The Hanged Man and the work of waiting

A woman named Aileen sat in my Edinburgh flat in February of 2024, in the chair by the window that looks out onto a row of pale Georgian terraces, and pulled the Hanged Man as the centre card of a five-card spread. She looked at it, the figure suspended upside-down by one ankle from a wooden frame, and said, "Oh no. I'm in crisis. The cards are saying I'm in crisis."

I said, "No, you're not. The cards are saying you should stop trying to make a decision this week."

She told me, six months later, that this had been the most useful sentence anyone had said to her that year. She had been about to make a large decision about her career, hastily, because the waiting was unbearable. The reading gave her permission to keep waiting. She kept waiting. The decision that eventually arrived, in August, was not the one she would have made in February. It was a better one. The Hanged Man, that day, did exactly what the Hanged Man is supposed to do.

The Hanged Man tarot is the most-misread card in the deck. I want to try, today, to clear up the misreading, because in 2026, in a year that has not been calm for most of my clients, the card keeps coming up and keeps getting flinched at. The flinch is the problem. The card is medicine.

What the picture actually shows

Let's start with what's in front of us. Smith-Waite version. A man hangs upside down by his right ankle, suspended from a wooden T-shaped frame. His left leg crosses behind his right at the knee, forming a figure-four. His arms are tucked behind his back. He is wearing red trousers, a blue tunic, and yellow shoes. His face is calm. A golden halo, or a corona of light, surrounds his head.

Notice three things, before you reach for any interpretation. First, he is not falling. The figure is held. Steady. He has been hung deliberately. Second, he is not in pain. His expression is, by the standards of medieval and Renaissance pose-language, serene. Third, his head, the centre of his thinking, is glowing. Whatever he's doing while he's suspended, it is producing light.

The card is a picture of voluntary suspension that yields insight. That is not a card about crisis. That is a card about a discipline.

Why clients misread it

I have a working theory about why this card scares people. Three reasons.

One: the visual rhymes with crucifixion imagery, and Christian iconography has trained the Western eye to read a man suspended on a wooden frame as a man being executed. The Hanged Man is not being executed. He's hanging by one ankle. His arms are loose behind his back. But the resemblance is close enough that people see suffering even where there isn't any.

Two: our culture has lost most of its language for productive stillness. We have language for action. We have language for rest, in a vacation sense. We do not have much language for the long pause that is neither action nor rest, the deliberate stop that allows a different orientation to settle. So when clients see a card whose central instruction is exactly that, they don't have a concept to file it under. They reach for the nearest available label. Crisis. Stuckness. Powerlessness. None of those are what the card is.

Three: the card sometimes is uncomfortable. I won't pretend it's all serenity. Voluntary suspension, when you're actually doing it, is hard. Your body wants to move. Your decision-making muscle wants to twitch. The Hanged Man asks you to refrain. That can be unpleasant, even when it's the right move. Clients read the unpleasantness as proof the card is bad news.

What the card actually says

In my reading, after fourteen years of pulling it and watching it land, the Hanged Man tarot card has a single core instruction, dressed up in different clothes depending on the spread.

The instruction is: stop trying to act on this. Stay where you are. Look at it from where you're hanging.

That's not nothing. That's a hard ask, in any year. In a year like this one, when so many of my clients are reaching for action as a way of managing economic and personal uncertainty, the Hanged Man's permission to stop is, I would argue, more useful than most other cards in the deck.

The card does not say give up. It does not say accept defeat. The figure is not lying on the ground. He is hung, deliberately, in a position from which he can see things he could not see standing upright. The work of the card is to use the new view. Not to escape the position. Not to right himself prematurely.

When I tell a client the Hanged Man has shown up for them, the conversation I have to have is almost always the same. The client wants to act. The cards are saying don't, not yet. The client thinks not-acting is the same as failing. The card is saying not-acting is the work, this week, and the next week, and possibly the week after that. The client needs to hear that staying still is allowed to count as progress.

Aileen's reading, in detail

I want to walk through Aileen's February 2024 reading more carefully, because it's the clearest example I have of the Hanged Man tarot doing real work.

Her question was open. She wanted to know what to pay attention to as she considered a career change. I pulled five cards in a horseshoe. Past on the left, present underneath, advice on top, near future on the right, far future on the far right.

• Past: Ten of Wands. The accumulated weight of the work she'd been doing for years. The burden she'd been carrying.
• Present, underneath: Four of Pentacles. The position she was currently holding. Conservative. Gripping. Defended.
• Advice, top: the Hanged Man.
• Near future: Two of Swords. A decision held off. A blindfold.
• Far future: the Star.

The whole spread, read together, was telling a single story. She had been carrying too much for too long, in the Ten. She was currently in a defensive crouch, in the Four. She was being told, in the advice position, to suspend. The near future showed that suspension producing a held-off decision rather than a forced one. The far future showed the Star, which is, for me, almost always a card about quiet hope, things easing back into rightness, faith returning slowly.

What the Hanged Man was doing in that spread was making sense of the Two of Swords. Without the Hanged Man in advice, the Two of Swords would have read as paralysis, as a problem. With the Hanged Man in advice, the Two of Swords became the natural consequence of correct waiting. The blindfolded woman with crossed swords was not stuck. She was disciplined. She was refusing to act before the act was ready.

Aileen did not make a decision in February. Or in March. Or in April. She came back to me in May and we pulled again. The Hanged Man was no longer in the spread. The Three of Pentacles had taken his place. The waiting had done its work. The next phase was collaborative, hands-on, specific.

She made the decision in August. It involved leaving her industry entirely. The decision was, by her own assessment a year later, the best one she'd made in a decade. None of it would have been possible if she'd forced movement in February, when every cell in her body wanted to.

The Hanged Man reversed

Quickly, because I want to be useful to other readers, on the Hanged Man reversed.

Upright, the card is voluntary suspension. Reversed, in my reading, it's the failure of that suspension. The figure is no longer being held. He is either trying to thrash his way out of a position he was supposed to sit in, or he has been hanging too long and the productive stillness has gone stagnant. Either way, the card is asking: are you doing the wrong kind of waiting.

The right kind of waiting is alert. The wrong kind of waiting is numb. The right kind of waiting changes how you see. The wrong kind of waiting just passes time. The hanged man reversed is, almost always, a sign that the client has tipped from one into the other and needs to either commit more fully to the stillness or admit it's time to act.

I read this reversal for a client last October who'd been "waiting on clarity" about a relationship for, by his account, eighteen months. The reversal landed hard. He saw himself in it. He admitted that the waiting had stopped being a discipline and had become an avoidance. He left her in November. The relationship had been over for some time. He had been hanging, but not for any reason.

What I get wrong

I want to be honest about a case where I read this card poorly.

In 2022 I read for a man I'll call Will, who pulled the Hanged Man in the advice position of a spread about his job. I told him, with my usual confidence about this card, that he should stop trying to make a decision and let things settle. He took my advice. He waited. The job, while he was waiting, was eliminated in a restructuring. He was made redundant in a worse position than he would have been if he'd negotiated his way out three months earlier.

Was I wrong? Partially. The card's instruction to wait was, I still think, the right instruction for what he was actually carrying, which was a long pattern of leaving jobs reactively before things settled. The card was reading him, not the company. But I should have said more. I should have said: wait on the decision, and also prepare. Suspension does not mean unawareness. The Hanged Man is hung, but his head is glowing. He is doing something while he's there. I let Will think the card meant pure passivity. That was a misread on my part.

I now, when I deliver the Hanged Man's advice, distinguish between waiting and preparing. You can do both at the same time. You should, usually. The card asks you to stop trying to force the decision. It does not ask you to stop tending the field.

What I want clients to know

If you pull the Hanged Man, especially in the advice position, especially this year: take a breath. The card is not the worst news. It is, more often than not, an instruction to stop trying to move, look at the situation from where you currently are, and trust that the next right step will become visible when you've hung there long enough.

The discipline is hard. It is not crisis. It is a permission, in a culture that does not give it freely, to wait.