Episode 138: Yours and Yours Alone: On the Death Card in the Tarot

What better way to ring in the New Year than with a freeranging discussion of the dreaded thirteenth arcanum of the tarot? Of all topics, surely death needs the least introduction. Or does it? To those of us who inhabit the castellated compounds of post-industrial privilege, it is perhaps too easy to forget the uninvited guest who skulks in the shadows, touching each of us in turn as he sidles past. "Nothing is certain except death and taxes," Benjamin Franklin once wrote. He was joking, of course. The truth is that death is the only certainty. Click here for information about JF's upcoming talk at the Last Tuesday Society. Header image: Detail from Harry Clarke's illustration for "The Masque of the Red Death," from the 1919 edition of Edgar Allan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination. SHOW NOTES Brian George, Masks of Origin Chris Leech, The Gnostic Tarot Our Known Friend, Meditations on the Tarot Rachel Pollack, Tarot Wisdom Rachel Pollack, 78 Degrees of Wisdom Edgar Allen Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death” Weird Studies, Episode 2 on Garmonbozia Steven Spielberg (dir.), Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark Weird Studies, Episode 137 on Sunn O)))’s “Life Metal” Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth Thomas Browne, “Urn Burial” Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic Alejandro Jodorowsky, The Way of Tarot Sallie Nichols, Tarot and the Archetypal Journey Clive Barker, Hellraiser Weird Studies, Episode 116 on “Blade Runner” George Gurdjieff, Armenian mystic Body without organs, philosophical concept Elizabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy Weird Studies, Episode 126 with Matt Cardin