Today is Friday the 13th, the perfect day to talk about the most misunderstood card in all of Tarot, the thirteenth card of the Major Arcana: Death. In your basic Rider, Rider-Waite, or Rider-Waite-Smith deck, there he is, the ol’ Grim Reaper, all jaundiced and smug upon his pale horse after running over the king. The cleric is trying to bargain with him, the lady is about to pass out, and the kid is all “ooh, big pony?”

When people see Death’s bony visage, they tend to freeze. Their eyes open wide. Maybe they gasp. And that’s just in the movies. In person they also tend to say, “OH MAH GAH, AM I GONNA DIE? IS SOMEOME NEAR ME GONNA DIE?”

Well, no, that’s not what the Death card means. All this card means is change. The change could be a way of thinking, a stage of your life, or the end of some kind of  event in your life that has brought you low or been difficult to deal with, maybe something like unemployment or a lousy break-up. A king’s reign ends when he dies. Whatever has been reigning over your life is ending, is about to end, or has recently ended. Another option is that there needs to be an end to something that is ruling you and not serving you, and you need to get up on that horse along with Skeletor over there and run it over so you can make way for something new. Drawn reversed, the Death card suggests you might be stuck dwelling on something that recently ended, you need to stop resisting the change, and you need to let it go. You need to be like the kid, in awe of the big pony and eager to go for a ride. You know, before you get stepped on.

I own a bunch of Tarot decks, and the Death card in The Star Tarot by Cathy McClelland resonates with me the most of all the Death cards I have.*

Yeah, there Death is again, but he’s a little less aggressive and you can’t see his face. Sometimes change comes gently or in a vague kind of way. But check out that phoenix rising up, ready to take flight. For something beautiful and good to come along, something else must come to an end, and the good thing can rise from the ashes of what came before.

The next time you see the Death card, embrace it. Consider that change usually means some kind of growth or opportunity–or opportunity for growth–and that when you clear a path through the debris of what came before, you make room for something new.

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*No, no affiliate links or anything. I…I don’t have enough readers to qualify for any kind of program like that. /me hangs head