78 Notes to Self: For Shame
For Shame: The Hanged Man
This is one of my least liked tarot card trumps. I’m not sure it’s anyone’s favorite given its uncomfortable depiction of torture, but my main beef with this card is not only does it tell me that what I want requires a very long wait, but in the meantime I’m not going to be enjoying that wait. Unlike the Star that also depicts that my goal is afar off, this card says the intervening time is pretty much going to suck for me, though I will learn a lot from it. Bah. Take your life lesson and hang that from a tree, ok?
To even attempt to understand the meaning of this Major Arcana card, one really does need to get the historical perspective. Times have most certainly changed since the creation of Tarot and this card references something that people of the 1500’s would have readily recognized that we in the 21st Century have no current context. Well, we do, but not in this manner. This picture of a man hung upside down by one foot is what was known in Italy as a pittura infamante, a defaming portrait. It was used as a kind of rag publication that showed thieves, traitors, those guilty of bankruptcy or fraud in this punishing position and displayed in centers of public view. Those paintings weren’t literal, in that the depicted victims were not actually hung in this manner but were shamed by the portrait. They were akin to our political cartoons except that they were approved and even requested by the municipal civil authorities as a form of public punishment. They began to lose popularity when they began to be appreciated more as an art form, like the political cartoon, rather than be seen as a form of punishment. The intended effect, shame, was lessened, and the practice diminished. (read the full post)
Ginny Hunt
Ginny Hunt is a Professional Tarot Reader from Maryland. Her interest in the spiritual and metaphysical has been a lifelong passion. She has been a practicing counselor, both professionally with adolescents and para-professionally as a volunteer with abused women. She offers professional reading services through 78 Notes to Self.
Music Credits
- 78 Notes Music: Winter Moon by Rhonda Lorence from Winter Moon (Magnatune)
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November 24th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Interesting to bring in the past imagery for the Hanged Man (i.e. we may not “get” today what the upside down figure represented then). I wish more attention had been paid to the imagery itself – the hair, the leg position etc.
We can sometimes make a card harder than it has to be just by thinking of it as a hard card. Perhaps the Hanged Man is a short “time out”, as opposed to a horribly long period of time over which one has no control.