Ageless Wisdom From Tarot Key 13
Molly Hankins January 16, 2025
The Malkuth is the realm of physicality in Kabbalistic traditions, and as we make our way through it, we live with the inevitability of death. Malkuth is pictured down at the very bottom of the Tree of Life, the world of form being the farthest away we can get from what Kabbalists describe as ‘the one mind of The Creator’. Going in and out of form is the catalyst of spiritual progress that physical life offers us. Without death, as Builders of the Adytum founder Paul Foster Case tell us, life in Malkuth would be akin to a defective record player with the needle remaining forever in the same groove. “Endless repetition would replace progress.”
Tarot Key 13, the Death card, carries the ageless wisdom that death is the essential mechanism driving the evolution and understanding of our true selves within the world of form. Until our souls realize we are one with all of life we need death to advance the plot of our personal spiritual growth. Key 13 is associated with the sign of Scorpio, representing reproductive energy, as well as the Hebrew letter Nun. As a verb, Nun means to grow or sprout while as a noun it means both fish and movement, each of the layers of meaning signifying the life energy released by death.
The Death card most commonly includes a skeleton riding a white horse or scythe next to a white rose, both representing the movement generated by purified desire. In the tarot, red roses symbolize base desire as a driving force of our personal journeys through the material world, but white represents desire purified by direct experience. The scene in Key 13 takes place at sunrise, with death as the bearer of a new day releasing a burst of growth-promoting energy. Once we know this, not just intellectually but as a fully embodied truth learnt through many incarnations, we become what Builders of the Adytum refer to as “a new order of human being.”
When we advance to this new order, we loosen our attachment to the temporal nature of life and no longer have the same need for death to catalyze the evolution of our consciousness. Many occult traditions carry the promise of conscious evolution as a means of achieving immortality, but the great spoiler is that overcoming death paradoxically comes from embracing it. By getting to know our physical bodies as temporary vehicles for our consciousness, we come to understand that our true immortal nature is actually the cause of physical death, removing us from the unconscious cycle of endless repetition. “Death is proof of eternal life,” wrote Reverend Ann Davies of Builders of the Adytum. We must learn to consciously embody the rhythm of the death and rebirth cycle in order to transcend it.
With this embodied knowing, we become conscious enough to choose growth-promoting thoughts and actions, instead of relying on death and entropy to advance the plot of our spiritual evolution. There are countless records of occultists from modern Kabbalists to ancient members of the Tat Brotherhood in Egypt who treat death asa force akin to gravity, an inherent and essential feature of life that, with sufficient knowledge and creative efforts, can be overcome. Once we fully accept that life is continuous change and dedicate ourselves to facilitating our ongoing transformation, we can step into the role of being a conscious agent of change. This, according to Kabbalistic philosophy, is the most practical means of overcoming death.
“The greatest expression of life’s benevolence and The Creator’s love for us is the fact that we are being taught by an ongoing cycle of movement, change, life and death, whether we want it or not.”
Serving as our own agents of change rather than relying on the algorithm of life and death to drive spiritual progress has benefits beyond simply feeling more relaxed about the human condition. Embodying immortal consciousness as a way of life changes our relationship with dying. This can take many forms of expression, removing the fear and stress of death, or even slowing the aging of our physical bodies to the point of being able to choose when and how we die. The occult definition of immortality is not that of living forever in a single physical body, it’s learning to keep the beat of eternal change in our lives by making transformation-promoting choices so we no longer have a spiritual need for entropy and death.
Whether or not we subscribe to the possibility of conscious immortality and seek it as a goal of our experience, we all get to reap the harvest of wisdom from our choices. In her lecture on Tarot Key 13, Rev. Ann Davies tells us that the greatest expression of life’s benevolence and The Creator’s love for us is the fact that we are being taught by an ongoing cycle of movement, change, life and death, whether we want it or not. The numbers 1 and 3 represent love and unity and they are the basis of the algorithm of life itself, always pushing us towards acceptance of the nature of how things are as a basis for right action. This is the acceptance that nothing we experience in form, no matter how painful it may be, is meant to harm our souls.
“One who arrives at this state can say with St. Paul, ‘I die daily.’ Every morning becomes a resurrection to the awakened soul. All the old motives, petty ambitions, all the foolish opinions and prejudices gradually die out,” Paul Foster Case wrote in Learning Tarot Essentials. “Thus, little by little, there comes an adjustment of all one’s personal conceptions of life and its values.” Consider this essay an invitation to keep making adjustments to our perspectives that promote transformation, so we can become conscious curators of change in our own lives, and be curious about what the life experience algorithm brings us in response.
Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.
