Cross Bones

What this is

Two long bones crossed, set at the head of the fourteenth folio. It is the emblem of mortality's plainest sign, of danger marked, and of the matter brought to its grave end. Its verses are grave, warning of loss, hazard, and what must be laid to rest.

What it governs

Presides over death, danger, hazard, and the close of a matter. Folio 14. It belongs to Saturn's province of finished things and to the warning posted at the edge of peril.

Its properties

Its colour is bone-white on black; its number fourteen; its metal lead. The quality is sober acceptance, the dignity of facing hazard plainly and letting the finished thing end. In shadow it is dread that paralyses, the danger fled rather than faced, the matter mourned so long that nothing new can begin.

Where else it appears

The same note is the crossbones beneath the skull on the old gravestone, the sign that all flesh comes to the same rest; the danger-mark posted at the poison and the precipice; the bones of the dead that the prophet saw clothed again with life; the alchemists' blackening that must precede the gold. One crossed pair, many warnings of the same passage.

Where you meet it on the Oracle

It surfaces as the Folio of the Day and as a closing folio, and it is the natural folio for questions of hazard, of endings, and of matters near their close. When it heads your day, mind the danger marked and let the finished thing finish; grief here is clean, not cursed. In a reading it answers with sobriety, never as a final sentence on you. Read it as a warning posted, not a doom pronounced.

Why it matters

It stands fourteenth because an oracle that could not name danger and ending could not be trusted on anything. The Cross Bones asks you to face hazard plainly and to lay down what is finished so your hands are free.

Correspondences

planet

Saturn, Mars

element

Earth

zodiac

Scorpio

number

14

sephirah

Binah

day

Saturday

colour

Bone-white, black

metal

Lead

stone

Jet

tarot

Death