The Hanged Man

The Hanged Man confuses card readers and challenges deck creators more than any other archetype. Over five hundred years, its meaning has swung wildly—from an overt depiction of treason to a gentle symbol of spiritual surrender. But when modern interpretations try to overwrite an image’s origins, they run into a psychological wall. By examining the interplay between visual history and the collective unconscious, we can untie this tangle—and offer a cautionary note to any card enthusiast or would-be designer on the limits of poetic license.

The visual description and contextual meaning of The Hanged Man have their roots in the social milieu of 15th-century Milan. Because it was customary at the time for the ruling elite to commission the creation of elegant card decks that depicted court life, the Visconti-Sforza card deck was a custom masterpiece created for the elite Visconti and Sforza families. The cards were used for card games, never divination. As an allegory of Renaissance philosophy, however, they educated players on the social order—and for The Hanged Man card, that lesson pertained to the betrayal of trust.

On that card, a young man is suspended upside down by one ankle from a wooden beam. His free leg is slightly bent, and his arms are tied behind his back. Unlike the current-day Rider-Waite-Smith Hanged Man card, he does not have a glowing halo of spiritual illumination around his head. Instead, he wears fine Renaissance court attire, representing the harsh legal consequence of treason.

Originally titled The Traitor, The Hanged Man is an example of a pittura infamante—a painting of infamy. These shame paintings, commissioned by civic authorities in cities like Florence, were intended to humiliate traitors, political enemies, and fugitive criminals in effigy. Figures could be shown wearing a mock paper mitre or surrounded by unclean or evil animals like pigs, donkeys, or snakes; or, they could be accompanied by explicit captions or verses detailing the person’s financial crimes, treason, or political misdeeds. To ensure masterful, lifelike resemblances, authorities commissioned notable Renaissance artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Andrea del Sarto and Leonardo da Vinci. Frescoes were painted on the exterior walls of palaces, administrative buildings, and prisons for public viewing.

Just as frescoes got destroyed when changes in the power structure occurred, so did the meaning of The Traitor as tarot decks evolved. When French card makers produced the Tarot of Marseilles in the mid-1500s, they left behind the Italian cultural context of the card and retitled it based on its appearance as The Hanged Man; however, they retained its associations to treason, crime, and physical restraint. Not until 1781, when French occultist Antoine Court de Gébelin popularized his ancient Egyptian theory, did cards become tools for divination. Unfamiliar with Italian history, he argued that The Hanged Man was printed upside down and reframed the meaning to prudence. In the early 1900s, members of the Golden Dawn added a halo to the upside-down figure and ascribed the meaning of self-sacrifice, suspension and chosen stillness to the card, removing all connection to treason.

Although treason was removed from the interpretation of The Hanged Man, does an unconscious residue of the card’s history still influence our minds? From the years of the pittura infamante until the 1970s—a span of about five hundred years—this card carried forward some version of a hanged man. In the 1970s, a reimagined version titled The Hanged One, arrived with the Motherpeace deck. It attempted to dismantle what its creators saw as patriarchal, punitive, and violent imagery. That card described a woman in a state of voluntary spiritual initiation, surrendering to compassion and feminine receptivity. Regardless of the intention, the card still showed a picture of a person hanging. It’s not until 1975 and the Mountain Dream tarot that a hanged figure disappeared from some new decks—the most famous of them being Osho Zen.

We still need The Hanged Man card, however—one with a graspable meaning. Although in today’s society, frescoes have been replaced by the FBI’s Most Wanted List, smear campaigns still show up on television and characterize politics. And on the personal level, who among us has not been betrayed or betrayed another? Who has not, at some time, suffered a drop in reputation or loss of status? The reinterpretation of The Hanged Man to a spiritual meaning painted a veneer over The Hanged Man’s original meaning—perhaps this is what causes confusion with the card’s interpretation.

We cannot simply assign a new, pleasant meaning to an ancient archetype and expect the psyche to forget its roots, according to Carl Jung. The subconscious mind registers the entire lineage of the image simultaneously because of archetypal residue, which exists in the collective unconscious. As part of our psychology and biology, the collective unconscious contains universal structures, instincts, and ideas inherited from our ancestors and is identical in all humans across cultures, eras, and geographic locations. It contains not images, but archetypes—instinctual, inherited predispositions to perceive, react, and experience the world in universal patterns. For example, all over the world we find the archetypal residue—a blueprint—of a Mother, a Hero, or a Wise Old Man.

By using the cards, we access deep knowledge. Jung posited a unified reality in which psyche and matter are interconnected—synchronicity is a manifestation of it. He said that inner psychological states and outer events interact because activation of archetypal patterns in the collective unconscious often coincides with synchronistic events. As a result, both the collective unconscious and synchronicity operate outside the conventional laws of cause and effect and beyond conventional notions of space and time.

If we engage in cartomancy, we want knowledge beyond what everyday consciousness can tell us. Because of the underlying unity of psyche and matter, synchronicity maps image to circumstance, allowing us to access that knowledge. If our interaction with these archetypes occurs on that archetypal level, when we draw a version of The Hanged Man that shows a hanged figure, it comes from a deep level of knowing. Why betray it with an incongruous interpretation?