The Hanged Man
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
The Hanged Man is read as a pause by choice: surrender, a new point of view, and waiting as an act. Waite listed wisdom, trials, sacrifice, intuition and prophecy.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as stalling, or a sacrifice made for nothing. Waite gave selfishness and the crowd.
In love
Waiting, seeing love differently, letting go of control.
In work
Pause, reassess, sacrifice for greater gain.
What is drawn on the card
A man hangs upside down by one foot from a living T-shaped tree, the other leg bent behind the knee, his hands behind his back. His face is calm, and a halo of light surrounds his head.
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
- Hebrew letter
- Mem
- Element
- Water
The letter and sign are 19th-century occult attributions (Golden Dawn), not part of the card’s origin.
Where the card comes from
- Tarot began as a card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest record is from Florence in 1440, and the game is still played today in France, Austria and Bologna.
- Reading the cards for fortunes is documented from Bologna around 1750, with ordinary playing decks.
- In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for it, and he wrote before anyone could read hieroglyphs (1822).
- The Hebrew letters and astrological signs on each card are 19th-century French and English occult attributions; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) fixed the set most readers use.
- The scenes follow the 1909 Waite–Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. The Innerverse cards are our own paintings of those scenes.
Sources: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Morgan Library & Museum, Visconti-Sforza tarot, MS M.630; Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781); A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911).
Draw your own card
The Hanged Man is one of 78. Draw one card or a three-card spread in the Innerverse, read with the same art and the same sources, free.
Or make it daily: one card each morning, with a private note →Want the whole deck? All 78 cards and the guidebook.
Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.