits are built to keep death at a distance. These holidays do the opposite. In Mexico, families build an ofrenda: a table with photographs, candles, marigolds, water and the favourite foods of the people they are welcoming home for a night. There is grief in it, and there is also laughter, because the dead are remembered as they were, jokes and appetites included. UNESCO recognises the tradition as part of humanity's intangible cultural heritage, and it is better described by the people who live it than by us. What we can say is what it seems to understand: remembering someone is something you can do on purpose, with your hands, at a table.
Where the Death card comes from
The first tarot cards were made in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game whose trump cards were called trionfi, triumphs. Historians often link the idea to the triumphal processions of the age and to Petrarch's poem The Triumphs, in which Death has a triumph of its own. Death also had a long life in pictures before the cards: in the late Middle Ages the danse macabre showed a skeleton leading a pope, an emperor, a child and a peasant by the hand, in the same line, to the same place. The card inherited that picture. In many Marseille decks it is not even named, only numbered thirteen, as if people hesitated to write the word. If you want the longer story of how the deck travelled, we told it in From Card Game to Oracle.
The great leveller
In the Rider-Waite picture a skeleton in armour rides a white horse. A king lies fallen under the hooves, a bishop pleads, a child holds out flowers, and in the distance, between two towers, the sun is coming up. It is the danse macabre in one frame: rank buys nothing here, and the road is the same for everyone.
Mexico has its own picture for the same idea. Around 1910 the printmaker José Guadalupe Posada engraved an elegant skeleton in a wide, elaborate hat, now known as La Catrina, a reminder that under the finery we all look alike. Two traditions, centuries and an ocean apart, say the same blunt, kind thing: everyone goes, so what matters is how you spend the time and who you tell.
What the card asks, and what it does not
The Death card does not announce a death. In a reading it almost always speaks about something that has ended, or is ending: a job, a friendship, a version of yourself, a hope you carried for a long time. Its question is quieter than its picture: what has already ended that you are still carrying? We come back to it in the Fool's Journey, where Death arrives on day 14 as compost rather than catastrophe, the letting-fall of what has finished so that something else has room.
On a day of remembrance the same question turns tender. What has ended, and what of it do you want to keep? Remembering is not clinging. It is deciding, on purpose, what you carry forward.
A remembrance spread
If you want to use the day, here is a small way to do it with three cards. Think of one person, or one thing, you miss: someone who has died, a pet, a home, a version of your life. Light a candle if that feels right. Then lay three cards, one for each question:
- What did this give me? The gift, the habit, the sentence you still hear in their voice.
- What is unfinished? What you did not say, did not ask, or have not forgiven.
- How can I keep this alive? Something small and doable this month: cooking their dish, telling their story, calling the friend you both loved.
You can lay them on a table with your own deck and have them read back to you here, or ask for a three-card reading on the front page with a question such as "what do I carry from them, and what is mine to do with it?" Write down what you see before you read the meaning.
What tarot cannot do
Tarot cannot speak with the dead, and we will not pretend that it does. What it can do is help the living talk to their own memory, which is plenty. If someone has gone very recently, you may not want cards at all, and that is as it should be: sit with a photograph and a candle instead. This is reflection, not therapy, and if grief is heavy this week, let that be a reason to call someone you trust.
Keep what you wrote
Whatever came up, the Journal will keep it, and in a week you can ask what still holds. Today's Card of the Day is another quiet way in. And if Death has been turning up in your readings lately, the Tarot Course gives the card the longer study it deserves.