25/7 The Hanged Man #12

TEMPLE artefact #004

The Hanged Man #12 final version

12. THE HANGED MAN

KEY WORDS – SELF-SACRIFICE, INITIATION,  SURRENDER, RESTRICTION  

The Hanged Man is Trump 12 of the Major Arcana.   

This is the card of Trial and Sacrifice. Especially Self-sacrifice for the greater good or a higher goal. An ordeal to gain knowledge. New perspective. Surrender. It may also suggest restriction and learning to deal with it.

The basic composition uses the frame of the Qabbalistic Tree of Life.      

Another embedded symbol is the Egyptian ankh which appears here, upside down, as seen in the attitude of the Hanged Man and his enlarged head in the TV screen.

In Norse mythology, Odin hung from the World Tree Yggdrasil and gave up an eye to gain knowledge of the Runes and magic. He is generally portrayed with an eyepatch.

This connection to the runes makes Odin part of a complex of gods associated with speedy communication, writing and the creation of symbols – such as Nabu, Thoth, Hermes, Ogma, Mercury, etc…also in many cases traveler/messenger gods of the crossroads, where the cross represents the material world of four elements and signals their ability to appear instantaneously anywhere on Earth in the form of text, or code transmitted electronically.

I’ve always seen in our computers a modern representation of Odin – single-eyed, sending forth the ravens Huginn (Thought) and (Munnin Memory) to bring him news from the Nine Realms, powered by lightning.

That’s why here the hanged man’s head and shoulders is obscured by a state-of-the-art FLAT MONITOR SCREEN with the proportions of the Golden Rectangle.

The screen itself shows a close-up on the Hanged Man’s masked face. The zipped mouth is open, and his mouth can be seen, ready to utter the words of power.

In the top right of the screen (bottom left from our POV) is a picture in picture – a smaller screen and in that one smaller again ad infinitum, a repeated fall – again using the proportions of the Golden Section.

The Hanged Man wears a BONDAGE MASK and GIMP SUIT – black with red panels straps and piping - to bring in modern fetishistic elements of ritual suspension. The straps on his arms, however, dangle UPWARDS defying gravity.

His arms are outstretched as though the Hanged Man has just released them from strait-jacket straps, invoking both a crucifixion posture and an expansive ‘free as a bird’ escape artist gesture.

When turned upside down, his awkward posture looks more like a yoga asana and the Hanged Man shows now no sign of fear – the ordeal is planned. The sacrifice prepared for. Poise, balance and mastery is implicit in the attitude of the figure when seen upside down.

On his PVC helmeted head the Hanged Man wears a simple CROWN that’s little more than 3 spikes - like old-school TV AERIALS they may remind those of us familiar with Christian iconography of THORNS, which brings up this card’s association with the crucified Christ – and his ordeal on a different/or perhaps the same tree.

A pool at the bottom of the composition shows a reflection of the Hanged Man’s head – in the reflection of his upward facing head, his mouth is zipped. Droplets rise UP from the pool. The pool hints at baptism also, the head prepped for immersion.

The Man Hangs from a BUNGEE CORD secured round his left ankle – coiling down from his belly an UMBILICAL CORD is looped around his neck (I was born like this, a living Tarot card!). His feet and hands are BARE and wounded like those of Jesus.

He is suspended from the arch of a bridge overhead which forms a frame – almost an arched doorway effect -for the central image. Not to scale, the bridge is reminiscent of something from a mediaeval painting – it resembles the KAWARU RIVER BRIDGE in Queenstown, New Zealand, where I did my bungee jump in 1994.

Forming the ‘doorframe’ either side and rising to support the bridge arch are two TREE trunks, again suggestive of mediaeval illustration with some flourishing leaves on four branches.

Two RAVENS sit on a branch each of the tree, one on the left, the other on the right. They seem to eye the Hanged Man greedily – as if he’s soon to be carrion fodder - but in fact they are his familiars Thought and Memory bringing him news, in the form of strips of film they carry in their beaks.

The background through the arch and behind the Hanged Man shows a wall of regular square tiles – on each is a different letter from a different alphabet –cuneiform, hieroglyphs, ogham script, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, computer code, English, emojis, runes, and so on.