Here in this card what we are seeing is a major balancing out of different aspects of your past, present and future taking place. At this time in your life, it is possible for you to restructure your life without any major crisis taking place as a result. This card is saying that you should not necessarily be on a continual clean-up and improvement campaign, especially in the area of your relationships. Instead, concentrate on the issues which are actively troubling the relationship: the rest you can safely afford to bypass for the time being.
In this card we are looking at the law of karma – the law of cause and effect. This card is saying that in accordance with the seeds which you have sown, you will begin to reap the harvest: what will be relevant will be those things which you have thought, said or done.
Therefore, look at how you can now influence the present situation while taking on board more responsibility, not less. You already have knowledge – you will find that you will come to exercise control by taking responsibility for what is going on around you. The way up for you is by moving in this direction: the way down is for you to run away, to retreat and to say to others, ‘Look at what was done to me’: don’t allow yourself to become a victim. You may find it helpful to sit down and write up all the negative acts of commission and omission which you have perpetrated: against yourself, against the opposite sex, against your family, against your deepest principles, etc. It is only by reviewing your own weak spots or ‘blind spots’, that you will become sufficiently aware to be able to avoid repeating them.
12 THE HANGED MAN
This card is looking at the principle of sacrifice at work in your life and it is saying that at the moment, you probably feel that people are making quite heavy demands upon your time, energy and money.
Sometimes in our lives, we are called upon by fortune to give unselfishly to a particular cause, to friends, to relatives, to something which we believe in or are a part of. This is one such point in your life. Someone in your circle of activity is asking a particular favour of you, and it may well be your immediate reaction to say, ‘Well, what have you done to deserve such a favour?’ The answer would be, of course, that in all probability the other person would have done nothing – or at least very little.
The presence of this card in your reading is suggesting that you shouldn’t be too calculating in terms of whether the things which are now being asked of you have been earned.
At some earlier point in your life, you also were given support and help, and didn’t thank the person who had helped you. You weren’t expected to do so. Now, the time has come for you to do the same for someone else. At this point, show a sense of magnanimity, of generosity, of being big as a personality: in this way, you will win the favour of the Gods and earn for yourself an even greater blessing in the future.
It may well seem that events have almost literally stopped taking place in your life; that you have arrived at a standstill. Enjoy this period of suspension. Because generally, when events seem to have stopped happening in the plane of action, it means that the whole experience is changing gear and that things are therefore happening on an even deeper level of reality. Another aspect of this card is that it can tend to show someone looking at the world upside down. Could that be you? In what way?
13 DEATH
This is the card which even those people who are not familiar with Tarot symbolism are often able to recall, maybe from having seen a Hammer horror film on television. It shows Azrael, the Archangel of Death, descending upon ancient Egypt in response to the invocation of Moses. In this legend, Moses had asked for his people to be allowed to go free out of ancient Egypt, and when his requests had been repeatedly refused by the Pharaoh, he summoned the Angel of Death to come and take the firstborn of each Egyptian household.
This card, then, may be warning us about becoming too inflexible with regard to some of the changes which life sometimes makes upon us. It is simply saying that we must be flexible and not allow ourselves to get drawn into ‘winner-takes-all’ scenarios from which we stand to lose more than we could possibly gain.
This card is saying to you that a major period of change is taking place in your life – but that it is going to be extremely advantageous to you in the long run.
You may not feel that the time is right for you to have to make such major changes, but this card is really reassuring you and saying that what is being presented to you is an exceptional opportunity for you to get out of your rut and start to experience something different from anything that has gone on before now.
What are the umbilical cords which still link you to past patterns? What is stopping you from cutting them?
14 TEMPERANCE
This card is showing an angel standing by a pool of water, pouring water from one cup to another. It shows the movement of the life force from one vessel or body into another. Water, the symbol of life itself from time immemorial, moves from the state of solid, when it is ice, through to liquid, and then from liquid to the state of air, when it evaporates. After a period spent in that form, it condenses, when it comes back down to earth in the form of rain, i.e. the downward motion of water in the card. So, we have a guided tour in this card through each of the elements, but with the essential and eternal quality of the life force remaining absolutely constant.
This card is inviting you to recognize the eternal and unchanging aspect of your own spiritual condition, that although you go through the experience of seeing constant change around you, you yourself as a spiritual creature are not whatever body you find yourself contained within in this lifetime.
This card is saying that at this point in life we have genuinely experienced a sense of spiritual and personal growth. Now we can begin to look back into our past with an awareness unfettered by the blinkers of ordinary consciousness and see what has really happened there to make us – or at least influence us – become the things which we are in the present.
It is a card which suggests great good fortune, if we take advantage of the present to look more closely at the decisions about ourselves which have led us to this present vantage point.
It is a period of considerable clarity, enabling us to define more clearly those things which we want to be, to do, and to have in the next cycle of activity as well.
This card is saying that it is by looking at our past from this perspective that we will more accurately be able to understand our present. At that point, it will be increasingly easy to determine our life direction, and to begin to move ahead to our goals and objectives.
The angel, or, more correctly, archangel which is shown here is Raphael, traditionally associated in ancient texts with healing. Thus the card is suggesting some kind of a healing process which is taking place in your life or which perhaps needs to take place. This card comes up a lot for people that have been involved in counselling, either giving counsel to others or receiving it themselves. Behind Raphael we see a road running into the distance, suggesting the past experiences which we have gone through, which have led us to where we are now. If you look carefully you will see the angel stands with one foot on land and the other on water. This represents the time when we emerged from the waters onto land, and thus became air-breathing creatures with lungs instead of gills. Thus we see from the posture of the angel that this card is all about the important evolutionary steps which we have as yet to make. What is there in your past that you could actively bring forward into present time to help you move forward? What is there in your life which still needs to go through the healing process?
15 THE DEVIL