Le Pendu Tarot

The earliest known tarot card decks date to the early 1400s, and for several centuries they were used simply as game cards, becoming associated with divination only after the 1780s.

This interpretation of The Hanged Man (Le Pendu) card show a ghoulish pirate suspended in a gibbet surrounded by carrion crows. These iron cages were employed throughout the British Empire to suspend the decomposing bodies of hanged men as a deterrent to those tempted to transgress colonial laws, and were used in Newfoundland from the mid-1700s up until 1834, most famously at Gibbet Hill, a small peak near Signal Hill in St. John’s. This pirate is shown holding his cutlass in one hand, and a winged hourglass in the other, an old symbol used on pirate flags to symbolize the fleeting nature of human existence. Within the context of tarot reading, the Hanged Man card indicates a crossroads of some sort has been reached in a person’s life and that a change in perspective is needed in order to find the right path.