The Hanged Man (or The Traitor) - Twelve

Tarot of Marseilles

Twelve are the apostles of Jesus, including the traitor Judas. According to the Gospel of Matthew, Judas commited suicide by hanging himself, and so the image of a hanged man was associated with traitors. The image for the twelth Tarot card is a hanged man, known as "pittura infamante" the defaming portrait. Such portraits were painted in order to shame a known criminal. Often the portraits were life size frescoes, displayed in public spaces, and accompanied by a written label to "name and shame" the criminal. To depict someone hanging upside down was considered particularly humiliating. These images were effective in punishing noblemen for their bad debt, bankruptcy, fraud, forgery, etc. What this image says is that someone of high standing and wealth has fallen from grace, their ego has taken a beating. The lesson this card teaches is that an over-inflated ego will be turned on its head. The height of pride will become the lowest of the low. This card makes a mockery of those who think themselves well-to-do because they enjoy the finer things in life. They are receiving shallow pleasure from ill-begotten gains. Superficial pleasures like expensive cars, handbags, shoes, and luxury mansions, do nothing to gratify the soul. If you happen to have a lot of money to hand, do something meaningful with it. It's a shame to live a superficial life, with no compassion, no human decency. Instead of obsessing over material gains, become rich with love, happiness, and peace. Don't be fooled by your own ego, because it's just a facade. You must learn humility.

Twelve is the number of completion, full circle. As the clock strikes twelve, we return to the beginning. As we reach the end of the twelth month, we begin the year all over again. There are twelve days of Yuletide, that golden time of year when the days begin the lengthen after the winter solstice. The twelth Tarot card teaches us that as we reach the grandiose heights of ego pride, we must be purged of our falsehoods, and taken back to square one. We are turned on our heads to see life from a totally different perspective.

In Buddhism, humility, is a characteristic that is both part of the spiritual practice, and a result of it. As a quality to be developed, it is deeply connected with the practice of the Four Abodes: loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy and equanimity.  Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada explains humility to mean one should not be anxious to have the satisfaction of being honoured by others. Mohandas Gandhi interprets the concept of humility as an essential virtue that must exist in a person for other virtues to emerge. Humility must not be confused with mere manners; a man may prostrate himself before another, but if his heart is full of bitterness for the other, it is not humility. Sincere humility is how one feels inside, a state of mind. Swami Vivekananda teaches that each human being is the Universal, the Cosmic Being, God or Brahman. Becoming aware of our oneness with everyone and everything else in the Universe, without inferiority or superiority, is the mark of humility. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan teaches that humility is the non-judgemental state of mind when we are best able to learn, contemplate and understand everyone and everything.

What's interesting is that the Hanged Man depicts death by suicide. This is a metaphor for ego-death, the experience of no-self, Anatta in Pali, or Anatman in Sanskrit. This is the realisation that the ego-self is an illusion. Removing notions of "self" and "I-making" enables one to attain liberation from false-perception. The ego is a sense of self that we develop during our lifetime, and realising that it is just a facade, a mask for our true self, we are able to become masters of illusion, magicians. The magician may transform the ego-self into a force for good in the world, through the practice of loving-kindness and mindfulness. This is how a fraud, a superficial person, can turn things around and become "a good person" detatched from ego-identification. This is what the Hanged Man means to me.