12 - The Hanged Man Tarot Card

The Hanged Man is tarot card number 12, although it is the 13^th card of the Major Arcana because the 1^st of the 22 Major Arcana cards is number 0 (The Fool).

The Hanged Man is probably the second most-feared card in the tarot deck, that is the second after the Death Card. In the same way, much of the fear associated with the Hanged Man tarot card is based on mis-information or mis-understanding that may be due to the name of the card or to the way it is depicted in images on some older tarot decks.

Some older tarot decks include gruesome or distressing images on The Hanged Man tarot card. This is less common in modern tarot decks such as the Rider Waite and Robin Wood tarot decks.

The Hanged Man tarot card usually depicts a man or young person who is suspended upside-down, often from a tree and obviously by conscious choice and without any discomfort.

The theme of this card is learning the natural laws of the universe by changing ones perspective. This may imply the need to take some time out for reflection.

Some words and phrases associated with The Hanged Man tarot card include:

Change of perspective
Suspense
Interruption to progress
Hanging around
Turning the world upside-down
and the need to stay balanced

Note: The image of this tarot card shown on the right (above-right) is from an early French tarot deck that has been made available for general use via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. This shows a distinctly different style of illustration from that of modern tarot decks but is of historical and artistic interest.

The Gilded Tarot (Book and Tarot Deck Set)

More about the Major Arcana

The cards of the Major Arcana are widely considered to be the most powerful cards in the Tarot Deck. The 22 cards of the Major Arcana tell a complete story when arranged in upright and numerical order (beginning with 0 - The Fool then progressing through the sequence of Major Arcana cards until 21 - The World).
This is a story of personal development and enlightenment that is sometimes referred to as "The Fool's Journey".

Some texts also include meanings for "reversed cards". These are for the situation in which the cards are shuffled in both order and orientation. The theoretical advantage to this is that it effectively doubles the number of possible "cards" in the deck from 78 to 156. However, in terms of the calculation of obtaining results according to chance alone, it is not a simple mathematical doubling because once a card has been drawn it cannot be drawn again in the opposite orientation in the same reading.

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