A rainbow is read as a promise after rain: the sign that the worst of the weather has passed, that something you asked for has been heard, and in a great many traditions a bridge between this world and the one the people you have lost went on to. If you saw one on the day of a funeral, or on the drive home from the hospital, or on the first afternoon you felt like yourself again, the rainbow spiritual meaning you are looking for is the one people have given it for three thousand years, and it is not a foolish one.
It is also sunlight bent and reflected inside falling raindrops, and it appears whenever the sun is low behind you and rain is falling in front of you, and that one sentence takes nothing away from the first paragraph. Below is what the rainbow has come to mean, what it means after a loss, what a double rainbow adds, the honest part, the tarot card with a rainbow painted on it, and one small thing to do today.
What a rainbow has come to mean
The oldest reading in the English-speaking world comes from the flood story, where the bow in the clouds is set as a promise that the water will not cover the earth again, and the word promise has followed the rainbow ever since. The Greeks made the rainbow a messenger, Iris, running between the gods and people. The Norse made it a bridge, Bifrost, between the world of people and the world of the gods. In Australian Aboriginal traditions the Rainbow Serpent is the maker of rivers, and in Ireland the pot of gold at the end of it is a joke about chasing something that moves when you do.
The thread through all of them is a connection between here and somewhere you cannot walk to, arriving right after the rain. Read as a sign, a rainbow says that the storm was real and is over, that a message has crossed, and that the light was there the whole time behind you, which is the part people tend to miss because they are facing the rain.
Rainbow spiritual meaning after a loss
This is the version most people are searching for. A rainbow on the day of a funeral, over the cemetery, on the way back from the crematorium, or on the first anniversary is read almost universally as the person being well, as a message that they arrived, or as their way of saying they saw you. For pets the reading has become the rainbow bridge, from a short poem that has been passed around for decades, in which the animals you loved wait in a meadow by the bridge until you come.
The honest sentence here is that a rainbow cannot tell you where anyone is, and we will not pretend otherwise. What it can do is stop a car full of grieving people on the side of a road for two minutes while everyone looks up at the same thing and says the person’s name, and there are not many things that can do that. If it comforted you, the comfort is real and it is yours, and the name you said is the meaning. If the person has been turning up at night as well, there is a separate page on dreaming about someone who passed away.
Double rainbows, and the other versions people ask about
A double rainbow is the sign people photograph most and read most generously: double luck, a second chance, the promise said twice, and in some traditions a door standing open between two worlds. The second bow is light that has bounced twice inside each raindrop, which is why it is fainter, why its colors run in reverse order, and why the sky between the two bows is darker, a band with its own name, after the Greek philosopher who first described it. It rarely lasts more than a few minutes, and standing still for all of them is the correct response.
A rainbow at a wedding is read as the promise of the day being witnessed. A rainbow appearing while you were thinking about a decision is read as a gentle go ahead, with the caution that a rainbow knows nothing about your mortgage. A ring of color around the sun or the moon is a different thing, a halo made by ice crystals high up, and is read as a change in the weather, which it often is. A fragment of rainbow low in the sky, or one that appears and fades before you can point at it, is read as the smallest form of the sign, and it counts, the way a single white feather counts.
The honest part
Rainbows need rain in front of you and sun behind you at the same moment, and in the changeable weather of spring and fall that happens after a good share of showers, so the sky produces them far more often than anyone looks up. There is also a fact about rainbows that is stranger than any folklore: nobody else sees the one you saw. Each person’s rainbow is made by the raindrops at a particular angle from their own eyes, so the rainbow you stopped for was, in the strict optical sense, yours alone, and the person standing next to you was looking at a different one made of different drops.
That is the honest side and it is also the meaningful side. The sky did what it always does, and you were the one standing where you were standing, thinking about who you were thinking about, and you looked up. The attention was the sign, which is how every sign works.
The card that sits with a rainbow
In tarot the rainbow is painted right onto the Ten of Cups: a couple standing with their arms raised, two children dancing beside them, a house and a river in the distance, and above all of it an arch of ten gold cups set into a rainbow. It is the card of the ordinary good life noticed while it is happening, and of the moment after the hard part when someone finally looks up.
What the card shares with the sign is that the rainbow is not the point of the picture. The point is the people standing under it with their arms up, and if you keep seeing rainbows, or the Ten of Cups keeps arriving in your draws, the message is about looking up from the road for long enough to see who is beside you on it.
What to do with a rainbow today
Tell somebody. Tonight, before bed, tell one person where you were standing when you saw it and who it made you think of, in a text or across the kitchen table, and let that be the whole message, without the interpretation and without checking whether they believe in signs. The person you tell will usually answer with a rainbow of their own, because almost everyone has one, and the telling does the thing the rainbow was for: it makes two people look at the same sky for a minute.
A line to remember: the light was behind you the whole time you were facing the rain.
Questions people ask
What does a rainbow mean spiritually?
A rainbow is read as a promise after rain: the sign that the worst of a storm has passed, that something asked for has been heard, and in many traditions a bridge between this world and whatever comes after. It is one of the oldest signs there is and it has almost no threatening reading anywhere. If you saw one at the end of a hard stretch, that is the meaning people have given it for thousands of years.
What does it mean to see a rainbow after someone dies?
People very often read it as the person being well, or as a message that they arrived safely, and the rainbow bridge poem has made that reading common for pets too. A rainbow cannot tell you where anyone is, and we will not pretend it can, but the comfort is real and the person you thought of is the meaning. Keep the comfort and do not argue with it.
What does a double rainbow mean?
The second bow is sunlight reflected twice inside each raindrop, so it is fainter and its colors run in reverse order. As a sign it is read as double luck, a second chance, or the same promise said twice. The darker sky between the two bows has its own name, Alexander’s band, after the Greek who first described it. Stand still until it fades; it rarely lasts more than a few minutes.