Death

Tarot began in northern Italy in the fifteenth century as a card game, first called trionfi (triumphs), and Death was one of its picture trumps. The historian Michael Dummett sorted the old Italian orders of the trumps into three families, centred on Bologna, Ferrara and Milan. In the Ferrara and Milan orders Death, La Morte, is the thirteenth trump, and in all three it comes straight after the Hanged Man (in Bologna called the Traitor). In Milan, Temperance follows it; in Bologna and Ferrara, the Devil. The earliest surviving list of the trumps, in a Latin sermon against gambling written in Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century (the Steele manuscript, now at Vanderbilt University), follows the Ferrara type.

Hand-painted cards made for the Milanese court in the mid-fifteenth century, the Visconti and Visconti-Sforza decks, include a Death card. There Death is a skeleton with a bow and arrow, and the arrow was a common sign of plague in the art of the time. Other early cards, such as the so-called Charles VI cards in Paris and the Rosenwald sheet in Washington, show the more usual fifteenth-century picture: Death on horseback, riding down people of every rank, an image that goes back to the pale horse of Revelation 6:8.

In the Tarot de Marseille, the French pattern that grew from the Milanese tradition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the card is numbered XIII but usually left without a title. Death walks on foot with a scythe among cut-off heads and hands.

The card most people know today was drawn by Pamela Colman Smith to A. E. Waite’s instructions and published by William Rider & Son in London in December 1909. Smith brought back the horseman, which had almost vanished from tarot outside Italy after the fifteenth century. A skeleton in black armour rides a white horse and carries a black banner with a white rose. A king lies fallen under the hooves, a bishop stands before the rider with his hands joined, and a young woman and a child sink in front of him. In the distance the sun rises between two towers.

Waite himself, in his book on the deck, called the reaping skeleton a “crude notion” and preferred a vision from Revelation. He named the rose on the banner the Mystic Rose; some later readers see in it the white rose of York. The armoured rider has also been compared with Albrecht Dürer’s prints, but that is a modern suggestion, not something Waite or Smith said.