It’s enough to make one a bit dizzy.  Fortunately, impassable event horizons notwithstanding, here’s one thing we do know: the function of myth is to link us to the world in which we live, and to make that world meaningful to us.

Campbell is famous for pointing out that a lot of the mythology we live with describes a world that hasn’t existed for over a thousand years. That’s true. Things are still dying, much as they always have, but our understanding of Death has changed across the centuries.  Have our myths also adjusted?

This month is an occasion to re-examine traditional mythological symbols about Death in light of what we’ve come to believe and discover over the last few centuries.

Let’s have a look: 

Here’s the Death card from the Marseilles Tarot (c. 15th century), Campbell’s favorite deck.  His view, in fact, is that this entire deck follows on the heels of Dante and was designed as a symbolic representation of Dante’s life work.  

What we have here is a very traditional symbol of death personified as a skeleton and cutting off life with his scythe.  The imagery itself is taken from Greek representations of either Chronos or Cronus, depending on whether you understand the metaphor as harvesting wheat or castrating your father.

(The idea of castration, symbolic and real, is more important than may appear here.  For a real thrill ride, have a look at this month’s text, Masks of God, Vol 1: Primitive Mythology, in which Campbell details the puberty rituals among aboriginal Australians.)

While this image worked perfectly well for a few hundred years, one of the most commonly available tarot decks (the Rider-Waite-Smith deck from 1909) updated the symbolic representation. These cards became a hit when US Games bought the rights and sold a gazillion copies starting in the early 70’s.

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck shows Death riding a Pale Horse in concurrence with the description of Death in the Revelation of St. John 6:8 at the end of the New Testament and, as it turns out, the end of the world.  The cards were created by Pamela Colman Smith at the direction of A.E. Waite, and borrows heavily from the Golden Dawn symbolic lexicon.

This is a terrific symbol/myth/metaphor for death if (if!) we accept the New Testament’s understanding of Death as the terminal moraine of a Divine glaciation, punctuating all life – and all death to boot. It references the inexorable linear timeline of the Christian tradition: creation – stuff happens – apocalypse.

I’d love to make a joke here about Dante never going out of style, but if he hasn’t gone out of style, his three-story universe (Hell, Earth, Heaven) has been considerably revised.  

The universe isn’t what it used to be – Heisenberg and that crowd blew up by physics during the last 100 years –  and our mythology is still trying to catch up. Death isn’t what it used to be either.  If physics became indeterminate, so has Death.  Think of the variations and gradations we have today that didn’t exist 100 years ago.  100 years ago, when you were dead you were dead, but today? Today there’s brain dead and heart dead and stages in between where we still can argue about whether or not someone is “really” dead.

Our understanding of Death has had to accommodate changes in technology (respirators and heart bypass machines) and evolve with our rejection of fundamentalist religious certainties.  

By contrast Freda Harris’s card shows Death, again depicted as Father Time swinging his scythe: this time he isn’t harvesting or castrating the world, but spinning out a helix of interconnected threads, weaving new patterns in a tapestry of time rather than slicing off the ends.  New figures swim in those vortices.

The image suggests that Death is a process of transition rather than an ending.  

Death as transitional.  Isn’t that closer to how we understand death today?  We can reinterpret the symbol not only as the death of an individual, but as a representation of how “death” happens all the time as we change.  We become something new when we understand something new, as our ignorance falls away. Parts of our life are taken from us or thrown off; we shed our psychological skins, like the snake in the corner of the card, and arise to unbuild our lives again. 

Death in this case can mark the transitional moment when we go from who we thought we were to who we might really be. That transition is always painful and fraught and terrifying. What better metaphor than death?

Personally, I think many of us like this particular symbolic death most of all:

Thanks for musing along!

Mark C.E. Peterson is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies with the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and former President of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture.  He began his work at the University of Toronto focused primarily on Hegel’s natural philosophy and its links to the history of science and technology. These interests evolved to constellate around the larger questions of how humans are related – scientifically, philosophically, and spiritually – to nature. A practitioner of both taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years his academic research is currently engaged in a semiotic analysis of the relationship between explanatory and narrative/mythological accounts of nature and an Aristotelian re-examination of environmental ethics.