Crow the Trickster Does a Tarot Reading for Me

Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Rick de Yampert, author of the new Crows and Ravens.

I was gobsmacked the time I looked out my living room window at the woods behind my Palm Coast, Florida, home and saw a crow hanging upside-down in a loblolly bay tree!

What the freak!

I scrambled to get my camera (the real one I use to photograph crows, not my smart phone), but by the time I nervously flicked the on switch and returned to the window, the trickster crow was gone.

Damn, I just missed the crow photo of a lifetime!

Given my Pagan spiritual path and my concordant affinity for reading tarot (I own more than 50 decks) I immediately thought of the upside-down Hanged Man that’s a fixture in many tarot sets.

Is this “Hanged Crow” an omen?

Eden Gray’s book The Tarot Revealed says that the Hanged Man’s divinatory meaning is: “Surrender to a higher being causes a reversal in one’s way of life. In spiritual matters, wisdom, prophetic power, self-sacrifice. May also mean suspended decisions, a pause in one’s life.”

The Hanged Man entry in the LWB of Aleister Crowley‘s Thoth Tarot reads: “Redemption through sacrifice, enforced sacrifice, punishment, loss, suffering in general, defeat, failure, death.”

Despite the challenging, even dire aspects of the Hanged Man, I was still thrilled over my Hanged Crow encounter. After all, any tarot enthusiast worth their salt must learn to engage and navigate the so-called “shadow” cards rather than soft-pedal them…And besides, I had witnessed an upside-down crow!

However, in the following weeks my joy at witnessing such an astonishing crow feat turned to a nagging doubt: Did I really see that? Or did I misperceive that crow or—gulp—outright hallucinate it?

Whether my Hanged Crow sighting was reality or hallucinatory, its efficacy as an omen was proven less than a year later when I faced an arduous major life event: I was being forced to move because the owners of the home I had been renting for 11 years wanted it back for their own use.

The move’s time-suck would entail a huge delay in working on my book Crows and Ravens: Mystery, Myth, and Magic of Sacred Corvids.

Damnit. Sigh.

After landing in a new home just three miles down the road—a home that also borders woods and is frequented by crows—I resumed work on my book, more than a year behind schedule.

My uncertainty about the physical reality of my Hanged Crow sighting lingered until several years later when I acquired the book The American Crow and the Common Raven by Lawrence Kilham. A physician and amateur ornithologist, Kilham reported he himself had witnessed a crow hanging upside-down! Kilham also noted other birders who had seen such a feat.

Yay—I’m not crazy!

So, I’m ambivalent about seeing another crow do a Hanged Man routine. Maybe for its next tarot-inspired trick, a crow can somehow imitate the Magician, the Hermit, or the Star.

Our thanks to Rick for his guest post! For more from Rick de Yampert, read his article “5 Ways to Forge Communion (Both Practical and Magical) with Crows.”