On and around October 31, many people honour the festival of Samhain or Halloween. It’s a time to respect the ancestors and recently dead, to leave one year behind and enter another, to remember the final harvest of the year, and to really enter the more dormant/dark time on the cycle of seasons. Just to find out, I worked out a more exact half-way point between Autumnal Equinox and Winter Solstice to see when a “truer” Samhain might occur. This year, November 6 is where it falls. This doesn’t mean I’m fussy about it, just curious.
One of my favourite renditions of the Death card in the tarot is from the Motherpeace deck. A birch tree sheds its leaves. A snake begins to shed its skin and forms a womb-like circle around part of the tree and around a skeleton that’s in fetal position. Several people (myself included) associate the Death card with Scorpio — an instinct to transform, intense experiences of death and rebirth, the unseen realms, sex (the “little death”), composting, regeneration, organs of elimination and reproduction, etc.
So, as we enter the deeper, darker part of the year:
What in your life needs to be transformed? What in our world are you willing to transform? What needs to die? What might grow out of the humus of that dying? How do you connect with the unseen worlds? What old life stuff is being composted? How might that be regenerating to you? What is acting as both tomb and womb to you?
Evolutionary Tarot & Circle Ways 
This has long been my favorite Death card. I love the fact that everything pictured goes through it’s own shedding cycle – the Birch bark, the fall leaves, the poisonous snake losing its skin as it encircles the skeleton wrapped in a fetus position awaiting rebirth. Lovely.
Mary