The concordance 10 witnesses
Orientation
A skeleton carries a farm tool because the psyche needs harvest, not annihilation, to picture what ending feels like. Marie-Louise von Franz traces this figure back to Chronos-Saturn and forward through the medieval image of Father Time, reading the scythe-bearer as a dark aspect of the God-image that splits off and surfaces autonomously in the depressive states common to aging. Donna Cunningham, writing from astrological psychology, notes that Saturn carries “Grim Reaper” as one of its plain epithets, and argues that the dread it provokes is really dread of the Reality Principle: the piercing of denial, not the threat of nonexistence. Thomas Moore, following Ficino, locates the same figure in the humor of atra bilis, where blackness and Saturn’s influence reinforce each other until proximity to death becomes a lived psychological climate rather than an event. Sallie Nichols complicates the picture further, reading the Tarot Death card’s scythe as an object that quotes both Saturnian dissolution and the crescent moon of Artemis, so the figure carries destruction and regeneration in the same gesture. Clarissa Pinkola Estés insists that any Reaper severed from this counterpart, from the ongoing incubation of new life within apparent ending, is a culturally impoverished half-figure.
In antiquity Chronos-Time was identified with the old man Saturn and his scythe and depicted in this form… This figure survived in the Middle Ages and up to the seventeenth century as the image of old ‘Father Time.’
Von Franz traces the Grim Reaper’s genealogy from the antique Chronos-Saturn figure through medieval Father Time, interpreting the archetype as an autonomously split-off dark aspect of the God-image operative in depressive old-age states.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
Grim Reaper—names that contribute no small amount to astrology students’ dread of it… Saturn represents the Reality Principle—that is, the piercing of denial and the ensuing confrontation with truth.
Cunningham identifies the Grim Reaper as one of Saturn’s colloquial epithets and reframes the dread it generates as avoidance of the Reality Principle, arguing that Saturnian transits are benefic when consciously engaged.
, An Astrological Guide to Self-Awareness, 1982thesis
Its scythe connects it with Saturn, god of time, of harvest, dissolution and decay; yet the scythe echoes the shape of the crescent moon, symbol of Artemis, offering promise of renewal and regeneration.
Nichols reads the Death card’s scythe as a symbol that holds Saturnian dissolution and lunar regeneration in tension, arguing that the Reaper archetype is constitutively ambivalent rather than purely terminal.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980thesis
We have erroneously been trained to accept a broken form of one of the most profound and basic aspects of the wild nature… death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one’s existence has been cut down to the bones.
Estés argues that Western culture has pathologically severed the Death figure from its counterpart Life, producing a truncated Reaper image that must be restored to the Life/Death/Life triad to recover psychological wholeness.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017thesis
Death and darkness penetrate the realm of Saturn, and, as Ficino warns, either blackness will attract the influence of Saturn, or Saturn will bring with him feelings of death and decay.
Moore, drawing on Ficino, maps the Reaper’s domain onto Saturn’s humor of atra bilis, showing how proximity to death and depressive states mutually reinforce the Saturnian archetypal field.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990supporting
Death and darkness penetrate the realm of Saturn, and, as Ficino warns, either blackness will attract the influence of Saturn, or Saturn will bring with him feelings of death and decay.
An earlier edition of Moore’s same argument anchors the Reaper’s psychological valence in Renaissance humoral theory, treating Saturn’s influence as the experiential correlate of mortality-consciousness.
, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982supporting
The encounter with Death does not involve a definite end, but a hopeful beginning, even if you do not know in advance where the new will lead you!
Hamaker-Zondag, interpreting the Tarot Death card through a Jungian lens, reframes the Reaper encounter as a psychic threshold rather than termination, emphasizing openness to the unknown as the healthy response.
, Tarot as a Way of Life: A Jungian Approach to the Tarot, 1997supporting
To accept death like birth, as a part of life, is to become truly alive. ‘Not wanting to live,’ said Jung, ‘is synonymous with not wanting to die. Becoming and passing away are the same curve.’
Nichols marshals Jung’s paradox of life and death as a single curve to argue that refusal to face the Reaper archetype produces spiritual numbing, while acceptance liberates transformative energy.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
Although death is a concept of fleshly limitation belonging to the yin side of life, it is usually referred to as masculine. In the fable ‘Appointment in Samarra,’ it appears as an old woman.
Nichols examines the gendering of the Reaper figure, noting its conventional masculinity while surfacing counter-examples of feminine death, thereby underscoring the archetype’s androgynous and culturally variable nature.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
Those who wear the black shirt and the black robe, the black hood, and black undergarments as signs of radical identity become…
Hillman’s analysis of black as an alchemical phase-color tangentially illuminates the iconographic palette of the Reaper, situating the skull-and-scythe’s blackness within the nigredo’s paradigm-breaking rather than identity-fixing function.
, Alchemical Psychology, 2010aside