By Sarah Taylor
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.
— W. H. Auden
I’ve written about The Hanged Man before (What goes around: Wheel of Fortune and The Hanged Man), and yet it feels like The Hanged Man has been underrepresented in this column, maybe in the same way that I feel that the idea of “midlife crisis” is underrepresented in the psychological literature that I’ve been exposed to as part of my psychotherapy work.
Because this is what The Hanged Man is about from the perspective of our individual evolutionary path: it is a cornerstone in the tarot’s major arcana of the idea of midlife crisis — the archetypal crisis of identity and identification in later adulthood.
Coming, as it does, over halfway through the major arcana, The Hanged Man makes an appearance after we have accumulated enough baggage to find our onward progress uncomfortably stymied. Weighted down as we are, what we tend to do in such circumstances is to press on regardless, telling ourselves things will sort themselves out, ducking and diving to avoid the insistent messages that are clamouring for our attention. And those shouts only get louder.
Some wise souls will meet with The Hanged Man with a sense of acceptance. Many of The Hanged Man cards refer to the Norse god Odin, and his hanging from Yggdrasil, the World Tree. In Odin’s case, he sacrificed ‘himself to himself’; he understood it to be a necessary sacrifice. For the rest, Justice (the previous card in most tarot decks) is meted out either through an external act or one of self-sabotage. However they come to The Hanged Man, each protagonist finds themselves ‘strung up’ — held fast in a position that is both humbling and designed to resist traditional methods of escape: aggression, exertion and control.
Thus, the Hanged Man, as card 12 in the major arcana, marks a rite of passage of adulthood. It is a passage into a time of the stripping away of the old to make way for something new (13 — Death); the search for balance between opposing forces now that we have the understanding that the resolution of those forces is beyond our abilities (14 — Temperance); an exploration of the explicit and implicit agreements that we have to our shadows that hold us prisoner, but which also show us the way to liberation (15 — The Devil); and the uncompromising destruction of false gods that are incontrovertibly illuminated, and so dismantled, through the work we have done (16 — The Tower).