Quantum Tarot: the Hanged Man

nisaba

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That's better - this one doesn't look like a mini-reading for why we've all gone quiet.

The Hanged Man. I've always liked my Hanged Men (or Suspended Persons, or Hanged Persons, or Entangled Humans, depending on the deck). I suppose that's because there are stretches of years, here and there in my life, when I've been living this card.

In delicate shades of mauve, pink and puce, we see nebulaic clouds meeting in space, overlaying two upon row of equations. At the bottom of the image, teh clouds thicken into almost cumulus-like clouds, and a bright star catches out eye, like a halo or a spiritual entry-point to the head. The Hanged Man? Nowhere. He is the void between the clouds. He is only there, complete with bent knee, because of the absence of substance.

You know, since childhood I've loved the sky, but I've always looked to the dark, velvet shapes of the emptiness between the stars, not the stars themselves. There is something very mystical about darkness and emptiness, something very inviting. Later, I found a poem that the Australian poet Kenneth Slessor wrote about the Southern Cross: "But I could not escape those tunnels of nothingness, the cracks in the spinning cross..." And here again, the image we look at is an image made out of nothing, out of absences.

The science? The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the only scientific theorum, I delight in saying irritatingly to scientists, that doesn't even know whether it exists or not. You move, but if you have speed, you do not quite know where you are. If you know where you are, you have no idea how fast you are moving. This is starting to sound like a Sufi teaching-paradox, mysticism in science. And equally mystically, the Hanged Man only exists because there are no particles where his body is, he is nothing and nowhere although he is clearly visible. He has reality, out of unreality. And as a non-person, as the hole in the doughnut, he will find it very difficult to make moves, to have any kind of an effect. Hi is on hold.
 

KarlThomas

Hanged Man.

Mmm. The choiceless rascal. What a beautiful scientific principle to assign the hanged man. I also love this card, and sort of dislike some of the "gentling", or dummying down, which the card often gets. I understand the value that a softer approach offers, but I also believe that when sitters can view the dark reality in a picture, it helps them plot courses with more accuracy. Sometimes yes, we are well advised to look to the space between the stars.

Particle/Wave duality and immesurability blow me away, as so much of modern physics does. The paradox of being, and the fact, less and less refutable as we grow beyond our five senses, that its all simply energy.
None of any of this exists really and yet it so clearly does.

The fact that he is not composed of anything is what allows him to be. Love it. A very essential card.

I also enjoy Kay's remedy of relinquishment. No matter how solidly powerless and stuck the figure in the situation appears to be, there is in fact, something keeping this figure hung, the absence of which would allow freedom of movement.
 

Leo62

I like the idea of paradox being something we get "hung up" on, and something that turns our ideas about ourselves and the world upside down. For me, the Hanged Man is about a shift in awareness, a challenge to move beyond our limitations. And to do this we have to give up our old ideas about what is true and what is real.

I hadn't thought about the shadowy aspect of this card before - nisaba it's very perceptive of you to see the man himself as the void. The void we have to enter as part of the HM process is actually ourselves...hmmm...deep stuff for a Monday morning! :D
 

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nisaba

Leo62 said:
I hadn't thought about the shadowy aspect of this card before - nisaba it's very perceptive of you to see the man himself as the void. The void we have to enter as part of the HM process is actually ourselves...hmmm...deep stuff for a Monday morning! :D

<laughter> I *do* like getting something about a card that the creator of it didn't - it makes me feel so superior.

Apropos of nothing, this Hanged Man immediately reminded me of a meditation I did when my daughter was a baby (I know because I got pulled out of it by her crying) so it must have been about sixteen years ago now. I was accompanied by a non-physical being that I knew from previous encounters, but didn't have a name for. One small part of hte whole experience was that he told me: The universe is like a doughnut, and God is the hole at the centre of the doughnut." (Getting the picture of why this card remnded me of it yet?) Like the hole in the doughnut, god is nothing and has no substance, but again like the hole in the doughnut which gives the doughnut its character and charm, God shapes the universe and gives it its structure whilst being a non-existent factor (exactly like that hung man).