Spectrevision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes, or to support the podcast,

go to weirdstud J.F.

Our on-again, off-again series on the major trumps of the

tarot continues this week, with a discussion of the 12th Arcanum, the hanged man. I remember being

deeply affected by this card when I first laid eyes on it in my youth. I couldn't have been

older than ten at the time and knew nothing of the

tarot. My older cousin, to whom I owe my lifelong fascination with things strange and occult,

handed me his Marseille deck and let me flip through the cards. My impressionable mind feasted

on the images of kings and queens, gesturesers and magicians, weird machines and monsters.

Figures I was already acquainted with, thanks to fantasy books and dungeons and dragons,

another obsession I owe my cousin. But the hanged man, arguably the most banal member of the

tarot's dramatist personae, tens pencil predicament notwithstanding, seemed most

mysterious and enigmatic of all. I had no ready-made meaning for this image, and no way to

align it with the rest. Who is he? I asked my cousin. He's the hanged man, he said,

le pardu in French.

Why is he hanging? I asked.

My cousin shrugged. Nobody knows.

Indeed, nobody does.

Even the great occultist Arthur E. Waite, co-creator of the writer Waite deck and author of the classic pictorial key to the tarot, proudly confessed that he was as stumped by this card as everyone else. I can't think of a better way of introducing this topic than to quote him here in full. Note that the image he's describing is the one from his own deck. Quote, the gallows from which he is suspended forms a tau cross,

while the figure, from the position of the legs,

...