Not Heaven Or Hell

The Hanged Man

I used the term “betwixt and between” as the title of an earlier article, but it is applicable here. The terms “heaven” and “hell” can also be somewhat accurate, in a context I will get to at a later point, but despite the seeming obviousness, “As Above, So Below” is not an apt rendition to deal with this thirteenth card of the Major Arcana, styled XII in a line after the O of the Fool. Behold, the Hanged Man. (I’m pronouncing that mentally as “hang-ed” in the Shakespearean fashion. I think it better suits it and sounds less like a kid’s paper game).


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Smith’s version of this is more generous to the figure than the older models, where in addition to being hanged, the man is also being burned alive.

The Hanged Man is suspended by his right ankle, which is tied to the horizontal beam of a rough cross. His other leg drops down behind it and the bent knee causes it to mirror the cross beam above. His arms are bound behind him, possible around the upright of the cross. The wood of the cross appears newly hewn and has drooping leaves still attached, The figure wears humble soft shoes, red leggings, and a blue tunic. Behind the head is a halo of light. The background of this card is an empty drab grey.

This card’s meaning per Waite is emblematic of the Martyr God, Christ on the Cross, Odin on the Tree, and carries with it the context of secret wisdom gained at a sacrifice. By extension we can connect the murdered Osiris, and we are back in Ancient Egypt again, with the promise of resurrection and afterlife. From this springs the card as a symbol of transformation, of a change from one state into the next (though this is frequently assigned to the following card Death). This is therefore metamorphosis, a pupa in the cocoon. The past is gone, but the future is not yet written.

Originally this card depicted and was called the Traitor, and in place of his hallow was simple fire. He was being burned at the stake, or the gallows, upside down, for a crime against the state. While we can draw allusion to this being the fate of prominent martyrs such as Jesus and St. Peter, who was crucified upside down, there was not that original context. In the first flowering of Tarot, this was a bad man, who met a bad end. It was justification for the power of the state, to mete justice, and execute prisoners, which was shifting from a Divine Right and ecclesiastical authority, to a secular humanist one. Ironically this symbolized the shifting between two points that I frequently find the Hanged Man represents.

As noted, St. Peter is reputed to have required the Romans to hang him upside down on the cross, since he felt he had failed Christ and was unworthy to have the same death as his master. The inverted cross is nowadays associated with the idea of Anti-Christ and Satanism, though these distinctions I believe are more the result of the popular film culture of the sixties and seventies than any legitimate tradition. Inverting a cross, might have been a ritual of the so-called Black Mass, which included saying the Lord’s prayer and other holy texts backward, in a mockery of the Catholic rite. The Black Mass is possibly a whole creation of the Inquisition and Witchfinders. If it was practiced by witches in the 17th century and later, they may simply have been aping the alleged process, rather than following any specific tradition or teaching. The story of Peter may be apocryphal as well. One of his distinctions in the Biblical story is that he denied Christ three times during the trial and crucifixion. This idea of him inverting the Cross might indicate some esoteric tradition where he was a final time, disassociating himself with the faith he was considered guardian to. Bear in mind that the inconstancy of Peter is symbolic of the difficulty of following a philosophical discipline when faced with the temptation and privations of worldliness. In such an instance, one might find themselves “hanging in the balance” between doing what is good for their soul, and what is pleasurable to their body. It is not a coincidence that this idea stems from contemplation of this card.


shadowscapes-ghosts-and-spirits-cosmic-tarot
Three versions of the Hanged Man. These are from my Shadowscapes, Ghosts and Spirits, and Cosmic Tarot decks. I have combined them here because they all are full of tree imagery. While the RWS version does show greenery on the gallows, it is fair to say that it’s a tree that has been cut and converted into a means of torture or execution. This probably ties back to the undercurrent of Christian symbolism that I find troubling with Waite’s version, even though it does seem to agree with much earlier images. The two images on the side show living trees here, and the figure seems more or less suspended of their own free will. This can connote one of the possible readings of the card, that we need to alter our perspective of things.

In the Shadowscapes version, the figure reminds me of Peter Pan, at play with the faeries in the forests of Neverland. If we look upon the Hanged Man as symbolic of this transitory moment, of being neither one thing or another, then perhaps the perpetual child from Barrie’s classic is as apt a metaphor as any. There is, however, a possibly darker meaning here. The Egyptian ankh hangs on an upper branch. We find the ankh prominently figured in the Thoth Tarot of Aleister Crowley. The Hanged Man is suspended from it. Yet here he is separated. indicating, perhaps, that he falls, or hangs between, this life and the next.

Certainly this is more evident in the central card. The Ghosts and Spirits deck can be a disturbing read at times. The imagery is powerful, complex, and often horrific. We might see here a Tree of Death, instead of the Tree of Life. Yet many of the cards in this deck need to be interpreted as expressing the journey of the spirit outside the flesh, so in this case, like the Shadowscapes, we are possibly witness to a soul in between incarnations.

The Cosmic Tarot has a lot of Hindu and Buddhist overtones, in addition to other magic systems. If we view the Hanged Man similarly here, we might be looking through the Barod Thodol, commonly called the Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the spirit is trying to free itself of the entanglement of desire, so to break the endless cycle of reincarnation and merge back in the the Nothing That Is Everything (i.e. the Fool Card). If he let’s go, he is bound to fall to earth, and into another fleshly incarnation. The balance between is a means of avoiding incarnation, but it cannot be maintained. Only by eliminating the I, can the illusion be shattered.


There are several other possible connections that we can make when dealing with the Hanged Man. A notable one that often springs to my mind is that of the infant Zeus, taken by his mother Rhea and given to the nymphs. In one version of the story, he is kept suspended from a tree, touching neither the earth nor the heavens, and is thus kept invisible to Chronos, his father, who wants to kill him to avoid the prophecy that Kronos will die by the hands of his children. This idea that the Hanged Man occupies a kind of non-space is interesting.

The idea of Limbo is a Catholic expression of the place between places, which in “Neither in Heaven, nor Hell, nor upon the Earth”. Its place in the Catholic dogma is utilitarian. It resolves certain questions regarding the fate of those who, though they led just and noble lives, were not born under the covenant of the Christian Baptism. Per this doctrine, Christ when passing through death at the crucifixion comes first to Limbo, and redeems the souls there, such as Adam and Eve, Moses, and the other Hebrew chosen.

In theory, this would mean Limbo ceased to exist with the Resurrection, but there is an unofficial doctrine that says it now contains the souls of unchristened children, who, innocent of all but the original sin of humanity (i.e. they were born after Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil). Since they did not receive the initial tabula rasa by the Rite of Baptism, they technically weren’t going to get into Heaven, but as they didn’t live long enough to actually give into that sinful nature, it wasn’t proper to send them into the torments of Hell. According to variations on this theme, during the Final Judgment foretold in Revelation, these lost children will be redeemed and allowed to ascend into Paradise.

Some Protestant offshoots also believe that Limbo is where all souls are waiting for the Judgment Day, when the physical resurrection will occur and the world will become an earthly paradise. We’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here, as all that happens with Cards XIX and XX in a few weeks.

Getting back to our Hanged Man, I want to delve into one of those personal epiphanies that I have had over the years of working with these cards. Now, I will here caveat that the Unverifiable Personal Gnosis is just that. This is something that came from inside my head, possibly from a source I know not where, and there is little to no external verification of it as legitimate, or useful. That said, Tarot is an intuitive experience. Imagination is the key to using the toolkit, and this series of articles is about taking the cards beyond the face value, beyond potential connections and inferences, and letting the images on the cards inform your mind. So, onward.

At some point in recent years, not longer ago that a decade or so, but not so recently that i can readily remember. I started forming the impression that the Hanged Man is falling. Like the figures from the Tower, he has not hit the ground, nor is he on a firm point where he started from. I don’t know if there is a version of this card in one of my decks that started me thinking this way (I will endeavor to look before publication, but there’s a lot of decks to go through, and so far it’s not one of my usual ones).

Secondary to this, I also got the distinct impression that this person falling was the Morningstar, That is, Lucifer the Fallen Angel, who would later become synonymous with Satan, the Devil, etc. Obviously the Devil has his own card a few steps hence, but here again is that card between one state and the other. This is the Fall from Grace. It dovetails quite nicely with the idea that this card was originally a symbol of betrayal and treason to the established order, and that this was the punishment.

I confess to a bit of Luciferianism, in the sense that many depictions of the Fall and the Rebellious Angel are metaphor for the development of our own human psyche from the animal one we used to inhabit. Like his Greek counterpart Prometheus, Morningstar is being punished for bringing to man the Fire of the Gods. The gods feared what man might do with it, and justly so. We’ve really managed to foul things up with the exothermic reaction, and it’s numerous toxic by-products. Yet once the deed was done, the extreme punishment seems overkill given the nature of the crime.

Prometheus has his liver plucked out daily. Satan is cast into the pit of Hell. Adam and Eve are barred from the Garden “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”.

Seems awfully vindictive to me. So the question here with the Hanged Man, is, was Justice served? Coming as it does on the heels of that card, I am forced to wonder if we are meant to perceive this as righteous punishment. Again, I am not typically one adherent to the idea of a linear “Tarot journey” but I think there’s a relationship inherent in the order of the cards here. And that brings us back to the question of the placement of the Justice card as XI rather than Strength, which occupies that slot in some versions of Tarot.


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Two very different takes on this card. The left is from the Wildwood Tarot and the right from the Journey Into Egypt. I selected them both because they involve water and because they address the same subject in a totally untraditional way.

Wildwood works from a kind of Pre-Celtic or Proto-Celtic shamanic perspective, but often ties to the later Arthurian myth and Grail stories. The authors would appear to believe that the Arthur stories are a folklore from this more ancient time, and are simply retold in the wake of the fall of Roman Britain as the chivalric romances. In this case, we are confronted by a water spirit, which could as well be called a kelpie or similar name, holding a bronze mirror and a seeing stone, In the foreground is one of the heron’s we see in the Wheel image from a couple of weeks back, with a small sack around its neck. Behind them is a boat, which appears to hold a corpse. The boat is anchored or tethered. Behind the boat is an island with three trees. The text accompanying this card has a good number of esoteric ideas. It says also that many aspects of the traditional Hanged Man have been moved onto the Blasted Oak, which is this deck’s version of the Tower. I personally see the falling man from the Tower card having something in common with the Hanged Man, but here he is the figure in the boat, neither on this shore or the next. While the death metaphor seems very obvious, the text says this is about initiation, about reaching a point of injury or pain, that allows one to being open to the voyage to the island and healing. It is, according to the authors, not a journey that may be sought, but one that comes to us.

The Journey To Egypt deck is an amazing artistic expression. It diverts from the traditional take on the cards and yet manages to still impart much of that message. The figure here in isolation in the background, does not appear to be drowned. He is on the shore and apparently high and dry. Look again. His reflected self in the water is our Hanged Man, upside down, the world wrong side up. The man on the shore is bound to the man in the water. Neither of them are going anywhere. On facet of this deck is that it associated each card with astronomical events. I think it rather interesting that this one represents the Summer Solstice, which is the day this article is being released.

Remember that all of the cards are unnumbered in the original versions. The respective values of these cards in the Tarocchi game would seem to be more or less equal, so the ordering and numbering seems to have occurred when they began to be used by the adepts for purposes of divination. Levi gives us an order based on Kabbalah and the Hebrew Letters. He potentially inherits that from earlier sources, and later creators keep it roughly the same with the exception of cards VIII and XI. Justice might logically precede execution and death. But then justice might also fit between the force of an established state symbolized by the Chariot, and the isolate contemplation of the individual in the Hermit. It’s a question as to whether Strength fits better between the random chaos of the Wheel and the uncertain suspension of the Hanged Man. If Strength is the assertion of the Will over Nature- even individual nature, then a possible reading of the Hanged Man is equilibrium in the space of Chaos. He is not punished for having done wrong, he is simply unable to find a firm footing in an unstable universe. He cannot cling to the dogma he knows to be false, nor can he firmly embrace the totality of free will and personal responsibility because there is no assurance of accuracy or correctness. He lives in a quantum reality where the actual nature of things is only known by probability, potentiality, and only known too late. There’s no wonder that he is in torment.

There’s always some context where the seeker has to identify with the Rebel Angel. There is a point in our exploration of the universe and our own minds where we will question the truth of everything. We are not venerating in this sense, only stating that we can, in some way, feel empathy with Prometheus chained to that rock, waiting for the vulture to come again with the dawn. For Prometheus is aware of that eternal agony that what we believe to be true is always under threat from our own spiritual growth. We can either be content to remain ignorant, celebrating blind faith in something that we ourselves doubt, or risk the eternal damnation of never really being sure of anything ever again.

So we hang there on the tree, neither in Heaven or in Hell, unable to free ourselves to fall to the ground, or to climb back up to where we started from. In many ways this is a very pessimistic card, and they tend to get less cheerful from here.

I can only offer that there is a quiet to living in Limbo that can be very freeing, or at least restful. You know that change is coming. Change is inevitable. Yet now, you have the satisfaction of having endured change, and perhaps the confidence that you can endure the change to come, so being betwixt and between is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s hard to take any calls there.

I thank you for reading this week’s article. I am attending Heather Graham’s Writers for New Orleans later this week, where I will be part of a panel on occult subject matter. I will be reading Tarot for some of the folks in attendance, for the first time in many years. I am looking forward to seeing how the experience of articulating my views of these cards here will impact my readings, and I am wondering how the experience of cold reading will impact the remaining articles in this series. Since next week we face down Card XIII, with all the baggage it carries along, it should be informative. I hope you will join me then.

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There and Back Again

Mercury Header

Last week’s article was brought to you by Mercury Retrograde.

That is, I had postponed the live date for it before heading off to New York City on family business, intending to edit, polish, or postpone it again, ere I returned.

But no. That was not going to happen.

Flight delays. Missed appointments. Lost items. All the typical hallmarks of Mercury dancing merrily widdershins whilst we mere mortals can’t remember the word we want to say.

And thus, the pre-scheduled but possibly not final version of last week’s article was auto-posted as pre-scheduled.

My intention then, was to connect to my blog, unpublish the article, and reset it for a time when I had returned home and could contemplate it’s perfection at my leisure.

But drunken Mercury wasn’t done with me yet.

Seems that my new webhost uses a security program that blocks mobile access to WordPress’s backroom, even from the browser.

So being several thousand miles from my laptop, I had to content myself with the fact that the article was live and there was not a thing I could do about it.

Fortunately, the article as it stands is acceptable, and I have decided not to travel back in time and create a retroactive continuity (though Mercury might approve of that just now.).

Scoff ye skeptics. Once upon a time I walked amongst thee. Now, I’m not entirely sure.

If one adheres to any faith in astrology, Mercury Retrograde comes with the territory.

Whilst other planets share this optical phenomenon, the frequency and regularity with which the innermost world makes it’s backward track is viewed with particular dread.

Retrograde motion is an illusion. It’s observance in ancient times, before telescopes and the discovery of the extra-Saturnine planets, was considered an ill omen. But it’s basically the result of a pre-Newtonian understanding of orbital mechanics.

Ancient astrologers considered all the visible planets to be traveling around the earth. In the works of Claudius Ptolemy, the planets and the sun and moon were all pinned to a series of transparent spheres or shells, that moved around our own globe. His Almagest gave calculations for their movements, and was a standard1Although Aristarchus of Samos had published works at Alexandria where the planets rotated around the sun, the popular acceptance of Ptolemy meant that an earth-centered universe prevailed until the Renaissance. The geocentric order was favored by the Holy Mother Church as it allowed convenient location of Heaven and the angelic orders. until Newton’s Principia Mathematica corrected planetary order.

The Sun, of course, never goes retrograde. Nor does the Moon, ironically the only body that does orbit the earth. For this reason, and because they were biggest and brightest, they each get to rule their own signs; the zodiac signs of Leo and Cancer respectively.

Leo, beginning with the Summer Solstice, and the hottest of the fire signs, is the natural home of the Sun. Ptolemy in his Tetrabiblos (the astrological companion to the astronomical Almagest) says that the Moon is associated with moisture, so as the next brightest light, she is assigned as ruler of Cancer, the water sign immediately preceding the Solstice.


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This chart from Cafe Astrology shows the distribution of planetary rulership in the ancient world. The mathematics of Ptolemy’s Almagest made possible the first ephemeris. His Tetrabiblos is believed to be a summary of several earlier texts on astrology he researched at the Library of Alexandria. So these attributions may be as old as the Chaldean or Akkadian cultures, despite their Graeco-Roman names.

And thence all the remaining visible planets are awarded rulership over the zodiac in pairs, since there were only five of them, and there were ten signs left. So little Mercury gets both Gemini and Virgo; Venus rules Taurus and Libra; Mars: Aries and Scorpio; the expansive quality of Jupiter attend Pisces and Sagittarius; and finally cold and dark Saturn is lord over Aquarius and Capricorn.

Modern astrologers ascribe the “new” outer planets and some asteroids as rulers of signs and houses, but I find Ptolemy’s system to work fairly well, at least to gauge the basics.

And it warns us about Mercury. Mercury as ruler of Gemini presents duality and ambiguity. Perfect situation for a planet that can’t seem to make up it’s mind which way it’s going.

About that. Well, Mercury (and any other retrograde planet) isn’t actually moving backward. That would defy the laws of physics. . . Newton’s, not Ptolemy’s.

What’s happening is that all us planets are whizzing round that jolly old sun, at a pretty constant clip. But because of the different sizes of our orbits, every now and then it looks like some of the planets are moving backward, relative to our viewpoint here on little ol’ Earth2which means that Ptolemy’s universe might be more in line with Einstein than Newton’s, from a certain point of view.

And for naughty little Mercury, this happens about three times a year; more often than any of the other planets. So obviously the ancients took notice, and so do we. This wiggly motion astrologically indicates communication breakdowns that even Led Zeppelin could not have imagined, along with related interruptions in travel, technology, and other best laid plans.

So why do astrologer’s consider retrograde motion to be “bad”? Well, it may be helpful to compare it to the reversed meaning of a Tarot card. In Tarot a card that is drawn upside down is considered reversed, and it’s symbolism may be interpreted as an opposite or reduced version of the standard upright meaning.


thoth dual magician
In the Thoth Tarot, artist Freida Harris envisions the power of the Magus as synonymous with Mercury. This is something of a nod to the mysterious Hermes Trismegistus (the Thrice Great) a possibly fictitious author of many occult books. The god Hermes is the Greek equivalent of Mercury. He is also equivalent of Thoth (Tehuti) in Ancient Egypt, so there’s a bit of magical punnery at work here. This card is from my personal deck, one which has two alternate Magus cards. Ostensibly this was a publisher’s conceit, but much has been made of the symbology and secret intention of its having Three Magi.
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When the card is reversed, the once powerful and competent Magus now has lost control, and he, along with all his workings, appears to be plunging toward the abyss. The design is reminiscent of the 12th card, that of the Hanged Man. This card usually symbolizes life in constraint, or a delay in action. The Hanged Man, suspended between Heaven and Earth, partakes of neither. His energy is stalled, his intention frustrated. Like the infant Jupiter, he is invisible to the gods. As Mercury travels unnaturally, the normal order of things is upside down.

The same general rule applies when Mercury goes wandering. As the Messenger of the Gods, Mercury influences those things that have to do with sending and receiving messages, and in the 21st century, that covers a whole lot.

We have trouble finding the right words, or say things we shouldn’t. We forget to use BCC or forward that private internal memo to the whole office. We drunk text. We can’t access the Wi-Fi. We have no bars on our phones. We forgot we were on speaker. And Chaos ensues.

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The retroshade of the current Mercurial backward transit. The wiggly spiral is Mercury’s observed direction through the zodiac. This chart represents all of 2022, which begins in the center and ends on the outer rim. The shadow period is defined by outer limits of the backwards S shape. The end of the retrograde casts a shadow backward in time, and the beginning of the retrograde casts the shadow forward.

The red overlay was added in Photoshop, but this graphic was generated by a nifty piece of software called Planetdance. If you’re a Windows User it’s free to download from the link. It has many of the features of professional astrology software. Like any freeware, it’s not always plug and play.

I am by no means a professional astrologer, but I am a professional computer guy, so it works for me. Calculations that would have taken me hours or days in my youth with paper ephemeris, tables of houses, and a slide rule (google that) are now just a few mouse clicks. It does a number of things that I don’t even begin to understand, but I’m learning.

Mercury only runs backward for about three weeks. But astrologers also reckon the “shadow period” which begins at the point in it’s forward orbit adjacent to its backward travel limit; and ends when it’s return to forward motion passes the point where it turned backward. So while the actual retrograde motion is from May 10 to June 3, the shadow period goes from late April until just past the middle of June.

Does Mercury’s little dance actually cause all the problems we associate with it? Or do we just see it as a convenient reason we butt-dialed the ex? As I said, I used to be skeptical, but 2022 is tempting me to reconsider.

Besides, that’s the only explanation I can find for my airline believing that Denver, Colorado is located on the flight path between New York City and Houston, Texas. I have had to travel more than halfway across the country, just to travel back home.

Twice.

Mercury is laughing his ass off.


Thank you for reading this article. I hope it has entertained, and possibly educated. I’ll be back again soon.

I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Ms. Renee Watt in pointing me in the right direction (pun intended) on some key astrological questions. She is a published astrologer and podcaster, and a delightful person to share Sun and Moon with.

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