The Hanged Man.
Hanging, and the hands are hidden.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
A man hangs by one ankle from a T of living wood in leaf. The free leg is crossed behind the tied one. His arms are out of sight behind his back. A ring of light round his head. The face inside it is calm.
A pause that does not look like suffering. The position says torture and the face says otherwise. The hands that would settle whether he can get down are the one thing left out of the picture, so the card cannot tell you whether you are trapped or practising.
Four things people go to on this card
- his face
You went to his face. There is a halo of light round it and he does not look distressed.
A suspension that is not a punishment. Hung by the foot, upside down, long enough to have acquired a halo, and nothing in the face is working against it. That is the whole state the card describes.
It is not a delay and it is not an accident. It is the position itself, held, with something being got out of it. You have been calling this a hold-up. The card is asking whether you might, in some part of yourself, be choosing it, and it will not think worse of you either way.
What are you calling a delay that you might actually be choosing?
- his leg
The legs are what you looked at. One ankle tied, the other leg crossed behind it in a figure four.
How much of this position is voluntary. One ankle is bound. Everything else is his own arrangement, held on purpose, and holding a leg like that takes continuous effort from muscles nobody is looking at.
Worth sitting with. There is usually one genuine constraint in a stuck situation and a great deal of arrangement around it, and the arrangement is the part that could change this afternoon. Find the rope. Then look at everything you have been treating as rope that is actually you, holding a shape.
Which part of this is actually tied, and which part is your own arrangement around it?
- the tree
You went to what he is hanging from. It is a T of living wood, in leaf, and not a gallows.
The thing holding him is alive. Green leaves on both arms of it, and it is putting on growth while he hangs there, at its own rate, paying him no attention.
So the pause is happening inside something that has not paused. Whatever you have stopped for, the world it is attached to has carried on, and the card does not present that as a threat. Some of what has grown while you were still is yours. You will only find it by going and looking.
What has kept growing while you have been waiting?
- his hands
The arms stopped you: behind his back, out of sight, and you cannot tell whether they are tied.
The card refuses to say how much he could do about this. The one detail that would settle whether it is captivity or practice is the detail left out, and it is left out of the only card in the deck that turns a person upside down.
That is not a failure of drawing. It is the question being handed back with the answer withheld on purpose, because the answer is not available from outside a situation. So answer it yourself, in the plainest words you have, and notice how fast you knew.
Answer honestly: could you get out of this if you decided to?
On the Tree of Life, The Hanged Man is the twenty-third path, Mem, from Geburah to Hod, in the Golden Dawn's attribution (Liber 777).
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.