The Hanged Man

The Hanged Man is the trump whose original meaning is best documented and least known, and the gap between the two is instructive.

In fifteenth-century Italian cities, a man who had betrayed a trust, defaulted on a debt or fled justice could be punished in his absence by having his portrait painted on a public wall, hanging upside down by one ankle. The practice is called pittura infamante, shame painting, and it was a real legal and social instrument, carried out by named artists under municipal contract. The card shows exactly that: a man suspended by one foot, the other leg crossed behind, hands often bound or hidden.

A fifteenth-century player did not see a mystic in voluntary suspension. He saw a traitor. The Italian name for the card, Il Traditore, the traitor, is attested, and the French Le Pendu simply means the hanged man.

The modern reading, willing sacrifice, surrender, the reversal of perspective that yields insight, and in many popular accounts a comparison with Odin hanging on the world-tree, is entirely a product of the occult revival. The Odin comparison in particular has no historical connection to the card whatsoever; it is a twentieth-century observation about two images that happen to resemble each other, and it is frequently presented as though the card were derived from the myth. It is not.

None of this makes the modern reading useless. A card of enforced humiliation reinterpreted as chosen surrender is a real interpretive move with real value. It is simply a move, made recently, by people who did not know what they were looking at.

The Golden Dawn assigned the twelfth trump the letter Mem, the element Water, and the twenty-third path from Geburah to Hod. Mem is one of the three Mother letters and its element is water, which suits a card about suspension, immersion and the loss of ordinary footing. The assignment is late nineteenth century and rests on the alphabetic scheme first proposed by the Comte de Mellet in 1781 and systematised by Eliphas Levi in the 1850s.

The card is read for suspension, and the readings divide on whether the suspension is chosen. The generous reading takes it as a deliberate pause, a willingness to stop pushing, and the specific insight that comes from seeing a situation from an angle nobody else is looking from. The unsentimental reading takes it as being stuck: waiting on somebody else's decision, unable to act, and quietly paying for it.

Both are current, and a reader who only knows the generous version will misread a great many spreads, because querents who draw this card are more often trapped than enlightened. The distinguishing question is usually whether the querent chose the position, and the surrounding cards will normally say.

The sacrificial reading, something given up so that something else can happen, sits between the two and is probably the most reliable. Waite's reversed meanings run to selfishness, an unwillingness to make the sacrifice, and the crowd rather than the individual. Readers working without reversals treat a reversed card as no different and read the whole range upright, which for a card that is already upside down has a certain logic to it.