Creating the Webbd Wheel: The Frame
In which it all hangs together ...
As the seeds for the Webbd Wheel series sprouted and mingled, I knew I needed a frame to tie it all together and give it shape. I was writing a story about intersections of stories and characters; I thought I would frame the whole thing as a series of stories told to an audience.
Then I remembered The Hanged Man.
I’ve written about The Hanged Man, a Tarot card, previously. In several Tarot decks, he’s smiling. It’s not a hilarious smile, and it’s not unpleasant, like a smirk. It’s more of an I-know-something-you-don’t kind of smile.
In one deck, he’s playing a pipe.
Hanging upside down is not comfortable. Hanging upside down by one leg must be worse, but he doesn’t look uncomfortable at all. He looks at ease, relaxed, even, as though he’s in the most natural position possible.
Why is that enigmatic Hanged Man smiling? I’ve always wanted to know.
Odin, the Valkyries, Valhalla, and the Wild Hunt are out of Norse and Germanic mythology. Yggdrasil is the Norse cosmic tree, or Tree of Life. Yggdrasil is guarded; the written and oral record is inconsistent about its guardian, but I imagined a giant snake named Mirmir.
Odin supposedly sacrificed himself by hanging from Yggdrasil, giving up an eye in order to learn secret mystical information, including runes. He is closely associated with the Hanged Man card.
I had already decided to structure the books around the Pagan Wheel of the Year and Tarot, and I knew one of the parts would be Yule, which is the winter solstice. The card representing that part would be The Sun, which in the Tarot deck I was using at the time depicted two very young male children, hand in hand, one light, one dark.
What if I turned those two children, symbolizing both new beginnings and balance, into characters and made one of them into The Hanged Man?
I had my frame, and it made the story circular. I could begin and end with The Hanged Man, which perfectly represented the concept of the Webbd Wheel, a complex, never-ending set of cycles and seasons, perpetually beginning, perpetually ending. This echoes The Chariot and the Wheel of Fortune, two other Tarot cards.
It worked. I never looked back. Every now and then I reminded the reader we were listening to Mirmir tell The Hanged Man stories, and their characters took shape as they interacted with each other as well as within the stories Mirmir relates.
The meaning in Tarot of The Hanged Man is a sacrifice, pause, or life in suspension. It’s completely against successful writing rules to write a book about suspended intervals. People want straightforward action; told in a linear fashion with a beginning, middle, and end.
But life isn’t like that. Most of us don’t live lives of constant, steady, forward motion or high adventure. We take a step forward, six back, and leap sideways. We pause. We experience long stretches during which it feels like nothing is happening. We get stuck.
We get stuck as we crouch between childhood and individuation. We outgrow the life we’re living and search for a bigger life. We find ourselves locked in towers without a key. We refuse to bloom where we’re planted. We get mired in loneliness, bitterness, fear, and resentment. We earn a reputation and get stuck with that. We make catastrophic choices and get stuck with the consequences. We wait for someone to save us, someone to love us, someone to fix us. We linger on thresholds, afraid to go forward, afraid to go back.
Often, the places we get stuck are the most fruitful. Everything happens while it looks and feels like nothing is happening. Meanwhile, life’s larger seasons and cycles continue. Birth and death. Ebb and flow. Increase and decrease.
The Hanged Man is about the pause, the suspended interval, the places where we get stuck and the events that nudge us back into motion, against a backdrop of a wider world, filled with characters and stories, always changing and unfolding.
I finally know why The Hanged Man smiles. He’s listening to stories. Oh, and he clearly plays a pipe.
(This was published with Post #2 of The Hanged Man.)