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.