The Hanged Man

A figure hangs upside-down by one foot from an ankh, his legs crossed and his arms held out to form a cross above a triangle. Nails pierce his hands and foot; a serpent rises beneath his head; the whole is drawn on a grid, the fixed matrix of the old Aeon.

Mem, water, one of the three Mothers, on path 23 from Geburah to Hod: the great sea, and the descent of the severe power into intellect. Mem is the still water in which the light is reflected upside-down.

Elemental Water. Modern practitioners overlay Neptune (dissolution, mystic surrender); this is not among Crowley's primary attributions.

Twelve, the zodiac completed, and Mem's value 40, the number of the flood and of the years in the wilderness: the whole cycle passed through in suspension.

The sacrifice of the ego's viewpoint that precedes rebirth: enantiodromia, the reversal of every value. Jungian readers see the descent into the unconscious and the crucifixion of the persona.

Waite's hanged man is serene with a halo; Crowley's is a dying god of the old Aeon, pinned to the grid of a formula that has passed, and he warns that the card should no longer be read as the model of redemption.