In the symbolic system of the Tarot, Death signifies a turnabout or change, heads rolling (figuratively). Far from being a signifier of mortal demise, the Death card presages a choice to be made by the querent - a moral crux, a chance for resurrection or damnation. Carrying the scythe of Chronos, god of time, skeletal Death levels both kings and commoners, destroying every tangible thing, and leaves only our souls and choices behind.

Divine Justice, who sees everything, unlike the blindfolded justice of men, bears the balance of Anubis, (the Egyptian god of the dead) She prepares to weigh souls, and holds the double-edged sword of discernment.

Whereas drawing the Death card represents a choice, the Tower card represents an impending catastrophe. Zeus' lightning bolt, Divine Truth, topples the crowned tower and symbolizes the utter destruction of materialism. The French name for this card means "House of God," signifying a complete iconoclasm, or the eradication of convention and normalcy.

"When a period no longer has a style of its own, the first thing it loses in its relation to art is, immediacy - including the immediacy of rejection. The beholder dare not reject, quite apart from social timidity, because he lacks any context for response. The artist may pretend that none is needed - invoking the myth of autonomy, but the beholder knows better and is confirmed by the fact that the artist felt impelled to write a long commentary in lieu of context. The words are not enough, while they are also too much. Most often they are words without meaning, words trampled into mere husks of thought by overuse, as they have been in advertising and the propaganda of fifty years of war. Even when they possess a certain clarity, they do not advance the cause of art or the understanding of the public, because they form no part of any common world of discourse in which disagreement is possible. They belong only to one or another of the myriad "ideologies" of art, that morass akin to the endless interpretations of the Bible in the centuries of the Protestant Reformation: every man his own theologian.

Such confusions are never disentangled, they are thrown away. A later generation, seeing that zeal for enlightening the world leads to increasing darkness, tosses out the archives of the whole event. It clears its mind of cant, makes itself a new mind, free and strong for fresh creation. This, I think, is the point we have nearly reached - the point of total elimination, the last mighty effort in which every act and all its opposites converge to bring about the leveling of the ground, the wiping clean of the cultural slate."

pg.140 "Art in the Vaccuum of Belief", "The Use and Abuse of Art", The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts - 1973, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Bollingen Series XXV - 22, Princeton University Press 1974

Jacques Barzun