The Weekend Tarot Reading — Sunday, March 3, 2013

By Sarah Taylor

We have three major arcana cards in today’s reading: Lovers (VI), flanked by Strength (XI in this deck) and Hanged Man (XII). I drew the central card first, which, coupled with the outer cards being chronological neighbours, indicates that we are looking at two different aspects coming together — whether physically, or symbolically, or both.

This is soul-level stuff; not just the everyday, not just about what we’re doing. It is how we are — more than that: it is who we are, and who we are intending to become.

Something is going on behind the scenes that takes us out of the realm of our five senses and into a larger arena, which I’ve found asks for a greater degree of trust because, often, it is not we who are at the controls. When we engage with the major arcana, we are walking in the land of the gods. This asks for a different form of navigation: our intuition. It calls for a particular way of interacting with our surroundings: one based on receptivity.

I love the Lovers in this deck. Together, the two figures make one, mouths disappearing at the point of contact, arms wrapped around the other, polarised bodies joined from crown to base, each eye-half forming a functioning whole. This may be the coming together of two individuals, but even that is a metaphor for something of greater significance: the uniting of two elements of the soul.

Through Strength, we have the opportunity to experience sex and our animal drives as being just as much a part of Spirit as anything else. Strength is the antidote to the various forms of indoctrination — formal and informal — that tell us that sexuality is something to be ashamed of, and consequently to be sequestered, whether in the darkest recesses of our minds, in the closet, or in something that is deemed to be more acceptable. One half of the equation starts to come into focus.

Through the Hanged Man, making up the other half, we are asked to surrender. That might be an idea about ourselves as much as having to ‘let go’ of a situation that we cannot control. It might be that, by surrendering an idea about ourselves, we find we have to let go anyway. What is it that we have built to shore up a falsehood? What is it that is asking us to look at things differently, even if that means we are suspended upside-down in order for it to get its point across?

The Hanged Man symbolises the phase of one’s life associated with mid-life: the archetypal mid-life crisis that confronts us when we have continued to ignore the callings of our soul. It can feel like it’s coming at us from the outside — and frequently more like a kick in our guts than a tap on our shoulder. But it hasn’t come from ‘out there’; we have engineered it from ‘in here’. Behind the scenes, behind our own backs, we have conspired to create a wake-up call whose alarm goes off when the illusion can no longer be maintained. We are strung up, sucked downward — asked to contend with what lies in the deep.

In this instance, what that is feels carnal. Deeper still, it is a creative force of nature, one that might have terrified us with its potency, because it has the power to penetrate outward appearances and right to our very hearts. We are no longer acceptable at any cost: we are vulnerable, we are virginal, and we are animal. We are more than we ever thought we needed to contend with. We might have to grow up and decide that the only sane way to be, is to be ourselves.

And so, time out. Time out to come out. And in coming out, we come together, reunited with what wants out of the shadows. It’s been long enough.

Astrology/Elemental correspondences: Strength (Leo), Lovers (Gemini), Hanged Man (Neptune/water)

The Voyager Tarot website: www.voyagertarot.com

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 explains how to use the spread.