The Hanged Man: a head-down moment

The picture: living wood, one foot, a ring of light

Waite starts with two shapes. The gallows from which he is suspended forms a Tau cross, and the figure, from the position of the legs, forms a fylfot cross. There is a nimbus about the head of the seeming martyr.

Then he asks the reader to note three things: first, that the tree of sacrifice is living wood, with leaves on it; second, that the face expresses deep entrancement, not suffering; third, that the figure as a whole suggests life in suspension, but life and not death.

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BaZiFlow's original Hanged Man with three ways to read it

On the RWS card itself, a beam runs across the top with green leaves hanging at both ends. The figure is held by one foot from the beam, that leg straight and the other bent behind it, head down, with a ring of yellow light around the head, a blue tunic and red legs.

Read the picture from top to bottom: the wood, the person, the light.

What Waite lists: eight words, and none of them is "waiting"

Waite's divinatory meaning is eight words:

Wisdom, circumspection, discernment, trials, sacrifice, intuition, divination, prophecy.

The eight fall into three small groups: the first three are about how to see, the middle two about what is paid, the last three about looking ahead without reasoning it out. There is no "waiting", "pause" or "letting go" in the list. The nearest source for that reading is the phrase "life in suspension" in Part II, which sits in the description of the picture and did not enter the list.

Tau wood, crossed legs, a nimbus: what he wrote, and what he turned down

Waite names three shapes: the Tau gallows, the cross formed by the legs, and the ring about the head. He describes the shapes without explaining what each one means.

In the next passage Waite's tone changes. It is a card of profound significance, he says, but all the significance is veiled. One editor suggests that Éliphas Lévi did not know the meaning, which is unquestionable; nor did the editor himself.

It has been called falsely, he adds, a card of martyrdom, a card of prudence, a card of the Great Work, a card of duty, and one may exhaust all published interpretations and find only vanity. Of his own he says very simply that it expresses, in one of its aspects, the relation between the Divine and the Universe.

How to read it: hang the agenda upside down and start from the end

The picture has a plain structure: one point of attachment, the foot that holds him; a head turned down; and light about the head. Put onto a meeting agenda, it turns into three moves. It is an exercise borrowed from the picture, not from Waite.

1. 1

   Find the hook

   Only one foot and one beam hold him. A meeting has one thing it must deliver: write it as a sentence, for example "this week's schedule is settled". Every other item hangs under it.

2. 2

   Head down: start from the end

   Start from "what each person takes out of the room" and go up the agenda from the bottom, asking of each item: does it yield a decision, a piece of information, or only a round of talking?

3. 3

   Keep what the light falls on

   The light is at the head: keep in the meeting only the items that people present must decide on the spot; turn information items into a written update beforehand; cut the round-robin ones first and see whether anyone misses them.

Say a weekly meeting has three agenda items and has to shrink to forty-five minutes. Ask them from the end and the three separate by kind:

Reversed and neighboring cards: selfishness, the crowd, and three cards about being stuck

Waite's reversed list has three words:

Selfishness, the crowd, body politic.

He does not expand on them. The first word points to the individual and the other two to a group: "the crowd" and "body politic", meaning the state or society as made up of its people. Reading it as "hung between the individual and the group" is a way of arranging the three words, not Waite's own statement.