Given that there are more in the Tarot de Marseille facing right, (Le Mat, La Force ...and Le Pape who is looking to the right) this is an interesting choice in the RW...good observation, ros.
If I use the "looking in the mirror" view for body facing positions, Death is, as you say, the only Trump, facing in the active, future, masculine position... movement, consciousness, will...
Death as a precurser to resurrection....all the others along the way in relation to death, seen as less active, more feminine....Waite says in his own descriptions: creation and destruction---perpetual movement...therefore forward.
The veil or mask of life is perpetuated in change, transformation and passage from lower to higher, and this is more fitly represented in the recitified Tarot by one of the apocalyptic visions than by the crude notion of the reaping skeleton. Behind it lies the whole world of ascent in the spirit. The mysterious horseman moves slowly, bearing a black banner emblazoned withthe Mystic Rose, which signifies life. Between two pillars on the verge of the horizon there shines the sun of immortality.....The natural transit of man to the next stage of his being either is or may be one form of his progress, but the exotic
and almost unknown entrance, while still in this life, into the state of mystical death is a change in the form of consciousness and the passage into a state to which ordinary death is neither the path nor gate.
A.E. Waite
terri