The Hanged Man
The Hanged One represents voluntary surrender, limbo, and the sacrifice of control to gain enlightenment. It asks for patience and a change in perspective that often places one at odds with social norms, granting outsider wisdom. Associated with water and Neptune, the card evokes immersion in the unconscious and the disorienting but illuminating encounter with mystery. It prepares one for deeper transformation through acceptance, waiting, and the relinquishing of ego.
Keywords
Associations
Water / Neptune
Keywords
Enlightenment through discomfort, a necessary pause, the grace of surrender, sacrifice, limbo, being misunderstood.
Quote
If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it. — Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Meaning
Following Justice, in which we recognize the need for action and set forth, sword in hand, to make a change, we arrive at a card that paradoxically seems to force inaction: the Hanged One (traditionally titled the Hanged Man). Usually depicted as a person hanging upside down from one foot from a gallows or a T-shaped cross, this card can be uncomfortable to look at—but discomfort is exactly what the card entails. The Hanged One is about an experience of limbo and of waiting, of surrender and of sacrifice, and of choosing those things willingly.
Bridging Justice and Sacrifice
In her book The Dark Exact Tarot Guide, my friend and prolific deck creator, artist, and writer Coleman Stevenson succinctly bridges the gap between Justice's call for change and the Hanged One's sacrifice and discomfort: "Recognizing the need for change and seeking it out is a sort of sacrifice, a sacrifice of the familiar, of assumed personal comfort." In order to truly embrace change, we must first accept the discomfort of transformation and the necessity of sacrifice. As the saying goes, you can't take it with you, and indeed the Hanged One is preparing us for the card that follows it: Death. Seen in this light, the Hanged One assumes a waiting-room smell of anticipation and preparation, of surrender in the pendulous threshold of something coming but not yet here.
Not Punishment
But this card's meanings are more complex than only that. In early Italian Tarot decks, the Hanged One was often called L'Appazzo or Il Traditore, or "The Traitor," suggesting they had done some misdeed and were being punished, perhaps by Justice. However, this interpretation of the Hanged One as perpetrator is not supported in most Tarot decks after the 16th century and is not supported here. (Nor is retributive or carceral justice supported here, for that matter.) I want to be clear: the Hanged One is not about punishment. It is not about shame, though it does sometimes lead to the overcoming of shame. It is instead about releasing power, control and personal will, about surrendering oneself to the ebb and flow of the unknown, about quieting the ego to gain greater understanding of the self and life and its secrets.
Perspective and Misunderstanding
Tarot guidebooks often include the phrase "a change in perspective" (get it—they're upside down) in their interpretations for this card, but I think it's far more resonant to think of the Hanged One not merely as a change in perspective, but a change to a perspective that goes against the grain of convention or of mass-approved consensus. In other words, in being upside down, the Hanged One literally and figuratively sees things differently than everyone else. They’re a bit of a pariah or a black sheep, perpetually misunderstood due to their unique view of the world. And by holding to their unconventional beliefs, by acting on them, or simply by existing as themselves in a culture that finds them contrary or weird or even "unnatural" (say the people who know nothing of nature), the Hanged One becomes social anathema, a traitor to the societal norms. They’re hung out to dry, as it were, but it’s no matter. Or, as gay rights activist and self-identified drag queen Marsha P. Johnson would say (to paraphrase Paul Foster Case), the world’s ridicule is the best indication that the Hanged One is in the right.
Outsider Wisdom
There’s something in the experience of being an outsider, of being 'othered,' that is intrinsically tied up in the Hanged One, for those in the margins can see the whole more clearly than those in the center, and that yields a special kind of wisdom. In this way, the Hanged One is kind of like an advanced Hermit, but where the Hermit eschews civilization to pursue their own solitary truths, the Hanged One does not pursue but simply exists. The Hermit seeks out meaning with their upraised lamp, but the Hanged One surrenders to the not-knowing, through which, paradoxically, knowing comes. The Hanged One chose those ropes. They inverted themselves willingly because, as any kinkster or practitioner of shibari (Japanese rope bondage) will tell you, in surrender lies bliss, and in the Tarot, that bliss is wisdom.
Imagery and Correspondences
Our Hanged One for Fifth Spirit Tarot is tied up in ropes in a willing act of self-surrender, nimbus of enlightenment around their head. They are underwater because water, as students of Tarot and the occult will know, is the unconscious and the mystery and the source of life itself, in which the experience of the Hanged One submerges us. The card also corresponds to the element water and the planet Neptune, god of the seas and planet of spirituality, fantasy, dreams, and illusions. Being dunked in Neptune's waters is truly a disorienting experience of encounter with the unknown, but, like the Hanged One, it can be an utterly illuminating experience if we surrender to the waves.
Literary Influence
Another important influence on the underwater imagery of the card is T. S. Eliot's "drowned Phoenician Sailor," from his 1922 poem The Waste Land which retells the story of the Fisher King (a.k.a. the Grail myth) set in the "unreal city" of contemporary London. In the poem, Madame Sosostris, "the wisest woman in Europe / With a wicked pack of cards," gives a Tarot reading and remarks, "I do not find / The Hanged Man. Fear death by water." A full literary analysis is beyond scope, but the passage hints at the Hanged One’s nature: when we seek answers, we are not always given them. Sometimes, all we find are cryptic riddles, the meaning of which we cannot understand until much later. We are powerless to force the future; we can only wait and experience it. We must let the mystery take us. That's a Hanged One experience.
Mythic Parallel
Eliot also notes the 'Hanged God of Frazer'—Odin—who willingly hung upside-down from the World Tree for nine days with a self-inflicted spear wound in order to attain wisdom, which he received in the form of the runes. Similarly, the Hanged One instructs that we must surrender to discomfort, to pain, to waiting, to the unknown, in order to gain wisdom of our own. The Poetic Edda puts it: "I was offered to Odin, myself to myself." Perhaps that's the real wisdom of the Hanged One. In surrendering, in finding peace with what is, we sacrifice ourself to ourself, and in doing so we gain ourself truly for the first time.
Visual Description
An upside-down figure is suspended by cords in a web stretched between tall vertical posts beneath a greenish, watery surface. The person is bound at the ankles, torso, and arms with ropes, hair streaming down through a circular halo or wheel behind the head. Bubbles rise, small fish and aquatic plants drift nearby, and an eel rests on the seabed below. The Roman numeral XII is at the top and the printed title "THE HANGED ONE" appears at the bottom of the card.
Fifth Spirit tarot
💜 Please support creators. Buy official decks.
ℹ️ Disclaimer
All card images and descriptions are taken from public sources. They are used for review purposes only. All rights to these images and descriptions belong to their creators. If you believe there is a copyright infringement, please contact us at [email protected].