12-The Hanged Man – Upright Rider Waite Deck

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Your Chosen Card – The Hanged Man Upright Rider Waite Deck

When upright, the Hanged Man looks like an image reflected in the surface of a body of water, suggesting that what we perceive with our senses is but a reflection of a deeper reality. To understand what is really real, we may need to adopt a new perspective. If your life feels like it’s on hold or in a state of suspension, it’s time to adopt a spiritual perspective and pursue the greater good. We sometimes need to make sacrifices and let go of something we value to achieve a greater good. In any case, when the Hanged Man appears in a reading, you are likely to be viewing or doing something out of the ordinary in a way that sets you apart from the more accepted approach of those around you.

Keywords Upright: Sacrifice for the greater good, a state of suspension; waiting, surrender, devotion, altruism, serenity, faith, visionary thinking, release, going with the flow, letting go, feeling like you are on hold, redemption through sacrifice, adopting a unique perspective, doing something out of the ordinary, a spiritual viewpoint, a novel way to view a situation, loving kindness, compassion, evenly suspended attention.

Key XII: The Hanged Man (The Traitor)
Myths/Archetypes: Jesus. Buddha. Odin. Cuauhtémoc. The Martyr. The Sacrificial Lamb. Benedict Arnold. The Traitor.
Astrology: Water (Neptune in some modern decks)
Numerology: 3 (Empress) = 1 + 2 (Hanged Man) = 2 + 1 (The World)

Rider Waite: Wisdom, circumspection, discernment, trials, sacrifice, intuition, divination, prophecy; (R) selfishness, the crowd, the body politic.

When The Hanged Man is upright you can pretty much take it that life is going well but that’s when life takes us by surprise.  If The Hanged Man is unclear it may help to choose a card from the Major Arcana to provide more insight into what it is The Hanged Man is trying to tell you.  If you had a particular issue in  mind, or want to seek clarification on something else, you can also choose again to get more guidance.

This chosen card is part of your upright card reading for The Hanged Man using cards from the Rider Waite Tarot Deck. You will find many more tarot pages that will be of great help if you need tarot card meanings. Use the search at the bottom of the page. We have some amazing tarot books for you to browse. Please see below.

Here are some snippets from a few of my favorite books

Portable Magic
Book Details
Portable Magic: It will be found that with Tarot cards of the usual proportions for example, the standard Rider Waite deck the circle of the zodiac trumps is almost exactly the correct size to enclose the four Aces of the altar. The elegance of this relationship is at once apparent when the circle is laid out around the cross. No space is wasted within the circle, and the ritual layout of the cards is rendered as compact as it could possibly be made, so that it takes up the least area on the working surface for a given deck of Tarot cards. A deck of large cards will require a bigger working space than a deck of small cards, but the efficiency of the layout is preserved in either case.

Tarot Books

Complete Book of Tarot: The element Water is assigned to the Hanged Man, trump XII. Modern astrologers sometimes assign Neptune to Pisces and to the Hanged Man.

Tarot Triumphs: Now it’s the turn of the Hanged Man, a young man suspended upside-down from a cross pole. A ripple runs through the crowd: What is he doing like this? Is he dead? Has he been hung as a criminal or a traitor? But look, he is quite serene. He is balanced, one leg crooked behind the other, arms neatly folded behind his back, eyes gazing forward. There is sporadic, relieved laughter when they recognize him as a skilled acrobat, one of the rope and pole dancers who gladden the streets sometimes. But nevertheless, his frozen posture casts a sinister shadow on their reckoning. To be turned upside-down like that would be uncomfortable, to say the least, and your sense of security could fall away in no time.

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Tarot Triumphs: Now it’s the turn of the Hanged Man, a young man suspended upside-down from a cross pole. A ripple runs through the crowd: What is he doing like this? Is he dead? Has he been hung as a criminal or a traitor? But look, he is quite serene. He is balanced, one leg crooked behind the other, arms neatly folded behind his back, eyes gazing forward. There is sporadic, relieved laughter when they recognize him as a skilled acrobat, one of the rope and pole dancers who gladden the streets sometimes. But nevertheless, his frozen posture casts a sinister shadow on their reckoning. To be turned upside-down like that would be uncomfortable, to say the least, and your sense of security could fall away in no time.