Today's
TarotReading

Death carries the energy of the sacred first-transforming-mother — the one who carries every season to its close so that the next can begin. She is the thirteenth card of the Major Arcana, and among the most misunderstood. She almost never means a physical death. She means transformation: the end of one chapter and the clearing that makes room for the next.

The Death card does not, faithfully, bring loss for its own sake. Look at the whole picture: she carries a banner with a white rose, the sign of purity and new life, and on the far horizon, between two towers, the sun is rising. The card is a passage, not a wall. What she ends, she ends so that something can be born.

Death is the card of Scorpio, and today the Sun enters Scorpio. On the same day, Venus’s own Friday, the Sun meets Venus at the deepest point of her retrograde — the goddess of love renewed in the dark. Few days in the year could suit this card so well.

A woman rides slowly on a pale white horse through the turning autumn. She carries a dark banner marked with a single white rose. Before her, the old season bows gently, letting her pass. A river flows toward the horizon, and between two distant towers a new sun rises golden into the dawn. A sprig of lavender is tucked into her horse’s bridle.

The white horse is purity and steadiness: this change moves at its own calm pace. The white rose on the banner is renewal — beauty that survives every ending. The river is the flow of life, always moving on. The rising sun between the towers is the promise at the heart of the card. She does not linger in what is ending. She rides toward the dawn.

Death on Venus’s own Friday asks the sovereign feminine one small tender question: what is ready to end in me, so that something truer can be born?

Not everything. Not all at once. Just one season, one habit, one old story that you have quietly outgrown.

The Sun’s meeting with Venus today gives the reflection a heart. Venus retrograde has been a time of reviewing old loves and old values. Now, at her deepest point, she is renewed. What you release today can make way for a love — of yourself, of life, of another — that is more honest than before.

And because the Full Moon is only two days away, the reflection asks: what will the full light reveal once this ending has made room?

Transformation, softly allowed, is not destruction. She is the sovereign feminine riding calmly toward the rising sun, the white rose lifted high, carrying every ending to its new beginning.

I ride, softly, as the transforming-mother rides — letting one season close behind me, my white rose lifted, my face turned toward the sun rising between the towers.

1. What season, habit, or story in your life feels ready to end?
2. What might be born in the space it leaves behind?
3. When has an ending in your past turned out to be a new beginning?
4. How could you honor what is ending, rather than rushing past it?

Christina Rossetti — born in London in 1830 into a gifted family of Italian heritage, the youngest sister of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti; who often served as a model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters around her brother; who volunteered for years at a refuge for women in need in Highgate; whose collection Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) made her one of the most admired poets of her age; who also wrote the words of “In the Bleak Midwinter”; and who died in 1894 — wrote these lines as the close of “A Birthday,” a poem composed in 1857 and published in that first collection.

Because the birthday of my life is come, my love is come to me. The poem pours out image after image of joy — a singing bird, an apple tree heavy with fruit, a rainbow shell in a calm sea — before naming the reason: love has arrived, and with it, a second birth. Rossetti suggests that we may be born more than once. The day love comes, in whatever form, can be the true birthday of a life.

Today’s Death card lives in Rossetti’s words directly. Every true ending holds a birthday inside it. When the transforming-mother rides through a season, a new life is waiting to begin on the other side.

“Here Comes the Sun” — Nina Simone (from Here Comes the Sun, 1971)

Nina Simone — born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933, a classically trained pianist who became one of the great singers of the twentieth century — recorded “Here Comes the Sun” as the title track of her 1971 album. The song, written by George Harrison of the Beatles, became something new in her hands: slower, deeper, more searching.

Today’s Death card moves gently in this song. It is a song about the end of a long, cold season and the first warmth of the returning light. In Nina Simone’s voice it carries the weight of what was endured as well as the relief of what is coming — exactly the sunrise waiting on the horizon behind the transforming-mother.