DEATH - GUIDE TO KNOWING WITH THE BODY
Before even beginning to assess this card, we must confront the presence the Death card holds in any deck. Death is a card that causes pause and caution in most, if not outright anxiety or panic. I have always been partial to Rachel Pollack’s system of aligning the Major Arcana in three rows of seven cards. In this system, Death sits directly below The Lovers and above Judgement. It represents a stepping stone between the relationships and choices we make as individuals, and the sense of one-ness that Judgement provides. It is our choice to connect, and our lack of control over loss, that offers comfort in unity.
Death, then, offers a unique wisdom from their place in the major arcana. Great sorrow and lack of control can offer a kind of great comfort in our journey towards unity and togetherness. In grief, when we are most isolated, we also are reminded of how universal the experience is. So if Death speaks to a universal sense of loss, what wisdom does this guide offer in relation to the body?
“Death stripped away the muscle to start over with the bones”
Death, as a guide to knowing with the body, calls in the flesh and grounds us in our mortality. We are not our bodies, but rather temporarily inhabit them. We all know a cautionary tale or two about immortality and the misery of living without death. Though we may fantasize about all we could do with infinite life, we know it results in a rather vacant relationship with the world, and ourselves.
Here, the figure on Death is not sad or haunting, but adorned with color and ribbon, looking back at us with a crown upon their head. They are the master of our fates, but do not with us ill will, only balance and reciprocity. Death comes for all precisely because of its reverence for life. Loss is dealt out to everyone, so everyone might experience the preciousness of having anything in the first place.
To have a body is precious. To experience the world in all its physicality, is precious. Death asks us to have reverence for the process of our own decomposition, and to deconstruct the relationship of terror we have formed with death and loss. In a society so deeply consumed with, well, consumption, we are encouraged to fear that which takes away from us as individuals. The system itself works with this fear, to create scarcity and illness and loss where there need not be any.
We see the mechanisms of patriarchy, racism, queerphobia, and capitalism sanction loss and death based on skin color, disability, sex characteristics, and other ways humans display the great diversity of life. It is cruel that we must contend not only with our own fears of death, but also the monstrous systems of this world that seek to kill us. We often forget the wisdom that our bodies know, that death is based on reciprocity and cycles, and only see death as a failure to live and consume in alignment with those twisted systems of power.
Death scorns these systems of power and control that seek to artificially create loss and scarcity. Death offers comfort and care to those struggling to see having a body as anything other than a curse. Death offers the wisdom that listening to the body may often bring calls of pain, echoes of trauma buried under dissociation and isolation. It may be that there are still parts of our bodies we do not have a relationship with, and that they are crying out for care and attention. Death encourages us to not let our fear of loss keep us from enjoying every moment of connection and choice that we have.
Death reaches out a bony hand and greets us with sympathy and warmth. They offer us the consolation of perspective. One day we will return to the earth and thus unity, but isn't it beautiful that for a brief moment we get to have choice and a self? But when the responsibility and gift of life becomes so painful we want to turn away from it all, Death asks us to put a hand on our belly and breathe. They ask us to strip away the layers and get back to the structure of ourselves, and to remember that every breath we take in is an act of love and reciprocity with the cycle of all life and death.