The Hanged Man

The image

Smith's Hanged Man hangs upside down from a T-shaped cross of living wood, with leaves sprouting from it, his right ankle tied to the crossbeam. His left leg is bent behind the right knee so that the legs form a cross or the figure four. His hands are hidden behind his back. He wears a blue tunic, red hose and yellow shoes, and around his head shines a bright yellow halo. His face is calm, even contemplative, against a grey background.

History

The fifteenth-century Italian card showed a man hanged by one foot, the posture used in pitture infamanti, the shaming portraits of traitors and debtors painted on public walls in Italian cities. In some early lists the card is called il Traditore, the Traitor, and its original meaning was almost certainly disgrace rather than spiritual insight. The Tarot de Marseille's Le Pendu keeps the pose, with the man hanging between two trees.

Court de Gébelin, believing the card-makers had printed it upside down, argued that it really showed Prudence standing on one foot. Éliphas Lévi read it as the adept's self-sacrifice, and the Golden Dawn attributed it to the Hebrew letter Mem and the element of Water. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) denies that it is a card of martyrdom and suggests instead a mystery of the relation between the divine and the universe, hinting at a great awakening.

Symbolism

The living wood signifies that the tree is not a gallows but a source of life, and the tau shape is an old sign of salvation. The crossed legs and the triangle of the arms form, upside down, the alchemical sign of sulphur, which some commentators read as spirit descending into matter. The halo marks illumination gained through stillness. Readers have compared the figure to Odin hanging on the world-tree to win the runes, and to the crucifixion, though these are modern interpretations rather than the card's origin.

Mem, "water", is one of the three mother letters of the Sefer Yetzirah; water reflects things upside down, which suits the card's theme of reversed perspective. Some twentieth-century writers assigned the planet Neptune. The path connects Geburah and Hod on the Tree of Life. Twelve, the number of the zodiac and the months, suggests a full cycle completed before a new view can open.

In a reading

Readers take the Hanged Man as a sign that waiting will serve better than forcing. Paired with the Four of Swords it confirms rest; with the Eight of Cups, a letting go; with the Death card that follows it, a transition prepared by surrender. In the advice position it often asks the querent to reverse an assumption.