Lecture quote:

"The Arcanum 13 of the sacred book of the Tarot depicts a man wielding a scythe.  He dips his scythe into the waters in order to harvest the wheat.  The image of the Arcanum 13 is an image of a reaper – one who is reaping the seed or culling the grain of the earth.

The card, or the sacred law of the number 13, is called “Immortality.”  The word immortality has at its core the Latin term “mort”, which of course begins with the letter “M.”  And mort, of course, refers to death.

Interestingly, the 13th letter of the Hebrew alphabet is the letter “M” or “Mem.” The letter “M” is also found in the Sanskrit word for death, which is “mrtyu” in Roman letters.  But in the simplest form, in Sanskrit the term “death” can be simply said as “Ma,” or in other words, the letter “M” in Sanskrit.

As everyone knows, in most languages “Ma” refers to the mother, and “Ma” is the beautiful phrase that the child speaks.  Often, the very first thing that a child will say is “Ma,” crying for “ma” – for mother.  And this term “Ma” of course is related to “mater” in Latin, which also means “mother.”  It is the root of the term “matter.”

So we find death and the mother very closely linked, but also the water, the “mer,” the waters, related to the “M”.

In Hebrew, the word for death is “met”, which is spelled, of course, with a “Mem”.  So the Arcanum 13 is related with death, and it encodes and contains the synthesis of the science of how to conquer death, or in other words, to acquire immortality, which is the name of this Arcanum.  But death has its science.