The Hanged Man

  • Arcana Major
  • Number XII
  • Figure on this site Odin on the world tree
Historical evidence

In the earliest decks

In fifteenth-century Italian decks the twelfth trump shows a man hanging upside down by one foot. The Tarot Heritage essay says the early Italian names were “Il Traditore” (the Traitor) and “L’Impiccato” (the Hanged Man). After 1500 French makers called it “Le Pendu”, and the Italian “L’Appeso” is a later translation back. Wikipedia also notes that Italian decks often call it the Traitor.

The Traitor name points to the pittura infamante, “shame paintings” that Italian city-states put on public walls to show traitors, often hanged. The essay says most were destroyed by weather and names surviving drawings by Andrea del Sarto (1529) and Filippino Lippi (late fifteenth century). It also mentions Botticelli’s 1478 painting of the Pazzi conspirators for Lorenzo de’ Medici and shame images ordered by Sforza rulers. It reads the money bags that some early cards show, as in the Charles VI deck (about 1460), as a nod to Judas.

In the Visconti-Sforza deck (Milan, about 1450) the figure’s hands are tied behind his back. The essay notes the tarot man looks calm, unlike the suffering victims of shame paintings, and suggests this was to keep a card game pleasant. A Bolognese manuscript of about 1750 still lists the card as “Traitor”.

The Tarot de Marseille pattern keeps the bound hands behind the back and the gibbet. Jean Dodal’s early-eighteenth-century Lyon deck labels the card “Le Pandu”. The essay adds that some printers in the 1700s turned the figure upright. Trump order varied by region and period.

Historical evidence

The Rider-Waite-Smith card

Pamela Colman Smith drew the card for A. E. Waite, and William Rider & Son first published the deck in December 1909, with a larger printing in March 1910. Her Hanged Man keeps the older idea of a man hanging by one foot, but the mood is different: a calm face and a halo around the head.

The tree is a living tree with leaves, as Waite stresses in his own text below. The bound traitor, money bags and shame-painting setting of older cards are gone, and the figure reads as a person held in stillness. The Tarot Heritage essay says Waite rejected earlier occult readings of the card but gave the figure a halo and an entranced look.

Myth and literature · Quotation

Waite’s description

The gallows from which he is suspended forms a Tau cross, while the figure—from the position of the legs—forms a fylfot cross. There is a nimbus about the head of the seeming martyr. It should be noted (1) that the tree of sacrifice is living wood, with leaves thereon; (2) that the face expresses deep entrancement, not suffering; (3) that the figure, as a whole, suggests life in suspension, but life and not death. It is a card of profound significance, but all the significance is veiled. One of his editors suggests that Éliphas Lévi did not know the meaning, which is unquestionable—nor did the editor himself. It has been called falsely a card of martyrdom, a card of prudence, a card of the Great Work, a card of duty; but we may exhaust all published interpretations and find only vanity. I will say very simply on my own part that it expresses the relation, in one of its aspects, between the Divine and the Universe.

He who can understand that the story of his higher nature is imbedded in this symbolism will receive intimations concerning a great awakening that is possible, and will know that after the sacred Mystery of Death there is a glorious Mystery of Resurrection.

Myth and literature · Context

Later meanings

In the late eighteenth century Antoine Court de Gébelin, who thought the tarot Egyptian in origin, called the upside-down figure a printing error and identified the card with Prudence, according to the Tarot Heritage essay. Etteilla and, in 1887, Oswald Wirth presented him as a seeker giving up worldly values.

Éliphas Lévi, in the nineteenth century, linked the card to Judas and to Prometheus, and tied it to the Great Work of alchemy. French occultists gave it the Hebrew letter Lamed, while the Golden Dawn is said to have assigned it Mem, with water and Neptune.

All of this is later. None of it appears in the fifteenth-century Italian decks, where the card is a traitor, and none of it is a Norse tradition.

Modern interpretation

As read on this site

This is the meaning used for readings here. Using the tarot to divine is a modern practice, and the Norse figure shown for each card is this site’s own association; the tarot began as an Italian card game. A short history is on the Tarot page.

Upright

Keywords: surrender, suspended action, gaining wisdom through sacrifice, necessary pause

Odin hung on Yggdrasil for nine days, pierced by his own spear, to gain the runes — a sacrifice that looked from the outside like nothing happening at all. This card is suspension before insight: the period where progress isn't visible because it's occurring somewhere you can't see it. If things feel stalled, consider that they might instead be incubating. Some clarity only arrives after enough stillness, and you might be closer to it than the silence suggests.

In general: What looks like stalling may be the necessary quiet before a real shift in understanding. Don't mistake incubation for failure.

In love: A relationship in a holding pattern that's actually doing important, invisible work — neither person quite ready to speak yet, but something shifting underneath.

In work: A project or decision that benefits from being left alone for a while longer. The insight you need hasn't finished forming.

Reversed

Keywords: pointless suffering, stagnation, martyrdom, stuck without growth

Sacrifice is only meaningful if something eventually comes back from it. When this reverses, you get the suspension without the insight: the waiting continues, the cost keeps accumulating, and nothing seems to be returning for it. Ask honestly what the current stillness is actually buying you. If the answer is nothing, the hanging has gone on long enough, and it might be time to come down from the tree rather than wait for a vision that isn't arriving.

In general: A period of waiting or sacrifice has stopped producing insight and started producing only more waiting. Reassess whether it's still worth it.

In love: Enduring a difficult dynamic in hopes it will eventually transform, when there's no real evidence that it will.

In work: Continuing to invest in a stalled project or role out of stubbornness rather than any actual sign of forthcoming payoff.

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