The Hanged Man

The 12th Key

Colour: Deep Blue
Sound: G Sharp
MATERNAL LETTER: Water

This path connects Splendour with Severity. Whilst it is also a path connecting the Personality with the Higher Self, the initiatory implications are very different from those three paths which lead straight into Beauty.

This is the second of the three maternals to appear. Judgment being the first. The Hanged Man is seen as a path of baptism into the maternal waters. Water represents consciousness, the substance from which everything is produced. It is also referred to as the Thinking Principle due to its wavelike movement. In its lowest expression it is the astral fluid first discovered on the path of the World.

It is on this Path that one is drowned in these waters, to be perceived as an intrinsic and inseparable part of the One Consciousness. A place where all life floats in suspension, with no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there. A place where you experience the other in yourself and the other than yourself experiences you.

The state of mind on this Path can be compared to Samadhi. Crowley referred to it simply as 'union with the Lord', a number of states involving different degrees of trance of which the Fool is the highest. An experience we may spend our entire lives seeking but which is only one step along the Great Way.

The figure on the card represents the willful suspension of personal consciousness, because a greater reality is imposing a complete reversal of perspective. In that reversal lies the baptism. It must be remembered that this is essentiality an intellectual experience. The meditator becomes the object of the meditation. The 'I' is utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that we become unconscious to ourselves.

The counterbalance of this experience is found in the Wheel of Fortune, the card opposite the Hanged Man. The Hanged man is rest whilst the Wheel of Fortune is activity. The Hanged Man is what happens when the Wheel stops turning. The Hanged Man (card 12) is qualified as a path of eternally unresolved possibilities, as openness without beginning or end. This is the opposite of the Wheel of Fortune which encloses eternal motion (card 21).

The Hanged Man can also be explained as a crucifixion relating it to a dying God. The death and resurrection of any God relates to this Path and the myth of Kabiri. One brother was slain by his three others and his body dispersed all over the world, his dismembered body is discovered, and he is resurrected for the good of humanity. This is similar to the Osiris legend whose body parts were scattered all about the land, collected and then resurrected. Also symbolised by the formula IAO meaning Isis (fruition), Apophis (death), Osiris (resurrection). And finally, aligned with Yod, Heh, Vau.