Death Tarot Card Meaning and Art Visconti B Tarot Deck Fragment
Designation
About the Deck
Visconti B Tarot Deck Fragment
(aka Pierpont Morgan Bergamo Tarot Deck) One of the earliest Tarot Decks, the Pierpont Morgan Deck is entirely gilded, with fine paintings upon it.
It is estimated to have been produced around 1451 or 1452, possibly for a triumphal event in 1453.
Provenance
Italy, c. 1452.
Tags
According to Many Schools of Thought
A. E. Waite's Secondary Meanings
Death. The method of presentation is almost invariable, and embodies a bourgeois form of symbolism. The scene is the field of life, and amidst ordinary rank vegetation there are living arms and heads protruding from the ground. One of the heads is crowned, and a skeleton with a great scythe is in the act of mowing it. The transparent and unescapable meaning is death, but the alternatives allocated to the symbol are change and transformation. Other heads have been swept from their place previously, but it is, in its current and patent meaning, more especially a card of the death of Kings. In the exotic sense it has been said to signify the ascent of the spirit in the divine spheres, creation and destruction, perpetual movement, and so forth.
S. L. MacGregor Mathers's Divinatory Meanings
Upright
Death, Change, Transformation, Alteration for the worse
Reversed
Death just escaped, Partial change, Alteration for the better.
Papus's Divinatory Meanings
Death.
