The white rose
The white rose on Death’s black banner is the rose of the Rosicrucians and the occult orders, which Waite calls the Mystic Rose and reads as life.
In the tradition
The rose was the flower of Venus for the Romans and of the Virgin for medieval Christians, and the Rosicrucians of the 17th century took a rose on a cross as their sign. The Golden Dawn, Waite’s own order, wore a rose on a cross as its emblem.
Older decks showed Death as a skeleton with a scythe. Waite put him on horseback under a banner bearing the rose. On the horizon of the same card, the sun rises between two pillars, which he calls the sun of immortality.
In the cards
The Fool holds a white rose too, at the start of the Major Arcana.
Sources
- A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910). Waite's own guide to the deck he designed with Pamela Colman Smith, with each card's divinatory meanings.
Updated October 9, 2026.
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