Dear Reader,
Every day I wake up missing the ocean. One of the things that I do to cope with that is think a lot about water. I spent the week reading about T.S. Eliot’s notoriously difficult poem “The Waste Land,” and writing a set of notes on The Hanged Man.
That’s because there’s a tarot reading in the poem, from which the Hanged Man is notably absent:
“Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
…
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.
…
Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.”
Rachel Pollack’s interpretation of the card is the one that tipped me off to this connection. She scrambles the order of events and misquotes the line that says “fear death by water,” but I like that she considers the coupling of the Hanged Man with water, as a suggestion that “the ego sees surrender as death—dissolution in the sea of life.”
In light of the Hanged Man’s absence in the spread, I’ve been wondering if the missing card stands for the narrator’s inability for the sort of surrender that would yield the exhilaration of total release the card indicates. The act that bestows the halo. Instead, they have over-identified with the Phoenician Sailor, and are unable to let go because they fear that letting go will equal death. Too attached to the terrestrial world, to their “carnal” comforts—“those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!”—they cannot let go.
Ironically (am I using this word correctly? Part of me thinks the Hanged Man is about releasing the need to be correct), the drowned sailor does not escape the sea changes they fear. Those waters get to us all some way or another, however good or bad we might be at letting go. And it all makes me remember one of my favorite lyrical buoys in the disorientating waters of grief, attributed to Bishop Ambrose by theologian Catherine Keller1:
“On the sea the storm rages, the winds scream out, but the fish swims; he is not swallowed up because he is used to swimming. To you, this world is the sea. Its currents uncertain, its waves deep, its storms fierce. And you must be this fish, that the waves of the world do not swallow you.”
If you enjoyed this, consider hitting the like button! Thank you. <3
Onward,
Jessica
You’re reading the Offering for July 12, 2026. I make these weekly-ish, and they are evolving. Usually, they have something to do with grief, loss and mourning, very often also the ocean and water. I’m almost always looking at Tarot cards when I’m thinking about the various things that I like to consider. Thank you for being here.
Cited in On the mystery: Discerning God in Process
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