The Hanged Man
This is the one of the cards that actually scared me the most when I first encountered the tarot. Oddly enough, it actually scared me far more than other cards like the Ten of Swords, Death, the Tower, or the Devil. Maybe it was because those cards, those images all represented concepts that were comforting in their familiarity and abstraction. In my years working as a teacher in various settings, I got used to going home with my back feeling like a pincushion for other people’s verbal knives and daggers. I’ve also had to live with being accustomed to sudden and unexpected cataclysmic changes bringing carefully thought-out plans in my life to a drastic, crashing end. And I’d also learned, through painful experience, that the Devil can all too-often take the form of the people, groups, or institutions who are trusted, who are the closest to you. Something about all of those cards was familiar to my life, normalized even. And as abstract ideas, they didn’t immediately elicit a strong physical reaction in my body. When I think of dying and death, what I imagine doesn’t take the anachronistic form of medieval longswords, or an armour-clad Reaper on a horse.
The Hanged Man is different though.
Up until now, the cards of the Major Arcana have been signifiers of exhortations and suggestions. They have been messages, signs and portents. But through it all, we still have agency. We still have freedom. From the Fool up to now, we have the freedom to do whatever we wish with these messages and signs; we can heed them blindly, approach them cautiously, or walk away from them altogether.
But not here. When I first looked at this card, I saw myself up there. I feel like it is actually us up there on that wooden frame, our body dangling precariously from one leg. Having been exposed to many more modern depictions of hanging as capital punishment in popular Western movies and TV shows, I feel a tense sensation of dread, my heart quickening, as my mind snaps to imagining myself on a wooden platform, the noose in front of me. For reasons I can’t fully explain, the imagery that the Hanged Man elicits in my brain just hits a lot harder than many of the other Major Arcana cards that are known for being foreboding. It simply feels more real, more tangible.
As we understand it as a form of capital punishment, hanging has been often used as a penalty for treason — the depiction of hanging in this card was also used in Italy as punishment for rebels and traitors. But unlike hanging as we know it in modern Western culture, this form of hanging — suspension from one ankle, as opposed to by the neck — is arguably much nastier. According to one account (dating back to Milan and Lombardy in 1393), the person sentenced was to hang from their ankle until they were dead; while they were alive, it was permissible to give them food and drink. (Northern Italy and Southern France were essentially the birthplace of the tarot as we know it today, giving rise to the legendary Tarot de Marseilles that in turn would heavily influence the Smith-Waite deck and Crowley’s Thoth deck.)
This meant that unlike hanging from a noose around one’s neck — which can result in death in at most a matter of minutes — hanging by one’s angle from a tree or T-frame held the promise of a very slow, prolonged, and humiliating death. Assuming you were able to get strangers or passers-by to give you food and water, it would still be an end heralded by a lot of suffering, as one was exposed to animals, insects, and the elements. Death by starvation and dehydration are what would one would face, on top of all of this.
Yet here we are, dangling. But our face is not one of pain, nor is it one of anguish. It is one of peace and serenity. Evoking Orthodox and Byzantine Church iconography of holiness, a halo surrounds our head. What is going on here? Why and how did we come to this place?
For those of us on the asexual and aromantic spectrums, there are many things in our personal experience that happen to us which are out of our control. We cannot control how people will react to the post we put up on Facebook declaring our sexual identity. We cannot control how our others will react to us calling out others on their racism, transphobia, or aphobia. And we certainly cannot control how friends, family, loved ones, or partners will react to us directly coming out (and some don’t need to imagine this — many already know). We can only control how we meet their energy when we make that bold, honest move. In an almost Wheel of Fortune way, we may never know what might happen. Perhaps a stern and seemingly conservative family member may welcome you with open arms, despite their self-confessed lack of understanding of identities and sexual diversity. Perhaps friends that would be otherwise banner-waving progressives or outwardly queer-friendly liberals may treat your coming out with scorn, derision, gatekeeping and gaslighting. Regardless of what may or may not happen, at the end of the day there comes a point in your relationships as you move through your life as an out queer person, where you will have to accept that control over a situation or conversation doesn’t rest solely in your hands.
Ordinarily, those thoughts genuinely terrified me. Growing up in a house where I was under constant threat of being screamed at or yelled at over the tiniest perceived imperfection, my mind turned to analyzing and overanalyzing my relationships, the people around me, and my interactions, in the hope of finding a path through a conversation that would have the lowest chance of leaving them upset or angry at me. My mind would hatch multiple different back-up plans for what I would do or what I would say, if and when the person I was with (be it one of my parents or a friend or partner) got angry. Sure, when it worked, it worked exceedingly well. But as a result of all of the planning and contingency planning, and alternate back up planning, I ended up becoming bogged down in a mire of stress, anxiety, and hyper awareness. I’ve started to wonder if my growing struggles with memory loss are the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of hypervigilance and emotional hyperplanning, the neurons in my brain worn out and ground down from a primal desire to find as much agency as I could in situations where it was taken from me.
With the help of time, experience, and therapy, I began to start unlearning those habits, in the hope of replacing them with healthier ones. Among them: learning to let go. Accepting that you don’t and may never have full control over how people act towards you was for me a huge step. With that, so many other important puzzle pieces fell into place: I realized I didn’t have to caretake people and assume responsibility for their mental welfare. I didn’t have to be a people pleaser and elevate other people’s needs and wants far above my own. And on top of that I also realized that it didn’t fall on my shoulders to solve all of the world’s problems. While it’s still a constant, unfinished process to internalize all of this and to actually act on it in my life on a regular basis, I have to say that I’ve felt a lot more peace in my life. I’ve also been both more forgiving of, and graceful to myself.
As queer and asexual people, the negative and harsh treatment that we face, from patriarchal family members to strangers on the internet, and everyone in between, can be withering. Much like the traitors and rebels of old, so too are we both traitorous and rebellious: we rebel against the expectations of allonormativity, cisheteronormativiy, monosexism, and amatonormativity, and we are seen as traitorous to both our family and our native culture for refusing to buy into the traditional narrative of dating, a marriage, 2.5 kids, a dog, and a house with a white picket fence. In a lot of ways, we really are that person in the Hanged Man, and the people who are in our communities, or families or friend groups are the ones who put us there.
On an intersectional level, we may also be perceived as traitorous to other queer people when we challenge dimensions of oppression that can be present in queer spaces: racism (especially anti-Black racism); classism, ableism, or monosexism manifested as bi- and transphobia. All too often, it can be other people in the queer community or ace community who leave us up there to dangle on our own — especially in social media and online activist spaces.
And yet, we’re still okay. Part of being queer is to suffer through the loss of friends, loved ones, and family, because try as they might, and try as you might, they will never come to accept or understand who you are. It is completely fair to mourn these connections, but understanding that they still need to be let go is an important step in accepting who and what you yourself truly are.
We are smiling, calm and serene in this situation of suffering and loss, because we are also accepting that as we go through our life journey as asexual and queer people, we will have to let people, places and connections go. We will have to accept that such connections, people, or places may be bigoted, toxic, or even abusive. We will have to accept the potential loss of incredibly valuable relationships into which we may have poured a huge investment of time, resources and emotional labour.
We will have to not just bear all of that, but also accept it; as not events or things that have happened that are good or bad — just as things that are simply there. I believe that people are not born aphobic, just as how they are not born queerphobic, transphobic, racist, ableist or misogynistic. Hate is learned, as Nelson Mandela once quipped. For the bigoted people who may be in your life, their hate likely stems from an entire context of parentage and family that likely actually has nothing at all to do with you, or your asexual/aromantic identity. It is ultimately up to them (not you) to develop the self-awareness necessary to see their own hateful and problematic views as hateful and problematic. And beyond that is whether or not they possess the willingness to do the work and self-reflection necessary to unlearn all of that hate. Again, there is nothing you can do about that. And again, that’s okay.
While no one can guarantee that taking on such a mentality will suddenly elevate you to Zen Buddhist levels of calm and tranquility, I can definitely say that in my own experience, letting things and people go has helped me to be more graceful and at peace with myself, especially when I think about past friendships in my life that I have found difficult to let go of, or move past.
Now, back to the hanged man: As we lay dangling as the hanged person in this card, let’s all think: What or who are you considering letting go of? If you are thinking about having an important conversation with someone, how comfortable are you with not being in control of that situation, or conversation?
Superficially, the gendered nature of The Hanged Man makes it a difficult card to present and even connect with, due to its historically gendered language. That is why I am often drawn, when looking at potentially queer-friendly tarot decks, to The Hanged Man as one of the major cards I look at to see if the deck is something I can connect to. The Star Spinner Tarot, the This Might Hurt Tarot, and the Next World Tarot are the decks I think of that immediately reflect a vision of the Hanged Man that fits a gender and sexually subversive view of queerness.
However, my favorite version of The Hanged Man by far is from Carrie Mellon and Annie Ruygt’s The Spacious Tarot: It is a scene that captures what it feels like to be suspended in space, the majesty of earth stretched out below you. Maybe you’re in your spacesuit, reflecting on the accident that severed the safety tether to your ship. Maybe that accident sucked you out of the cabin when you were sleeping. Either way, you are helpless. In that moment, your thoughts are filled with infinite vastness. You see the big picture, in a way that wasn’t visible at all to you from your place of safety. To my currently dangling mind, nothing quite captures the sense of letting go as effectively as that.
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