Jesus and the
Tarot Twelve Card
The first thing we might notice about this card is the title. Well, no. The first thing people see is that he’s upside down. Give a Tarot deck to people new to the cards, and let them leaf through it. When they get to card twelve, they usually will turn it around. This, then, becomes a fundamental meaning of the Hanged Man—to seem, at least, upside down, the wrong way around. To give others the irresistible urge to turn us around so that we look and think and act like everyone else.
—Rachel Pollack 82
Inspiration comes from the most unexpected places and often out of the most difficult (even painful) circumstances. I had many such experiences during the writing of this book. My research had taken me on an exciting journey into the discoveries of the Jesus quest, and as a result I had been brought face to face with a man who was far more captivating and relevant than I had ever known before. But the constant emotional cost of this effort was draining; at the same time, I was being tested by the Church for unorthodoxy (heresy). The cost of being true to myself had, three years previously, robbed me of my job as a full-time clergyman, along with many other things—home, security, pension, and so much more. I still saw myself as a priest (though unlicensed) and offered myself as a free-lance celebrant of rites of passage and other ceremonies for those outside the officialdom of formal religion. As I’ve made clear in this book, I had no intention of resigning my actual orders. In fact, I wanted very much to be seen (by the Church) as a progressive priest who had a deep love and connection for Paganism, and an ability to swim in both rivers. But the only way the Church would consider having me as a licensed “priest at the edge” was to test my orthodoxy and see if I could still fit under the breadth of the Anglican tradition. There are plenty of clergy who are far less “orthodox” than me, and some have passed such “tests for orthodoxy” by a clever use of semantics and half truths. I could not employ such tactics; I needed to be totally honest—totally myself. Integrity and authenticity is what caused me to lose my job in the first place. If I allowed myself to play the semantics game at this stage, well, the previous three years of shit would have been for nothing. Besides, I’m really not clever enough.
In the end, I was actually given back my “Permission to Officiate” as an official Church of England priest, but I decided not to accept it. I still loved the Church of England from the bottom of my heart (and do to this day) but thought I’d rather be a friend of it on the outside, than an antagonist on the inside. Even though life was tremendously tough—especially financially—I knew I had to remain true to myself and continue to live outside the institution.
All this turmoil from the ecclesiastical powers that be as well as the trauma of the past three years had taken its toll on my life in the most devastating way. The book writing and necessary inspiration thus became harder to find. My life was becoming burdensome and stunted my creativity and openness to spirit. When I reached this particular chapter (I didn’t know it was going to be about the twelfth tarot card, the Hanged Man at that point), I had nothing left. I’d come to a dead end. Indeed, I was beginning to feel as if I’d died within, and something like a dark night descended. And the book’s first-draft deadline rapidly approached.
Yet then came a ray of light, as it does so often through the cracks of coming to the end of one’s own resources. I put out a little note on my Facebook page, stating that the Muses had left me, my Awen had dried up. And, after an hour or so, a response came:
There once was an Xtian bard
Who was finding a chapter quite hard
He looked to the tower
On top grew a flower
Why not pick a tarot card?
It was from my good friend Adele, who had herself submitted a lovely story for this book. I read the rhyme, and chuckled to myself as I reached for my Rider-Waite deck. I pulled a card. As I turned it over and saw what it was, I knew immediately that Adele had become my impromptu Muse, and that the card had become my gateway. I replied with a rhyme of my own.
The Xtian bard was delighted
The card that he picked his world lighted
For the archetype found
Was a hanged man, yet crowned
With a halo—Twas Jesus he sighted …
And so I had my inspiration, and it appeared in the most remarkable way. The death of the historical Jesus came to me depicted by a strange deck of cards usually associated with the Pagan (or at least the magical) community. But not only that; through this Hanged Man–Jesus card my own story had also been powerfully connected. The suffering I had been going through gave way to inspiration, just as all suffering can often make way for magic. Suffering can often enable us to see things from a very different perspective. It turns everything on its head, upside down like the Hanged Man.
This is one of the more esoteric meanings of the cross which we will come to in the next part of the book. For now, however, let’s turn our minds to the way the historical Jesus story ended.
Jesus died upon a torturous cross of wood—this is a fact. We do not know any more than that, but we do know that much. There is even non-biblical literary evidence to support his.83 As far as the doctrine and theology of the Cross (Atonement) go, we’ll have to leave them for the next chapter, where we will try to unpack some of the Christian mythology surrounding Jesus. For now, I want us to stay with this image of a man dying on a cross, a real human being who was put there because he was a threat to the religious and political powers that be.
Jesus of Nazareth’s execution was the price he paid for taking the risks he did. His compassion—his expressed love—turned out to be truly sacrificial, yet not in the sense that later doctrine suggested. It was love that spilled out of his veins as they were opened by whip, nail, and fist. And while this was happening, there were no Christians praising God for the sacrifice that was being offered upon the altar of the sacred Cross. There was nothing sacred about that cross. It was a disgusting instrument of torture and death, and Jesus’s mission to be true to the message within him and to teach others to be true to themselves, ended there.
The theology/mythology of the Cross is a later development, and it still has a power of its own, but here, pre-Easter, pre-Church, we just see the pitiless depths to which humanity is prepared to go to destroy a gift. We also see the courage, the resolve, the sacrificial authenticity of a man who knows what he had to do—simply because his heart will not allow him to betray his own deepest self.
Jesus the hanged man is a sign to all people of any faith or none that being true to one’s own deepest truth is of more importance than anything else. It is the symbol of the martyr, of the nonviolent protestor, of all those who have stood against anyone or anything that tries to rob them of their dignity, of their message, of themselves—especially of those whose life is lived for the sake of freeing others. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Sadat, et al. all stand in this stream, this powerful tradition. And they do become more powerful after their death. They do live on. Not in the sense of coming back to life literally, but in the sense that their own selfless and authentic courage gives hope, strength, and meaning to those who try to emulate their practise. Jesus the human being should never have been turned into a “god who did it all for us.” His message was not “You don’t need to bother because I’ve paid the price for you.” Rather, it was closer to this: “Be true to YOU, do the work, go through the process, and let it lead you to the place of true freedom and true selfhood. For there you will find your inner god-self.”
This now essentially leads us onto the next persona of my “tri-part Christ.” The historical Jesus’s story ended as a naked, bleeding man, paying the price for his own authentic walk. It is inevitable that such profound images begin to transmute into myth and metaphor. It is a perfectly natural phenomenon. The only problem when this happened with the story of Jesus is (as I’ve been consistently claiming) that it was then re-literalised to give the world what is essentially a supernatural hero figure but equated with real history. Jesus himself was indeed a man of history but Christ was an added metaphorical layer thus creating a mythos. Yes, I believe that God was in Jesus of Nazareth and yes I believe that Christ is what we call this phenomenon of deity embodied in humanity—spirit in matter. But God/Christ are also in every other human being that lives on this planet. Jesus shows us what we all are.
For Pagans, Jesus the man holds a great fascination. He seems to emulate their dream of authenticity along with many of their beliefs and understandings about the realm of spirit and their own divinity. However, Jesus Christ shouts at them with an exclusive message of “I am the way, the truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father but by me.” Once we understand this Christ-ness of Jesus as a natural metaphoricalization of an amazingly important man and as a profound symbol of what is true for all humankind, a whole new world of theological possibilities will open up. And once we re-mythologize what has been literalised by the Church, we are left with another divine-man image which can unlock many profound and universal truths.