The Hanged Man
Trump XII of the tarot: a man hanging upside down by one foot. A. E. Waite read it as wisdom, sacrifice and intuition.
Meaning
Waite's figure hangs head down from a gallows shaped like a Tau cross, tied by one ankle, arms behind him and one leg crossed over the other, with a halo round his head. Waite stressed that the face shows "deep entrancement, not suffering" and that the figure suggests "life in suspension, but life and not death". The eighteenth-century fortune-tellers' cards, he wrote, showed instead a youth standing on one foot beside a stake.
What does the Hanged Man card mean?
Waite's meanings are "wisdom, circumspection, discernment, trials, sacrifice, intuition, divination, prophecy"; reversed, "selfishness, the crowd, body politic". He added that "all current meanings attributed to this card are cartomancists' intuitions".
In older decks
A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card L'Appeso. Papus joined it to the twelfth Hebrew letter, Lamed.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsDeathTrump XIII of the tarot: in older decks a skeleton mowing with a scythe, in Waite's a rider on a pale horse. A. E. Waite read it as end, mortality and destruction.
- The same shape in Chinese radicalsMù 目The character for ‘eye’, and radical 109 of the 214 Kangxi radicals, under which characters for looking and seeing are filed.
See also
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers, lines or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 27, 2026. How we research
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