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Mem and the Hanged Man: The Tarot Overlay

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Mem and the Hanged Man: The Tarot Overlay

This path is assigned the tarot trump The Hanged Man, and the pairing rests on the letter Mem's elemental attribution to water: the Hanged Man, suspended upside down in willing surrender, is read in the Golden Dawn system as the card of the element of water, of reversal, sacrifice, and the immersion of the self, the reflection in still water, the world seen inverted. The mapping of the twenty-two letters onto the tarot trumps descends from Eliphas Levi and was fixed by the Golden Dawn from 1888, as published in Liber 777. The provenance must be kept clear throughout.

The path from Geburah to Hod, the letter Mem, and its attribution to the element water as one of the three mother letters are Jewish in origin, from the Sefer Yetzirah, whereas the correspondence to the Hanged Man is Hermetic Qabalah, the modern Western esoteric adaptation of 1888, a magical overlay distinct from the Jewish mystical tradition it borrowed from.

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