This post continues the reading started in Part 1: The setup.
The reading is one using “traditional” meanings (gleaned from authors such as Arthur Edward Waite, Eden Gray, and Leanna Greenaway), in a “predictive” (or fortunetelling) reading. The purpose of this reading is not fortunetelling, but to demonstrate how a predictive reading can be used to stimulate the creative imagination and as an aid in problem solving. (See Part 1 of this series for the reasoning behind the exercise.)
Your home: The Hanged Man (Reversed)
Working with only the (more-or-less) traditional meanings of the cards can be challenging. If you let everything about and on the card inspire you—the image, the colours, the atmosphere, the attitude of the people in the scene—it is much easier to “fit” an interpretation to the circumstances. You can imagine stories, reflect on personal associations that come up when you look at the cards, consider any metaphors or clichéd phrases, or combine suit and number to find interpretations that make sense to you, in these particular circumstances, but not necessarily to another Tarot reader. In such a case, the possibility for projecting your current concerns on the card or the spread is also greater. The danger, however, is that the field is too wide; that you will have enough options to dismiss the ones you should be reflecting on.
A further advantage of forcing connections between a narrower range of interpretations and the card position, is that you can exercise you “innovation” muscles. At times, finding a connection can stretch your ingenuity uncomfortably far. Consider the Hanged Man in the “Home” position.
The “Home” position is about your environment, which can include the attitudes of people around you, or something in your environment that is influencing you.
The Hanged Man is about sacrifice, particularly self-sacrifice, and being “suspended,” hanging around. Earlier meanings for this card included “betrayal” or “traitor.” In older decks, coins fell from the pocket of the Hanged Man, or the figure would hold bags of money. These cards referred to Judas’ betrayal of Jesus. In 15th century Italy, escaped criminals and traitors were depicted in this hanging-upside-down position in what were known as pittura infamante, or ‘shame paintings.’
For the reversed card, Waite offers “selfishness, the crowd, body politic.” Eden Gray has “Absorption in physical matters. Pre-occupation with the ego. Resistance to spiritual influences. Arrogance. False prophecy.”
None of these interpretations fitted. I tried reversing the upright meanings, but came up blank. Then I tried Mary K Greer’s suggestion of “breaking through” from “The complete book of Tarot reversals.” And there you go: no more “hanging around”—I have broken through the feeling of being stuck (which, I remembered, is one of the interpretations for the reversed Fool). Read together, cards 7 and 8 could mean that I have been feeling stuck and unenthusiastic, against a backdrop of a project that has been suspended--just “hanging around,” in fact—but that there has been a change in the environment, some movement. True: however unenthusiastic I felt, I have still done some work, including these posts about this particular spread.
Here is another example of how reading the cards for problem solving and reading them for divination can differ: I am not concerned with the “correct” interpretation of the cards, but only with gaining insight. I’m mixing up time frames by letting some cards refer to the current situation, and others to the past. Some cards describe the ideal situation, and others the real one. I also don’t use a consistent method to interpret reversed cards.
I remembered that I had wanted to investigate the “wrong choices” suggestion from Eden Gray, however, so I considered the other upright meaning of the Hanged Man: sacrifice. I played with a few thoughts here: could I have made the “wrong” sacrifices by starting this particular project? Alternatively, have I perhaps not been making the right sacrifices? These thoughts did not take me much further; and anyway, I do not believe that I have made the wrong choice. I dismissed this avenue.
But, something did strike me as funny: writing this book is one of the projects I started after I was retrenched almost four years ago. Not “self-sacrifice,” but sacrificed on the downsizing altar!
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