This week the cards drew Death.
Scorpio season opens tomorrow evening, and the deck has handed me the Scorpio card.
The chart and the cards, two languages, same soul.
Before you scroll past, read to the end, because this card has been misread for two hundred years and I would like to fix that for at least this group.
Look at the image.
A skeleton in black armour rides a white horse, slowly, from left to right across the card.
He carries a black banner with a white rose on it, five petals, open.
On the ground in front of the horse lies a king, his crown fallen off, dead.
A bishop in gold robes stands facing the rider with his hands together, asking for something.
A young woman kneels and turns her face away.
A child kneels beside her, holding up a small bunch of flowers, looking straight at the rider, unafraid.
Behind them all, a river with a boat on it, and in the far distance two towers with the sun between them.
Most people see this card and hear the word death and think somebody is going to die.
In forty years of reading I have never once had this card mean that.
Death is the card of the ending that has already happened.
Look again at the king.
He was already down before the rider arrived, and the rider is simply passing through, on a slow horse, collecting what is finished.
That is the whole teaching.
The card names the ending you have been stepping around.
And notice the four people, because they are the four ways we meet an ending.
The king fought it and lost.
The bishop is bargaining.
The woman cannot look.
The child hands the rider flowers, because the child has not yet learned to be afraid of change.
Now the sun between the towers.
Is it rising or setting?
Waite never said.
I have always read it as rising, because the horse is walking towards it.
Here is how it sits with this week.
The Sun enters Scorpio tomorrow evening, and on Saturday Venus meets the Sun at the middle of her review while Mercury turns retrograde in the same sign.
So the next three weeks are for looking at what has already ended, in a relationship, a job, a version of yourself, and letting the rider collect it.
Now the shadow, because every card has one.
Death gone wrong is the king, refusing an ending so hard that you spend a year fighting a thing that finished last spring.
The card is a mirror.
It shows you what is already over, and asks how long you plan to keep it in the house.
The white rose on the banner is the promise.
Something grows out of every ending, and it is white, and it is open.
So the practice for this week.
Ask yourself what has already ended in your life that you are still treating as alive.
Then decide which of the four people you have been.
And then, if you can manage it, be the child.
Hand it flowers and let it pass.
What has already ended for you that you are ready to let the rider collect?
There is more teaching like this in The Library, and every daily post is in Daily Posts. If you would like guidance on your own path, see Readings.
See every page and post in the Contents.
The Members area has songs, Moon pages to print, the Sunday article a day early and a first look at new Library pages.