What goes around: Wheel of Fortune and The Hanged Man

Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

This week, we’re looking at two cards that concern themselves with events that, for the most part, lie outside our control. I write “for the most part” because there is always an active choice that we can make in any situation — even if that choice sometimes feels like sailing between Scylla and Charybdis. In fact, sometimes the choice is as simple as this: we can fight the inevitable, or we can surrender to it.

The Wheel of Fortune and The Hanged Man are about surrender. But it is not a surrender that has to be passive. It can be significantly empowering, as we’ll explore a little further on.

The tenth and the twelfth cards of the Tarot’s major arcana respectively, the Wheel of Fortune and The Hanged Man deal with archetypal situations rather than characters. Whereas someone can embody different aspects of the divine feminine with The High Priestess or The Empress, the regality and authority of The Emperor, or the alchemical prowess of The Magician, the Wheel of Fortune and The Hanged Man refer more to events in a person’s life that further their journey along the road to individuation (the route along the major arcana, from zero to twenty-one).

What follows is an exploration of how each card can feature in our own journeys along that route. It is by no means exhaustive; but if you haven’t guessed from my previous articles, I am an ardent proponent of synchronicity: when we are active participants in our own individuation process, we create the information and resources that we need at any particular time. (In these moments, we are living The Magician archetype.) If there’s something here that clicks for you, know that you are the one who conjured it up.

Wheel of Fortune

The Rider-Waite Smith version of the Wheel of Fortune incorporates many diverse symbolic elements. I’m not going to describe each one in detail (there are many resources that do this more than capably, including one here), but instead explore the overall picture that they convey.

A wheel is suspended in a blue sky surrounded by grey clouds. On top of the wheel sits a Sphinx-like creature, its body almost seeming to be part of the sky itself. On the bottom of the wheel is a figure with the head of Anubis. A yellow serpent wriggles down the left-hand side. In the four corners of the card, each backed by a cloud, sit an angel, a griffin, an ox and a lion — all winged, all with an open book in front of them. The books are blank.

This is a key. Even the winged creatures in the firmament are giving us no clue as to what is in store. The future remains unwritten in the minds of mankind. The Sphinx’s look is as impenetrable as the mystery of the Sphinx at Giza. Its smile is knowing, yet enigmatic.

The idea of an element of unknowable-ness is further emphasized by the letters and the alchemical symbols in the wheel itself. There are four letters: T, A, R, and O. Depending on the letter you start from, and the direction of travel, you can create at least four different words. The substances denoted by the alchemical symbols are the basis for creating the Philosopher’s Stone. And yet there are no further instructions, no directions — just as there is no indicated direction in which the wheel is going to turn.

With this card we become, in the words of Shakespeare’s Romeo, ‘fortune’s fools’. We carry in us the archetype of The Fool, fearlessly stepping out into the unknown at the beginning of his journey. When we reach the Wheel of Fortune, we open ourselves to the possibility of understanding that not everything is under our control. The wheel may turn one way, or it may turn the other. The direction is not ours to know, nor ours to dictate.

I don’t subscribe to the viewpoint that the Wheel of Fortune only refers to ‘good’ news. I believe that idea is not only inaccurate, but that it makes literal fools of us all. By ascribing only this interpretation to the Wheel of Fortune, we adopt an ‘ostrich in the sand’ approach to our evolution. It sees events in black and white, as negative and positive, as undesirable and desirable. Sometimes what we experience as wonderful in one moment can pitch us down the side of the wheel and into the depths of our own personal underworlds in another. Sometimes the most painful experiences in our lives lead to the greatest growth. Something might feel good or not feel good at the time, but the results often stand separate from our judgment of it.

So if we don’t know what is going to happen, nor can we do anything about it when it does, just where do we have the possibility to exercise choice?

To use the metaphor of the wheel: we can cling to the outside of the wheel, where we run the risk of meeting any of the three figures and getting thwarted. Or we can move to the centre, away from obstacles, and where the movement is minimised. In other words, we can cling to the outside world, to what is familiar and what we don’t want to relinquish. Or we can surrender the notion of clinging, and move to our own centre. Individuation is about identifying and excavating the core that lies in each of us that cannot be shifted or thwarted by external circumstances. When we are in touch with our centre, we are in touch with the Self: timeless and unperturbed by the whims of fortune. It is from this point of balance that we can then move out into the world, once the movement has stopped, with a renewed sense of the true source of our empowerment.

The Hanged Man

Ever felt like events in your life have put you in a position of not being able to move? That whichever way you turn, you are met with resistance and an uphill struggle? Where, no matter what you do, you are misquoted, misunderstood, misjudged? Welcome to the world of The Hanged Man.

Events from the Wheel of Fortune can put us into the position of The Hanged Man (via Justice, card eleven, which lies between them). Those events can just as easily move us out of it. Either way, the Wheel of Fortune is about movement — albeit movement that is out of our control — while The Hanged Man is concerned with stasis.

But this isn’t voluntary stasis. When we draw this card, the stasis is not under our control. Nor is it simply ‘stopping’. We experience The Hanged Man as a surrendering, where we are not only strung up: we are suspended upside-down. The indignity of it!

But look more closely at the card. The man might be bound to the tree that he is hanging from, but only by one foot. Indeed, the position of his other foot might even be construed, under certain circumstances, as being rather jaunty. It is as if he is dancing an Irish jig. He is well clothed; he looks healthy. Not only is he smiling, but he is doing so with some serenity. There is a peacefulness about him. Most importantly for me, he has a halo of light around his head. This man is no victim. He is in the process of enlightenment … en-light-enment. “Ah!” he seems to say. “I see now.”

The circumstances that put you in the position of The Hanged Man might not be clear and they might not be fair. But they give you time for contemplation and access to a new perspective. Living with the archetype of The Hanged Man turns your world upside-down. But perhaps it needed shaking up a little so that you see things differently.

We might not know what this man is seeing, but what we can see is that he is benefiting from the encounter. The boughs to which he is tied support new life in the form of green leaves. He too is, in a sense, supported. A few of the leaves show hints of yellow. Soon, they will turn and fall from the tree. Perhaps it is in this moment that the man will also be released from his bonds, free to continue on his journey.

With endings come beginnings, just as the most hopeless of situations hold in them the possibility of insight, invigoration, and renewal. The Hanged Man sees that possibility and through Death, which comes next, enters a period of transformation.