Some Noteworthy Excerpts From Dulcimer
....The fact that the sun is setting doesn't mean it, nor what it represents, is dying. Only that it is becoming hidden. To be rediscovered later. Hopefully.
Some believe that the real death is when you are born into the world not out of it. That the setting sun is our true nature, the eternal Self becoming hidden....
All the extra imagery on the card expands on the core idea, RChMI, but it still means the same. The river in the background is, I think, more likely to be the Styx than the Nile. However; "through the valley of the Tuat (the Egyptian underworld) runs a river which is the counterpart of the Nile in Egypt and the Celestial Nile in heaven..." [Wallis-Budge - Gods of the Egyptians Vol.1 p171]. So I could (happily) be wrong. The sun is setting between the Towers on the path we are all taking - a recurrent theme as we all know - and it is descending behind the mountains which, in Egyptian mythology, separate this world from the Tuat.
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Yes, Death is synonymous with Death, with disappearance into oblivion from what daylight eyes see.
From the Egyptian Book of the Dead: "I have come like a priest in panther skin, having crossed the Nile by boat, having come through the gap in the mountains, having walked black corridors restless.... I've sailed the Nile and walked through the gap in the mountain. Faithful in word like a scribe I have come.... I ask for water and a strong sailing wind, and a delta island on which to raise my children....I have come to this dark world like a bright star in the southern sky, a shaft of light gleaming in the hawk's eye." (from Awakening Osiris, "The Arrival," translation of Normandi Ellis)