Tarot Card Meanings: The Hanged Man

Give me release, witness me
I am outside, give me peace

Heaven holds a sense of wonder, and I wanted to believe
That I’d get caught up when the rage in me subsides

In this white wave I am sinking, in this silence
In this white wave, in this silence, I believe
I have seen you in this white wave, you are silent
You are breathing, in this white wave I am free

‘Silence’ by Delerium (McLachlan/Leeb/Fulber)

Welcome to my hanging circle! At the top of my Tarot journal page for the Hanged Man, I’ve scrawled ‘loitering with intent’, a phrase from Poppy Palin’s Everyday Enchantment Tarot, and I love it as a description of what’s happening in this card. Sometimes we need to wait, be still, to try to see things from every angle (even if involves flipping our whole worldview upsidedown), and to sit with our own discomfort. Sometimes it’s only by surrendering to a situation, trusting the flow of events and ourselves, and accepting (often difficult or painful) realities, that we are able to truly learn, and eventually move forward with our lives.

I see the Hanged Man as being primarily about three – often overlapping – things: perspective, patience, and sacrifice. When the card comes up in a reading it can sometimes indicate setbacks and delays. Like the Empress, this is a card that takes its time. The clue is in the image itself: things are gonna be suspended! However! All that hanging around will pay off, and the delay will change things for the better, as it will bring a much-needed change in how we view a situation or problem. After a sacrifice, we will learn something, often something about ourselves and what we are capable of, that was hidden from us before. For me, Thirteen’s description remains the most useful way into this card: “the Hanged Man goes infinitely in.” Not outwards, not onwards, but instead inward; into the slow, strange work of self-knowledge.

Symbolism in The Hanged Man Card

In the traditional RWS imagery, the Hanged Man is hanging upside-down by his foot from a tree/gallows shaped like a capital ‘T’. The tree has been variously linked to the Ankh, the Ancient Egyptian symbol of eternal life, the Hebrew letter taw (ת – truth), and the “Tau cross” which is modelled on the Greek letter tau (T – life or resurrection).

What might look a lot like death or punishment is inextricably linked with life. Sacrifice is, after all, not just about (the ultimate sacrifice of) death, but something we are asked to learn to do as we keep on living. It is often in giving something up that we make space for something new to take root.

With one leg crossed behind the other, the Hanged Man’s body forms another cross-like shape, suggesting a moment of suspension at a crossroads, an invitation to pause and consider our next direction. You can also see his “free” leg as bending to form an inverted ‘4’. In traditional symbolism, four is the number of the material world – the four directions, the four corners of the earth – reinforcing this sense of being held at a point of orientation, poised between possible paths.

Waite writes in The Pictorial Key that “he who can understand that the story of his higher nature is embedded in the symbolism [of the Hanged Man’s body position] will receive intimations concerning a great awakening.” Ah, good old Arthur E., always chiming in with some profound-sounding-gibberish like the really stoned guy at a house party 😂! So, what is this symbolism? If you go on the hunt for it (or just spend two weeks staring at Hanged Man cards like I have, lol), you can see his body forms a shape reminiscent of several esoteric symbols: the alchemical sign for sulphur (often associated with the masculine principle), and the fylfot cross, more widely known as the swastika (well, techncially they’re slightly different, as the fylfot cross’s arms are slightly truncated, but as good as) . Long before its horrendous 20th-century misappropriation, this symbol was used in Hindu traditions to evoke shakti, the dynamic, creative force of the universe. The word “swastika” also translates as “to be good” or “to be with the higher self.”

Taken together, these echoes point us back to Waite’s “higher nature”: a sense that, in this suspended state, something deeper is being activated. What looks like stillness is actually a quiet awakening, a reorientation of the self at a more fundamental level.

Around his head, the Hanged Man is often depicted with a golden nimbus that looks very much like a halo. We see halos a lot in Christian art, where they signify sainthood and divine favour, as well as enlightenment. But the symbol itself is much older, with roots often traced back to the sun god Ra in ancient Egypt. In later traditions, Roman emperors (who began to think of themselves as divine beings) were often depicted in art wearing crowns that imitated the sphere of light from the sun.

Maddy Elruna writes that the Hanged Man’s halo suggests his crown chakra is fully open – that he’s in a state of heightened awareness where his insight comes not through action, but through surrender. Tilly Tarot draws a helpful comparison with one of Tarot’s other light-bearers, The Hermit, noting that while both cards engage with spiritual awakening, they approach it differently: “The Hermit holds a lantern to the darkness, whereas… the Hanged Man [already] has signs of great energy and strength inside his being.” Where the Hermit searches, the Hanged Man receives. Thirteen similarly reflects on the relationship between the two, writing that “[The Hermit] makes a mental and intellectual search for metaphysical realities… but he’s not yet ready, as the Hanged Man is, to sacrifice everything — comfort, sanity, clarity of mind, even control, to actually reach, on a visceral level, that metaphysical reality.” Together, these perspectives position the Hanged Man not as a seeker, but as someone who has gone further – who has let go enough to experience what the Hermit is still trying to understand.

It’s also of note that the Hanged Man is upside-down – and in being so, his heart is above his head. When we’re faced with a problem, it’s easy to overthink it, searching for a neat, logical solution. But the Hanged Man asks something different of us: to stop trying to think our way through, and instead to feel – to trust the quieter, less-easily-articulated pull of our hearts.

“Watch out for intellect,
Because it knows so much it knows nothing
And leaves you hanging upside down,
Mouthing knowledge as your heart
Falls out your mouth”

Anne Sexton

This inward turn, away from intellect and towards something deeply personal and internal, is what sets the Hanged Man apart. He is not searching for the divine, nor even trying to understand it, but surrendering to it – and, in doing so, finding it within himself.

As Maddy Elruna puts it: “If the Hierophant is about teaching and wisdom, the High Priestess is about connection to the divine, and the Hermit is about reflection, the Hanged Man is about finding the divine within. All deeply spiritual cards, but finding that spirit through different perspectives.”

Finally, the Hanged Man always looks super zen (not how I’d look hanging upside-down from a tree by one leg, let me tell you!) As Rachel Pollack observes, “glorious light fills his face.  No other figure in the deck appears this way, not even the angels of Love, Temperance, and Judgement.  They display halos, but not that wondrous blaze.”

Waite, too, emphasises this quality, noting that the light “surrounds the head of the seeming martyr,” but see here that he points out that the Hanged Man only seems like a martyr, for his face expresses only “deep entrancement, not suffering.” This is not the anguish of reluctant sacrifice, but the calm of something that has been fully accepted. Pollack is particularly taken by this air of inner stillness; the Hanged Man, she suggests, experiences life through a heightened inner awareness, and seeing it visually represented on the card “affects us because it shows a direct image of peace and understanding.” That calm is so striking precisely because it has been arrived at – because the Hanged Man has “surrendered to the rhythms of life.” And, crucially, this surrender is not passive. As Pollack notes, true surrender involves participation, joining the ritual rather than standing apart from it: “surrender to the World Tree is an actual step we take, not a passive waiting.”

It’s a tricky little card though, IMO, with some really contradictory symbolism – which is prob why this deep dive is so frickin’ long, haha! The Hazlitt blog argues that the “tension between the card’s name and its image is half joke, half literary device,” and I agree. There is so much peace in the image, but the name carries a legacy of horror: of violence and unwanted death, of harm inflicted against our will. Whenever it comes up in a reading, clients tend to go “uh oh!” – because, taken at face value, it’s a deeply unsettling card. In some ways, even more so than Death. Death, at least, can be wanted and can be peaceful. The Hanged Man seems to imply something far more terrifying: meeting some kind of painful, publicly humiliating end. How did this card end up with that name? There’s a story there, undeniably. But what is it?

The Shape of Surrender: The Hanged Man in Christian Imagery

First off, when we look at the Hanged Man there are clear resonances with Christ on the cross. In the Garden of Gethsemane, contemplating his own impending death, Jesus prays: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” (Luke 22:42). This is not a declaration of defeat, but an act of active, trusting submission – a laying down of personal will in alignment with something greater. It’s an act of humility that says: I no longer need to force reality, I will let reality reveal itself through me. Which is, in many ways, the spiritual posture of the Hanged Man: a relinquishing of control, a surrendering. And this kind of giving in is not the same as giving up, it’s something that can be very freeing, very welcome. As Meg Jones Wall puts it, “there can be intense beauty in submission, incredible joy in releasing the need to control everything and recognising when we are outmatched.”

Obvs the key visual difference with a crucifixtion is that the Hanged Man is v clearly the wrong way round! However, a brief diversion to Saint Peter brings us back to that striking image of inversion. Tradition holds that Peter was crucified upside down in Rome during Nero’s persecution of the early Christians, feeling himself unworthy to die in the same manner as Christ. Though not recorded in the Bible, this account is popularised in the 2nd Century apocryphal Acts of Peter, where he requests an inverted crucifixion. Again, we see the same themes emerge: humility, surrender, and a reorientation of the self in relation to something greater.

Others have linked the Hanged Man to figures of both betrayal and martyrdom – people willing to die for the cause, as it were (to paraphrase an annyoing idion: one man’s traitor is another man’s martyr!) Some v. obvious heroes and others cast as traitors, yet all bound up in larger narratives of sacrifice. In earlier Tarot traditions, the card was sometimes known as The Traitor (more on that later), and often depicted a man hanging by one foot, coins spilling from his pockets: a clear echo of Judas Iscariot. Judas is, of course, the OG archetypal betrayer – the man who sold out Christ for thirty pieces of silver. But some Gnostic interpretations offer a more complicated story, recasting him not as villain, but as the one disciple willing to do what was asked of him: to hand Jesus over, and in doing so, set in motion the events that would lead to humanity’s salvation.

In this reading, Judas becomes a kind of dark mirror of the Hanged Man: a scapegoat figure, condemned and misunderstood, whose role requires him to bear the weight of others’ judgement. The sacrifice is not just Christ’s, but his as well.

So it is with the Hanged Man in Tarot. What looks, from the outside, like punishment or defeat reveals itself instead as a necessary trial – one that alters the self at a fundamental level. As Charlie Claire Burgess writes, “It’s a trial through which a deeper wisdom, a greater peace, a transformed and expanded sense of self emerges.”

The Traitor Reconsidered: The Hanged Man Card and Being Hung By Your Feet As Punishment

Out of all my deep dives, the Hanged Man has, in many ways, been the most confusing one to research and write. There feels to me to be a real disconnect between the Tarot’s origins as playing cards – where this figure appears as the Traitor – and the later, more spiritual symbolism that has been layered onto him where he represents willing sacrifice, patience, meditation, and changing perspective. Certainly, things evolve, and I do very much believe that archetypal images like those we see in the Tarot can carry ideas and patterns that even their creators weren’t consciously aware of. Nature loves patterns, and we do too, often replicating them over and over in meaningful ways, whether we realise it or not (for example, the most gratifying thing for me about writing creatively is when I subliminally pop in a little easter egg without even realising I’m doing it, and then get to feel disgustingly and undeservedly smug afterwards, haha). So even if the original Hanged Man was intended as a straightforward image of a traitor or criminal, that doesn’t necessarily mean those other, more spiritual meanings weren’t already there too, quietly bubbling beneath the surface.

But… but, but but… The Hanged Man remains a puzzler to me. The connections between his earlier incarnation as someone being pretty brutally punished for a crime and his later role can, at times, feel like a stretch. Still – let’s see! (A lengthy detour into the archives follows – I promise we’ll come back up for air at some point, haha.)

We can see this clash of meanings play out in the interpretations offered by some of the Godfathers of Tarot themselves. In The Book of Thoth, Aleister Crowley emphasises the harsher side of the card: “enforced sacrifice, punishment, loss, fatal or voluntary, suffering, defeat, failure, death.” Similarly, the Golden Dawn’s S.L. Mathers describes it in stark terms as “enforced sacrifice… punishment… loss… suffering generally.” By contrast, Waite’s interpretation in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot shifts the tone considerably, foregrounding “wisdom, circumspection, discernment, trials, sacrifice, intuition, divination, prophecy.” Again, these versions of the Hanged Man seem to occupy two very different symbolic worlds: one of punishment and loss, and one of insight and transformation. And, I dunno, man. Even for someone who likes ‘mental gymnastics’ as much as me (a real life quote courtesy of Reviewer 2!), the distance between the two is not easily bridged.

Crowley and Mathers seem to draw much more heavily on the card’s history as the Traitor, so it’s worth taking a brief journey down that darker road (brace yourselves – what follows is not exactly a heartwarming chapter in human history!)

Inverted hanging – suspending a person by the feet rather than the neck – was used in medieval times as a form of punishment, torture, and public humiliation, and in some cases as a method of execution. Some times victims were hung between two enraged dogs to make it Extra Grim (yay, humans!) Such punishment was often reserved for those considered especially transgressive: traitors, heretics, and those whose beliefs or actions marked them as dangerous outsiders (witches!) In late medieval Germany, this practice became particularly associated with Jews accused of theft, in what was known as the Judenstrafe (“Jewish punishment”) – a stark reminder of how systems of punishment are often entangled with prejudice and the policing of difference.

Early Tarot was emerging around this same time, so it’s not surprising that this card was commonly known as Il Traditore (“The Traitor”). As Gertrude Moakley remarks in her history of the Visconti-Sforza Tarot, it was the “special punishment of the recreant [unfaithful] or perjured [lying] knight…to be hung up by the heels and beaten. If the culprit was dead, his body was hung in this manner.” However, this punishment generally involved hanging the victims by both feet, a detail that differs markedly from the familiar Tarot image, where he hangs by a single ankle. Interestingly, one of the few decks I own that departs from this convention is the Erenberg Tarot. Usually a very faithful RWS clone, here Erenberg makes a clear and deliberate choice to depict the Hanged Man suspended by both feet, perhaps leaning more explicitly into the card’s historical roots as a figure of punishment.

When it did happen, one foot hanging would have likely had a specific torture aspect, as the victim would have no purchase and would flail around and possibly break the pelvis. I can’t actually find much historical evidence this specific method was widely used though. I have no doubt it did occur every now and then – humanity will never cease to appal me with the terrible tortures we dream up to inflict on one another – but it does not seem to have been a particularly common practice.

There are some scraps of evidence here and there. Timothy Betts cites a 1393 decree from Milan and Lombardy: “Let him be drawn on a [wooden] plank at a horse’s tail to the place of execution, and there be suspended by one foot to the gallows; and be left there until he is dead. As long as he lives let him be given food and drink.” I haven’t been able to trace the original source beyond Betts’ reference, though his research appears robust, and he provides the original Italian text in his endnotes. So while I have no particular reason to doubt its accuracy, it does seem to describe a very specific – and perhaps not widely representative – practice.

There are also some visual and textual traces from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that depict hanging by one foot, sometimes as a precursor to execution by drowning or decapitation. Clark’s Martyrology (1677) includes an illustration with the caption: “Som were hanged up by one Foote, their heads and brests in the water.” (Boy did I have to search high and low for this scan, and for the original text, thank god for my Uni’s library!) The book goes on to describe instances of Christian martyrdom using this method. In one account, a bishop named Armogastes is tortured and then “hang[ed]… up by one foot, with his head downward,” yet appears, strikingly, as though he were at rest – “as if he slept in a feather-bed” (very Hanged Man coded! And obvs throughout history there have been numerous reflections from those who survived torture claiming their pain was ‘taken away’ and turned instead to ecstasy by some form of higher power.) The other description is less ambiguous in its brutality, detailing how bodies were displayed in ways designed to degrade and humiliate: “Afterwards they took both these dead bodies, and hung them up naked by one foot neer to La Torre, and when any prisoner of the Protestants passed that way, they forced him or her to go and kisse their Privities, that they might put alike scorne both upon the living and dead.”

What we do know was far more common than actually hanging people by one foot was painting them this way! Moakley notes, “if he [the criminal] had escaped [and could not face punishment for his crimes] he was painted thus,” referring to the tradition of so-called “shame paintings” (pittura infamante) used to publicly mark those who had evaded justice – particularly debtors who had scarpered rather than pay up. In these cases, individuals were tried in absentia and then caricatures of them were painted on the outside walls of civic buildings or prisons, sometimes shown hanging upside down in this humiliating pose. Moakley writes that the position of the body was also intended to explicitly link the criminal to Judas, with his thirty pieces of silver – a visual shorthand for financial betrayal and its associated dishonour and moral failure. These images functioned as a kind of ongoing punishment: a public display of shame that remained in place until the individual was either captured or made reparation (Edgerton, 1985). (Interestingly, Moakley also notes that Francesco Sforza’s father, Muzio, was himself the subject of a “shame painting” in Rome in 1412 – a strong indication that the family who later commissioned one of the earliest Tarot decks would have been directly familiar with this visual language.)

We can push this even further by looking at the legal and cultural context in which these images operated. In the early Renaissance revival of Roman law, Edgerton (1985) describes the principles of fama and infamia. Fama denoted a person’s good name – their reputation, credibility, and social standing – while infamia marked its loss: a state in which one’s word could no longer be trusted, and one’s honour had effectively been stripped away. Crucially, this was not just a moral judgement, but a legal one. Those deemed infames could be subjected to torture in judicial proceedings, their dishonour taken as evidence of unreliability and the need to make sure they were really telling the truth, not just take their word for it (Carney, 2015). Reputation, in other words, was not abstract – it had painful real-world consequences!

Within this framework, punitive images begin to make a particular kind of sense. If a person’s fama could be destroyed, then it could also be attacked visually. These “shame paintings” functioned as a form of image violence: a public, often super-life-like depiction that fixed the individual in a state of dishonour. Among the most ignominious of these was the figure shown hanging upside down by one foot – just like the Hanged Man. First recorded as a pittura infamante in Rome in 1347, this motif visually encoded disgrace, betrayal, and social inversion: the loss not just of status, but of one’s natural place in the world.

This idea of inversion, of being quite literally turned upside down, resonates with the broader medieval cultural topos (theme) that existed at the time: that of mundus inversus. Literally the “world turned upside down,” this idea was often associated with comedy, disorder, and humiliation. The folklorist Barbara Babcock defines mundus inversus as “any act of expressive behaviour which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values, and norms — be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious or social and political.”

Yet this kind of inversion was not always or exclusively understood negatively. As Bob O’Neill notes in his discussion of Hanged Man iconography, the idea of being turned upside down could also be read as a necessary stage in a spiritual journey – one that would not have seemed strange to a fifteenth-century viewer (Davidson, 1996). Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, describes the spiritual aspirant as a ‘fool for Christ’, adding “like jesters and tumblers, who, with heads down and feet up, exhibit extraordinary behaviour…” (James, 1953) – a striking image of inversion not as disgrace, but as transformation.

Seen this way, the Hanged Man in the Tarot can def be understood as a kind of mundus inversus figure, someone who steps outside the usual rules and rhythms of the world. And, of course, what counts as “upside down” depends very much on where one is standing! As Thirteen notes, during the American Revolution, British forces used to sing a song about “the world turned upside down” to describe what they saw as a dangerous and illegitimate inversion of the natural order – common people placing themselves above a king. To them, this was chaos; to the revolutionaries, it was freedom! And, as she reminds us, those who signed the Declaration of Independence did so at real personal risk: if captured, they would have been executed as traitors. So, whilst earlier versions of the Tarot might mark this inversion as shame or disorder, we can perhaps see a path to its more modern interpretation. What looks like transgression from one perspective may be transformation from another. As Charlie Claire Burgess explains, “this card asks us to sacrifice a certain amount of comfort, safety, and societal acceptance in order to strive for something better.”

By the late eighteenth century, however, the meaning of the Hanged Man began to shift quite dramatically, and somewhat speculatively, lol, mainly down to the work of the pastor and Tarot enthusiast Antoine Court de Gébelin. Writing in 1781, de Gébelin famously claimed (without any real historical evidence) that the Tarot preserved the lost wisdom of ancient Egypt, passed down in secret through the centuries. Within this framework, he reinterpreted the Hanged Man not as a traitor undergoing punishment, but as a symbolic figure whose meaning had been misunderstood over time. According to de Gébelin, the image had originally been the right way up: a man standing on one foot, the other raised cautiously, as if testing the ground ahead. This, he argued, represented Prudence – the one Cardinal Virtue not already present in the Tarot (alongside Strength, Temperance, and Justice). He imagined that the OG Hanged Man was possibly even (very purdently, haha) avoiding a snake, which he theorised had then been turned upside-down and warped into the rope that binds the Hanged Man’s ankle. Kinda ironically de Gébelin concluded that a “presumptuous cartier, not understanding the beauty of the allegory contained under this card, took upon himself to correct it, and disfigured it entirely” by turning it into a man hanging the wrong way up by his foot. NO DE GÉBELIN! THAT WAS YOU! YOU ARE THE PRESUMPTUOUS CARTIER! lol

There is… something going on here though, I think. As de Gébelin noted, Prudence is closely associated with the image of the snake. In classical iconography, Prudentia is often depicted either stepping carefully over a snake, lifting her skirts to avoid it (or maybe even scaring it with her terrifying vulva – no, seriously!) or holding one as an attribute. In both cases, the snake represents not deceit, but discernment: the ability to move through the world with care, intelligence, and strategic awareness.

This symbolism draws on the Biblical injunction to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16). Here, the message is one of balance: to remain open and uncorrupted, but also to be clever and calculating in how one moves through the world. The virtue of prudence provides the right balance of dovish and serpentine, a balance between innocence and strategic awareness. Seen through this lens, the recurring appearance of snakes in many modern Hanged Man depictions (more on them later), perhaps most famously in the Thoth deck, begins to make a certain kind of sense. Even if de Gébelin’s historical claims don’t quite hold, his instinct is an interesting one: that beneath the image of suspension lies a subtler theme of sensible hesitation and thoughtful calm, a careful testing of the ground before the next step is taken.

This whole thing (traitor vs. blissed out meditator) is still a bit of a struggle for me, I admit, but Thirteen offers a particularly compelling way of reconciling these threads. She suggests that the Hanged Man can still be seen as a “traitor”, but not in the conventional sense, rather in a more radical one: “someone willing to sacrifice himself to go against the status quo.” Not a Judas, but a Prometheus – one who betrays the established order in order to bring something new into being, and who is willing to suffer for that act. In this sense, he is “a traitor to the right-side-up world”: he sees differently to everyone else and accepts the consequences that follow. The suspension that results is not meaningless punishment, but the holding pattern that follows disruption: a period in which the old order has been challenged, but the new one has not yet fully taken shape. She concludes that “the Hanged Man represents a ‘betrayal’ against the status quo. It represents, ultimately, not merely your own change in perspective, but a way in which you can change everything.”

O’Neill believes that this same interpretation would have been available even to Tarot-fans in the 15th Century: “while the first impression might have been negative, there are also hints [in the card] of the humility of St. Peter. Thus, while the inverted position might be considered as punishment when forcefully imposed, when voluntarily adopted it might have been associated with the spiritual conversion experience of Dante or Bernard’s ‘Fool for Christ’ turning cartwheels. So the material was also available to the card-players who might have seen the symbol as representing a reversal of values, a voluntary reversal that permits the mystical experience represented in the remaining trumps.” In this light, the Hanged Man becomes not simply a figure of disgrace, but one of voluntary reversal: a turning of values that opens the way to transformation.

Hanging on the World Tree: Odin and the Hanged Man Card

Another striking parallel to the Hanged Man can be found in Norse mythology, in the story of Odin, the de facto King of the Gods, who offers “himself to himself” as a sacrifice. Hanging from Yggdrasil, the World Tree, for nine days and nights, wounded by a spear, and denied bread and mead, he endures a ritual of suffering and suspension. On the ninth day, he perceives the runes beneath him, grasping not just the physical stones but, more crucially, their meaning, and in doing so claims them for himself. From this ordeal comes knowledge – not given, but hard-won.

“I know that I hung on that windy tree
Nine days and nights
Stabbed with a spear, and offered to Odin,
Myself to myself”

from the Hávamál

It’s no surprise, then, that many Tarot decks draw on the story of Odin on Yggdrasil as inspo for the Hanged Man. The myth captures something essential about the card: that waiting is a time of both meditation and trial, sacrifice and prophecy. The gift of knowledge is what we buy with our sacrifice; in order to gain, one must give. Learning more about the world and changing our perspectives can be difficult and painful, but is so often worth it. As Jen Conway and Fiona Lensvelt write, the Hanged Man “seeks a new way of being, and the cost of finding it is his comfort”.

There’s that same sense of slightly bonkers ecstasy through sacrifice here that I discussed earlier in the blog when discussing martyrs who experience stillness, even pleasure, in the midst of torture, their pain transfigured by faith in a higher power.. As Criminal Justice Chris explains, “Odin — Wōðanaz, lord of frenzy, shepherd of the ecstatic, whisperer of the runes — exists at the threshold where life trembles on the edge of death, where knowledge and madness converge, and where vision is gained only through sacrifice and surrender.”

Buttttt…. once again the whole ‘is this imagery really present in the card?’ issue rears its ugly head, lol. Because was Odin hung upside down, as in the Hanged Man (and as we see in decks like Bonestone & Earthflesh), or by the neck – as, interestingly, Eric Maille depicts him in the Ink Witch Tarot? Odin is, after all, known as the Lord of the Gallows, and the prevailing scholarly view is that he was hanged by the neck as per how-we-humans-tend-to-hang-people-from-gallows, not the feet. In Norse literature, when a person is sacrificed to Odin, the term gefinn (“given”) is used to mark this offering – and the ritual itself is strikingly consistent: the victim is pierced with a spear and hanged from a tree. We see this, for example, in Gautreks Saga, where Starkaðr sacrifices King Víkarr: he is hanged, stabbed, and explicitly declared as given to Odin. Similarly, in the Hávamál, when Odin describes his own ordeal on Yggdrasil, the language and metaphors point to hanging by the neck, accompanied by wounding, not inversion.

Then we have the Oseberg Tapestry. Though poorly preserved, it gives us a really great insight into Norse beliefs and practices. Folded and placed in the Oseberg burial mound when it was sealed in 834, it remained hidden underground, along with other woven textiles, until the grave was opened in 1904. A fragment from the tapestry appears to depict multiple figures hanging from the branches of a tree, and Marianne Vedeler, professor at the Museum of Cultural History, notes: “There might be nine men hanging from the branches here… That immediately brings to mind Yggdrasil.” If these figures represent sacrifices to Odin, it is likely they are being hanged in the same way as him, suggesting suspension by the neck rather than the foot, and marking an important distinction from the traditional Tarot Hanged Man image.

If you’ll forgive me a little aside (arghhh, the rabbitholing has been intense with this deep dive, lol!) what I find super interesting is the Oseberg fragments also contain numerous swastika motifs (you can see one sneaking in bottom left there) – an ancient symbol associated with cycles, movement, and cosmic order. The echo here is uncanny: the Hanged Man’s crossed legs form a similar rotating shape, as though caught mid-turn, suspended between states. Vedeler explains, “the swastika is an ancient symbol that’s been used in the Nordic region since the early Iron Age.” Though obvs it predates the Vikings, with examples dating back thousands of years BCE. Its meaning likely shifted over time, and “we can’t be certain what significance it held for the Vikings.” Still.. this is really weird, huh? And it’s why I love Tarot, all these eerie little repeating symbols and archetypes that track us through the millennia, even in cultures separated by oceans and eons!

All that said, it’s not entirely out of the question that Odin may have been hanged inverted. Some readings of the myth suggest that, in hanging from Yggdrasil, he peers down into the well of Urðr in order to gain knowledge of the runes: “I peered right down in the deep; / crying aloud I lifted the Runes / then back I fell from thence” (Hávamál). One version of the story even describes him as both hanging from the tree and drinking from the well of wisdom, which, unless you’re quite the contortionist, would be much easier to do if you’re head down! There is also the precedent of Norse animal sacrifice, in which creatures were sometimes suspended by the feet before being slaughtered. If Odin is truly “giving himself to himself,” one could argue that he undergoes a similar ritual form.

So, does the Hanged Man have anything to do with Odin? IDK, but I do know that it fits beautifully for my little magpie brain. Both Odin on Yggdrasil and the Hanged Man are figures suspended at the threshold – between knowledge and unknowing, surrender and transformation. The specifics may shift across time and culture, but the underlying pattern feels strikingly familiar: that sense that insight comes not through force, but through pause, reversal, and sacrifice. As Rachel Pollack so beautifully puts it, “None of us can know the full meaning of being alive until, like Odin, we hang ourselves on the World Tree, its roots deep beyond knowledge in the sea of experience, its branches lost among the endless stars.”

From Womb to World: Rebirth and the Hanged Man

Others have pointed out that the imagery of the Hanged Man recollects when a baby turns in the womb ready for labour to begin, upside-down, legs crossed, looking like it’s almost hanging from the umbilical cord (like the traditional rope). Waiting to be born, the baby hovers between one world and the next. In this sense, the Hanged Man can be understood as a figure of rebirth. Sometimes we are asked to shed everything we thought we knew – our material concerns, our day to day habits and patterns – and give up our resistance to new ways of thinking. To return, in a way, to a spiritual “womb” (echoing the High Priestess, who sits between light and dark, sensing and knowing), and to wait there – patiently, uncertainly – until a new consciousness begins to emerge.

Kwaw, on the Aeclectic Tarot forum, also draws a connection between this ‘baby in the womb’ imagery and the figure of the Messiah, with its undertones of spiritual renewal and transformed perspective. As they put it, “Like any child he descends or is born ‘head first’; as the anointed one he takes on the sins of the world through his suffering.” In this reading, the Hanged Man becomes not only a figure of suspension, but of incarnation, linked by Christian cabbalists to the Logos (e.g. divine knowledge entering the world), and, in more Platonic terms, to the figure who returns from enlightenment to share what they’ve learned, even at personal cost. (Plato argues that because most people are narrow-minded idiots, lol, they tend not to take kindly to the philosopher who attempts to educate them, and often straight up murder them, à la Socrates, if they ‘return to the cave’ of ignorance to try and let the others know there’s a big, bright, world of knowledge out there. In that sense, the Hanged Man once again begins to resemble both martyr and traitor: one who sees differently, and suffers for it.)

The Hanged Man, then, is less a symbol of birth than of rebirth, echoed in the baptismal image of lowering the head beneath water, a ritual of surrender that precedes transformation. And this might be part of why so many Hanged Man cards have their figure dunking its head into a body of water…

Into The Deep: The Links Between the Hanged Man Card and Water

There’s a long-standing association between the Hanged Man and water, which draws us back to that same cluster of meanings: birth, rebirth, and transformation. Babies float (often upside down!) in the waters of the womb; initiates are immersed in baptismal rites, entering as one thing and emerging as another. Across cultures, water marks the threshold between states – a space of cleansing and change. To be suspended in water is also to enter a different kind of consciousness. When I think of the Hanged Man in the below cards, I think of that feeling you get when you sink to the bottom of a swimming pool and let yourself float there, staring up through the wavering sunlight towards the surface. It’s like you’re in your own private little muffled cocoon, alone in a way that is both unsettling and strangely peaceful. It evokes dreaming, vision, and a general slightly floaty dislocated state – the same inward turn we see in the Hanged Man.

Water has also long been used for scrying, for glimpsing hidden truths, and it is perhaps our earliest mirror: a surface in which we see ourselves, but never quite as we are.

There’s also connections between the Hanged Man and water in Tarot scholarship – though, in true occult fashion, it’s often buried under a fair bit of esoteric waffling. In the Golden Dawn system, the Hanged Man is linked to the Hebrew letter mem (מ), which symbolises water – the fons et origo, the source and origin of all things. Water, in this tradition, is a space of depth and reflection: a medium in which everything appears inverted, and where the surface conceals hidden layers beneath. Mathers describes the card as “The Spirit of the Mighty Waters” – which, stripped of the mysticism, points us toward something we already recognise in the card: surrender, immersion, and ceding to currents far stronger than ourselves. To stop fighting the flow and instead let ourselves drift, suspended, and perhaps even submerged, for a time.

This is exactly the territory the Hanged Man inhabits. In willingly suspending himself – hanging inverted, removed from the ordinary flow of things – he allows himself to drift into those deeper waters of intuition, dream, and altered perception. Neptune speaks to spirituality, imagination, and the porous boundary between self and world; and the Hanged Man, in his stillness, opens himself to all of it.

Thirteen builds on this idea, noting that the Hanged Man, as a water-aligned figure, is not simply peaceful, but deeply immersed in vision and emotion, “lost in visions and dreams and the esoteric… powerful, deep emotions.” He quite literally does not have his feet on the ground, and his head isn’t in the usual place for rational thought, lol. In this sense, the Hanged Man’s altered perspective is not always calm or comfortable. To see differently is, at times, to become consumed by that vision – to step outside consensus reality in a way that can look, from the outside, like madness. But perhaps that’s part of the point, as transformation rarely comes from those who remain entirely grounded! As Thirteen says, this is kinda the card of “delusional visionaries… [and] fanatics” but sometimes you have to be those things “because the [status quo] isn’t going to give way easily. A realist might give up. A rebel won’t. His delusion is necessary to keep him fighting, and to make change possible.”

Also, as y’all know, I am a hopeless bibliophile, so I cannot finish this section without mentioning the Hanged Man’s connections to one of my favourite poets, T. S. Eliot. Rachel Pollack notes that while Eliot claimed not to consciously draw on the Tarot, The Waste Land suggests an intuitive grasp of the Hanged Man’s connection to water. Madame Sosostris warns her client to “fear death by water,” and while she says “I do not find the Hanged Man,” she instead reveals “the drowned Phoenician Sailor” – a figure who seems to stand in for him, someone submerged instead of suspended. A figure of immersion instead of inversion, lost beneath the surface, transformed in ways that are not immediately visible.

The Hanged Man may seem like a peaceful card, but when he comes up in a reading he is sometimes asking us to do something the exact opposite of peaceful – he’s asking us to disturb the universe!

The Snake In Our Stars: Why are there so many serpents in Hanged Man cards?

Snakes are everywhere in Hanged Man imagery, so we’re going to go a little deeper into all their snakey meanings and explore what they’re doing there! At their most basic, snakes are creatures of change, shedding their skin, slipping between states, slithery and hard to pin down. As Crowley puts it, the serpent represents nature in its regenerative mode: the force that drives all transformation.

There’s also a long-standing visual archetype of the serpent entwined around a staff (a symbol closely associated with healing) in much the same way we see it wrapped around the Hanged Man’s gallows. The caduceus, for example, or Moses’ staff “which is transformed from rod to snake, and from snake back to rod” (Tishby, 1989) – a symbol of something fixed becoming fluid, and fluid becoming fixed. In alchemical terms, this is transformation at its most fundamental: the shifting of one state into another. Auntie’s Tarot also points to an interesting Biblical parallel: the story of Moses raising a bronze serpent on a wooden staff – a kind of tau-shaped cross – so that those who looked upon it were healed. And, intriguingly, in some early Christian and Gnostic traditions, the serpent is not a symbol of deceit, but of Christ himself – lifted up, suffering, and yet transformative; a bearer of knowledge, and, crucially, a source of healing.

Rosanne, on the Aeclectic Tarot forum, also makes a super interesting connection between the Hanged Man and the so-called “thirteenth” zodiac sign, Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer. (Now watch me get sucked into another wormhole about the thirteenth star sign, lol!) The zodiac system we use today was developed by the Babylonians around 2,500 years ago. They divided the sky into twelve approximately equal sections, one for each month, and assigned a constellation to each. VERY NICE AND NEAT. But the sky itself doesn’t quite cooperate with that pleasing symmetry. NASA pointed out that, in reality, the Sun passes through thirteen constellations along the ecliptic (its apparent path across the sky) rather than the traditional twelve used in astrology. One of these is Ophiuchus, actually a pretty large constellation that occupies more celestial real estate than Scorpio! Though, as Phil Pait observes, “Scorpius has brighter stars and an obvious scorpion-like shape, so it gets better press.”

Associated with the Greek figure of Asclepius, Ophiuchus carries strong themes of transformation, knowledge, and crossing boundaries that perhaps shouldn’t be crossed. Asclepius, the Greek god of healing and medicine, was such a talented healer he could even bring folks back from the dead. Unsurprisingly, this royally pissed off Hades (it’s hard to rule the Underworld when your population keeps disappearing!), and led to Hades’ brother Zeus striking Asclepius down with a thunderbolt, before, somewhat ironically, ultimately honouring him by placing him among the stars.

Modern interpretations of Ophiuchus as a ‘star sign’ often describe a slightly rebellious energy, someone who questions established systems and refuses to accept things simply because “that’s how they’ve always been done.” The parallels with the Hanged Man are hard to ignore: the seeker who sees differently, pushes beyond accepted limits, and, in doing so, risks consequences. The serpent here is not just a symbol of transformation, but of dangerous knowledge – the kind that can heal, but also disrupt – or even resurrect.

The Cocoon Phase: The Hanged Man and the Process of Becoming

Lots of decks render the Hanged Man as a chrysalis. What looks, at first glance, like total inaction and inertia is in fact a period of fundamental (and wonderful!) change. Like someone meditating or deep in prayer (or me when I’m staring out the window trying to figure out how to write these deep dives, lol), the stillness is deceptive. From the outside, it reads as doing nothing, but inside, everything is happening. The caterpillar in its cocoon is not idle; it is dissolving, re-forming, becoming. The work is simply hidden from view.

The Hanged Man asks for that same kind of pause. We cannot see differently while rushing forward in the same old direction. To shift perspective, to truly turn things upside down, requires a kind of stopping. A willingness to hang there, suspended, long enough for something new to emerge. Stillness, then, is not the absence of movement, but the condition that makes transformation possible.

And we shouldn’t fight this change. Bakara Wintner captures this beautifully: “a snake does not mourn the loss of its old skin, and neither does the caterpillar lament its chrysalis.” When it comes up in a reading, the Hanged Man can remind us of the need to trust instinctively in the necessity of change. “There is wisdom found in the animal kingdom in their relationship to transformation,” Wintner continues, “to grow, you must outgrow.”

After all, “when we move in a particular direction, we are sacrificing other possibilities, giving up potential in one area so we may pursue it in another,” as Meg Jones Wall puts it. The Hanged Man ‘loiters with intent’, not because he cannot move, but because he understands the cost of movement. To act is to choose, and to choose is to close doors. Suspended here, he holds them open a little longer.

If the chrysalis speaks to transformation, it also speaks to a different kind of waiting, one that is far more active, far more alive than it first appears. Not the impatient sort. Not the clock-watching, foot-tapping, huffing and puffing kind.

“I mean, is there that much of a difference between ‘wait’ and ‘hang in there’? But I think what’s important—and maybe missing—is that the Hanged Man’s waiting isn’t just ‘have patience.’ That would be Seven of Pents, right? … This is a time for sacrificing some point of view and seeing things differently. Maybe from the other person’s perspective.

When you do this, then the Hanged Man is no longer waiting or even ‘hanging in there.’ He is, instead, a time of quiet discovery. A time where you say, ‘Oh, that’s different. How interesting…’ and drink this new perspective in.

The Hanged Man isn’t suffering, and isn’t wanting to right himself yet. He is in the middle of freeing himself from something … and absorbing something different. He may be passive, but he’s in the middle of a process all the same. He’s not in a waiting room glancing with irritation at the clock.”

Thirteen, Aeclectic Tarot Forum

A couple of my foodie-themed decks strike a very similar vibe. In the Magic Pantry Tarot, the Hanged Man becomes broth, which is a great metaphor. Broth takes a long time of relative inactivity to richen and infuse. A rolling boil may look exciting, but it’s not always wise – sometimes a slow simmer is required. In the Gourmet Tarot, our upsidedown pal is instead smoked fish. The guidebook notes that hanging smoked foods represent “the need to let go and surrender to the natural process of transformation.” Smoking is a slow, passive method that relies on time, patience, and trust in the process. Just like the card, it’s about stillness, surrender, and emerging changed on the other side.

And then there’s one of my favourite Hanged Men, from the Grounded Wisdom Tarot, where the creator Gabby Morris reimagines him as The Fallow Field. I can’t tell you how much I bloody LOVE this metaphor; I use it with clients who are struggling with this card all the time.

It captures the core of the Hanged Man so cleanly: stillness, rest, and the idea that what looks like inactivity may in fact be preparing the ground for new growth. Even the sense of sacrifice is there, I feel. It can doubtless be frustrating to give up a few fields each year when you’re desperate for crops, but it is also a necessity if you want the farm to flourish in the long-term.

For a time, particularly before the resurgence of organic and regenerative farming, this idea fell out of favour. Letting land lie fallow was dismissed as inefficient and old-fashioned, even wasteful. Productivity became the priority: more yield, more output, more, more, more, now. But the logic of constant extraction comes at a cost which we’re still reckoning with on a global scale – in depleted soils, in diminished ecosystems, even in the declining nutritional value of some of the food we produce. And, as a result, fallow field farming has started to come back into fashion.

Morris’ guidebook speaks about her Hanged Man as being a call to “embracing rest, honouring the need for recovery, [and] acknowledging the necessity for periods without growth”. Which is such a valuable message in our fast-pasted neo-liberal capitalist world, where growth is expected to be exponential and everything should be bigger, better, faster, stronger than the year before. Which we all know IS NOT POSSIBLE. As the Tarot teaches us, our world, our lives, our bodies, are built around cycles – waxing and waning, rising and falling, growing and resting. Morris asks us “how are you developing ways to rest and recover, allowing new insights to thrive?”

But it’s easy to forget that. Like productivity-obsessed farmers, we can get carried away – working, working, working, always pushing for more. Until, one day, something gives, the ideas stop coming, the energy drains out of things that once felt easy. You find yourself tired, not just physically, but all the way through to your soul. Tired of the noise, the effort, the constant forward motion. Your body starts to fail, your brain freezes, and you just… stop.

That’s the moment to remember the fallow fields.  The philosopher and theologian Howard Washington Thurman once said, “There is a fallow time for the spirit when the soil is barren because of sheer exhaustion.” And when that time comes, the Hanged Man reminds us that the answer is not to push harder, or to wring one more ounce of effort from an already depleted self. It is to rest, to step back, and to tend, gently, to the parts of your life that nourish rather than demand. And then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, something shifts. After the pause, after the long, quiet work of recovery, an opportunity will come and the field will be ready to work again. As Thurman concludes, “work out new designs by dreaming daring dreams and great and creative planning. The time is not wasted. The time of fallowness is a time of rest and restoration, of Ailing up and replenishing. It is the moment when the meaning of all things can be searched out, tracked down and made to yield the secret of living.”

Yoga and the Hanged Man Tarot Card: Hold That Pose

I’ve always thought there’s a very clear connection between the Hanged Man and yoga, and so it’s never surprised me that so many decks make it explicit, by turning their hanged folks into yogis. And yet, I’ve seen some resistance to it among some Tarot commentators. Yoga, after all, is often framed as calm, centred, vaguely aspirational, kinda bougie – all yummy mummies under soft lighting on expensive mats – while the Hanged Man is sacrifice, suspension, discomfort. But the parallels are there, if we’re willing to look a little more closely.

At its core, yoga is not about performance or achievement, but about a kind of return, a coming back into alignment, into presence. In the Asian tradition, a ‘return to immanence’ (‘then there is’) is the literal translation of ‘yoga’. And, like the Hanged Man, it isn’t something you can force. You can’t make yoga happen, any more than you can rush transformation. You can place yourself in the posture, sure, but the shift itself, the moment where something opens or releases, arrives in its own time. All you can really do is soften, breathe, and allow it.

In yogic practice, too, inversion carries both physical and spiritual significance. Poses such as Sirsasana (the headstand, or the inverted tree pose) are not simply feats of strength or balance, but invitations into altered awareness. Blood flows differently, breath changes, and the world, quite literally, turns on its head. As B.K.S. Iyengar states, in his book Yoga: The Path to Holistic Health, the “creative struggle is experienced in the headstand: as we challenge ourselves to improve the position, fear of falling acts to inhibit us. If we are rash, we fall, if timorous, we make no progress. But if the interplay of the two forces is observed, analysed and controlled, we can achieve perfection.” And with that interplay can come a kind of quieting: “after a session of yoga, the mind becomes tranquil and passive,” he concludes.

There is something particularly Hanged Man-esque about inversion here. The literal act of turning the body upside down, of seeing the world from a new orientation, is not always comfortable. It can be disorienting, even a little alarming. Muscles you didn’t know you had begin to tremble, balance falters, and if you start fighting it, it can feel like a form of torture! (I am recently about to start yoga again after about a decade of not practicing, and am kinda dreading it tbh, haha). But if you flow with it, then you experience the message of the Hanged Man. As Meg Jones Wall puts it, “like a difficult, inverted yoga pose, we hold our position for as long as we can, knowing that we are stretching unfamiliar muscles, awakening a strained but necessary awareness.”

And this isn’t just metaphor. Within certain occult traditions, drawing in part on yogic ideas, inversion has been understood as a way of transforming energy itself. As Rachel Pollack notes, some believed that by literally standing on the head, gravity might draw energy upward, from the lower body to the mind, transmuting desire into something more rarefied, more conscious. This begins to edge us toward something deeper, a state sometimes described in yoga as samadhi, where the usual boundaries soften, where subject and object blur, and perception itself is subtly reconfigured. Where we’re not just seeing the world differently, but experiencing a different relationship to seeing.

In my Hermit post I rambled on about the writings of Scottish poet Anna ‘Nan’ Shepherd, who spent much of her life walking in the Cairngorms. Shepherd didn’t treat the mountains as something to be conquered, she sought to be with the mountain, to know what she called the “total mountain.” In one poem, she describes the “strange gifts of pleasure [of] the mind” that come when one is “de-formed, annulled, unmade” by immersion in the mountain.

“She feels the whole creation drown,
The ache of form allayed.
The streaming seas, the ocean gulf,
The rocks dissolve away.
Now she may re-create herself.
Now is the primal day.”

From ‘Lux Perpetua’ by Nan Shepherd

In her book The Living Mountain, Shepherd draws an explicit parallel with yoga, describing the “controlled breathing of the Yogi” as akin to those moments when, after hours of walking, “motion is felt, not merely known by the brain, as the ‘still centre’ of being.”

And then she goes on to offer us something very close to a Hanged Man experience:

“Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. How new it has become! From the close-by springs of heather to the most distant fold of the land, each detail stands erect in its own validity… Details are no longer part of a grouping in a picture of which I am the focal point, the focal point is everywhere”

To turn the body upside down is, again, to undo the hierarchy of perception. The self is no longer the organising centre. The world does not arrange itself around you. Instead, everything stands “erect in its own validity.” Which may be one of the deepest lessons of the Hanged Man: not simply to see differently, but to relinquish the need to be the one who sees from the centre at all.

The Hanged Man in Tarot and BDSM Practices: The Art of Letting Go

This brings me nicely to my two kinkiest decks, the Eros Tarot and the Tarot Erotica, and it’s absolutely no surprise to me that both these decks make this card pretty explicitly about BDSM (and Shibari in particular). Because once you begin thinking about suspension, surrender, and the deliberate relinquishing of control, it becomes difficult not to notice the parallels with BDSM practice.

Just like the Hanged Man, BDSM is not about pain for its own sake, nor about helplessness imposed from the outside. Quite the opposite. At its core, BDSM is structured around consent, trust, and negotiated vulnerability. The one who is bound, suspended, or restrained is not powerless, they are participating in a chosen experience of giving up control. In a session with a dom, the submissive enters a space where they no longer need to make decisions or shoulder responsibility. The weight of control is lifted, allowing them to experience a profound psychological release. Which begins to look very much like the Hanged Man!

In practices involving tying up and suspension in particular, the parallels become almost literal. The body is held, supported, movement is restricted, it can certainly be painful, at least to start with. But over time, something shifts, and the ordinary relationship between effort and outcome dissolves. The mind, deprived of its usual routes of control, begins to quiet. The constant forward drive – fix, solve, act, decide – falls away. What emerges instead is a heightened presence, a kind of attunement to sensation, to breath, to the immediate moment. Within BDSM communities, this altered state is often described as subspace – a kind of nice, floaty, expansive, pleasurable feeling where your sense of self starts to disappear.

Which brings us, perhaps unexpectedly, back to the Hanged Man, and, further still, to the ecstatic experiences under torture described by certain religious mystics and martyrs I touched on earlier in this (admittedly bonkers long!) deep dive. For example, Saint Teresa of Ávila famously wrote of an angel piercing her heart with a golden spear, an experience she described as both intensely painful and profoundly pleasurable: “the sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one cannot possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul content with anything but [this].” The suffering does not disappear, but is transformed, transfigured into something else, something almost unbearable in its intensity, yet not something she wishes to escape.

Across these very different contexts, we see a similar pattern: sensation heightened to the point where it becomes something other than itself, pain shading into pleasure, discomfort into revelation. To borrow from Trent Reznor, the Hanged Man in a reading can sometimes be about getting ourselves a little ‘closer to god’ – whatever that is for us.

“If all roads lead the wrong way, turn the map upside down!”: Lightwork and the Hanged Man Card

Some decks lean fully into the idea of perspective shift as a vital and very embodied experience, by turns weird and uncanny, strangely liberating, and stunningly beautiful. The Tarot of Oneness, for example, reframes the Hanged Man simply as “Perspective,” placing us high above the ground in a hot air balloon. It really captures that idea of all our troubles just melting away like the clouds as we get this new sense of distance and perspective. The Cosmic Cycles Tarot’s Hanged Man becomes a mountain climber, pausing mid-ascent – not in crisis, but in rest. Taking a breather (or, by the looks of it, a cigarette break, which I’m not sure is the most sensible thing to do while undertaking extreme physical activity with reduced oxygen, but we are where we are!), and looking out over the landscape from a newly won vantage point. It’s an interesting inversion of the usual discomfort we associate with the card. Many would find this position physically and mentally uncomfortable (heights obvs freak out a lot of people), even precarious. And yet, by leaning into it, he finds something else entirely: a sense of space, of clarity, even of beauty.

In Tarot Of The Abyss we are presented with an ‘Odin’s eye view’ of the world as he hangs from Yggdrasil; it’s strangely unsettling, disorienting in its angle and scale, and a really effective presentation of the mysterious energy of this card. As Bakara Wintner observes, “every time I see The Hanged Man card my impulse is to turn him around, not because I don’t know he’s chilling exactly how he’s supposed to, but because my brain wants things right side up. Society’s response to this archetype is similar, and The Hanged Man can be met with criticism or bewilderment for his unusual views.” There’s something v. human in Wintner’s reaction – the urge to correct, to restore, to put things back into their proper orientation. But the Hanged Man resists that impulse, he asks us instead to sit with the unfamiliar, to tolerate the skewed and the sideways. To accept that what feels wrong may, in fact, be a different kind of right.

The Heartscape Tarot’s Hanged Man is pretty trippy, and then the Mushroom Hunter’s Tarot leans fully into the trip, lol. Here the card shows a psychedelic mushroom, the Mexican Liberty Cap. A sacred part of rituals for the Aztecs, they were referred to as “god fungus”. They contain psilocybin, which can be used in the treatment of depression and trauma, and as the creator Joe Buckley writes, when taken “one may become suspended in time, surrendering their ego and finding a sense of interconnectedness between all things”. Whilst trying to isolate the psilocybin compound, the chemist Albert Hofmann ingested 32(!) Liberty Caps, and described his experience thusly:

At the peak of the intoxication, about 1¹⁄₂ hours after ingestion of the mushrooms, the rush of interior pictures, mostly changing in shape and colour, reached such an alarming degree that I feared I would be torn into this whirlpool of form and colour and would dissolve. After about six hours, the dream came to an end. Subjectively, I had no idea how long this condition had lasted. I felt my return to everyday reality to be a happy return from a strange, fantastic but not quite really experienced world into an old and familiar home.

Albert Hofmann, ‘The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens’

It’s a perfect depiction of the Hanged Man’s surrender: disorientation, ego dissolution, and the strange beauty of seeing the world (and oneself) from an utterly transformed perspective.

The Hanged Man from the Everyday Enchantment Tarot is another one that really captures the joy of the card. Instead of getting angry and stressed out that the bus is late, this Hanged Man embraces the opportunity of unexpected time, and surrenders to the situation. The creator, Poppy Palin (RIP), writes “the Hanged Man asks us to reverse and invert so that we can change our minds, or our lives, by turning everything on its head. The upside down boy doesn’t flip out, but flips over and takes a break”. Jessica Dore likens the message of this card to therapeutic processes and quotes the psychologist Steven Hayes: “acceptance is not passive tolerance or resignation, but an intentional behaviour that alters the function of inner experiences from events to be avoided to a focus of interest, curiosity, and observation”.

Then I LOVE the joyful abandonment in this rollercoaster Hanged Man from the Colorays Tarot. Sometimes if we surrender to the sensation of not being in control, of having everything flipped around and turned upside down, we can find a kind of wild pleasure in it.  In certain circumstances the physical sensations of being turned upsidedown on a rollercoaster would be terrifying. But when we actively choose to engage with going on the ride, those exact same sensations become genuinely pleasurable. (Also, I generally dislike the Ronan Keating cheesefest track I’ve picked below, but, the man can certainly write a catchy refrain, I had ‘don’t fight it / life is a rollercoaster / you just gotta ride it’ repeating in my head on loop as I wrote this section! ‘Love is a mystery / let’s get inside it!‘)

You Just Keep Me Hanging On: Shadow Work and the Hanged Man Tarot Card

The Modern Love Tarot offers a wry take on the card, showing someone in the classic Hanged Man pose quite literally ‘hanging on the telephone’. I am a boring old married matron now, but I well remember the agony of inaction waiting by the phone for a certain someone to call. Willing the phone to ring, trying not to read too much into the silence. There’s certainly shadow in this card. Not all stillness is sacred and not all waiting is wise. Sometimes the Hanged Man tips into passivity, into a kind of self-suspension where we give up agency not in service of transformation, but out of fear, uncertainty, or hope that someone else will make the next move for us. But equally, this kind of passivity is sometimes necessary – it is only by waiting to see if someone will come to us that we can know whether the relationship will be a well-matched and equal one worth pursuing.

In the Black Tarot we see the Hanged Man with his heart suspended in chains, and the question he asks is not simply what we are willing to give up, but what we remain bound to. We might think of the Hanged Man’s theme of willing self-sacrifice as a call to release ourselves from the things our hearts cling to most tightly. The attachments that feel essential, even defining, but which may also be holding us back. As Jen Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt explain in ‘Wild Card‘ we all have “dreams, desires, or wishes, or possible future versions of yourself that you avoid contemplating, because to chase after them would be to throw away everything that you’ve won, built, or amassed thus far. It would mean dismantling what you know of the world, or of yourself – and that cost is too high, isn’t it? (or is it?)” This is the sharper edge of the card: not just what we must surrender, but what we fear to let go of.

In the Yokai Yokai Tarot, the Hanged Man is a sagari – essentially a screaming horse’s head dangling from a tree, which drops down every now and then to freak out unsuspecting travellers, which is, I think we can all agree, not the most obvious route into spiritual enlightenment 😂. But I still think it kinda works. In folklore, the sagari is thought to arise from the spirit of a horse that died on the road and failed to pass on properly, becoming caught instead in a strange suspended afterlife. So it just hangs there, a creature of arrested passage: stuck between states, unable to move on, and disturbing everyone else’s journey as it does so. It is the card in one of its darker registers, something unresolved, hanging there – waiting, perhaps, to be faced before the journey can continue.

The Hanged Man in the Cracked Amethyst Tarot by Jessica Bott appears as an iceberg, its small, glinting tip floating above the surface, the vast bulk of it hidden below. “You can see a little bit,” Bott writes, “but you can see even more when you look underneath.” It’s a simple idea, but it lands deep: perspective changes everything. The image captures one of the darker sides of the card beautifully – that reminder that what’s on the surface is only a fraction of the truth. If we stay focused on the superficial, we miss the enormity beneath. And yet, there’s something faintly threatening here too, icebergs are dangerous precisely because so much of them lies unseen. The same is true of the tough inner work this card asks of us: to really sit with ourselves for a time, to surrender ourselves to the currents of our lives, to see from a new angle.

It also brought to mind the opening lines from an Elizabeth Bishop poem: “We’d rather have the iceberg than the ship, / although it meant the end of travel.” As critic John Palattella observes, Bishop cautions against “surrendering the necessary work of perception and comprehension for the seduction of revelation.” The same warning hums beneath this card – that real understanding comes not from the drama of epiphany, but from the patient, sometimes perilous work of truly seeing.

And here’s my favourite Hanged Man card, from the Cursed Auguries Tarot.

It’s not a particularly pleasant image (the whole deck is pretty, uh, confronting!), but the more I reflected on it, the more I thought how incredibly clever the concept is as a way of really cutting to what lies at the heart of the Hanged Man card.

There’s no guide/LWB with this deck, so apologies to the creator and artist Ana Sora if I’m way off base here, but this is how it reads to me.

When we find ourselves in a difficult or painful situation, our first instinct is to fight it, to struggle against something we don’t understand or like. To thrash against what is happening. And often, that instinct serves us well, but not always. Sometimes, the struggle itself is what holds us fast, and the best thing to do is relax into our fate, and accept the inevitable. And, perversely, by doing just that, by sacrificing ourselves to the situation we find ourselves in, we can actually end up escaping it after all, and being able to move on with our lives – but older and wiser.

The Hanged Man FAQs

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