Chapter 10: Hangedman
The usual explanation of the Hangedman card is that it represents a "shame painting" (Moakley 1966). Persons who were considered traitors were often depicted in this way and this can safely be taken as the literal sense of the symbol. In the last Canto of the Inferno, the traitors Brutus and Cassius who assassinated Julius Caesar are described as hanging upside down under the chins of Satan. This explanation clearly has merit. In many of the contemporary depictions of Hell influenced by Dante the image of the traitor often appears. The most striking example is Figure 23 (~1410) from a fresco of the Last Judgment in Bologna which might have served as a model for the Tarot designers.
However, another fascinating explanation is offered by Freccero (1986) in his analysis of the Commedia as the conversion experience of Dante himself. Such a religious conversion experience is often described as a reversal, turning one's life around, 'turning things upside down'. Something similar is suggested by modern interpretations of the card as representing 'letting go' and by decks that show coins falling heedlessly from money bags held by the Hangedman.
Freccero considers the events described at the end of the Inferno to represent exactly this kind of conversion experience, i.e., these events can be see at the Moral/Mystical level of interpretation. The sequence of events is depicted in Figure 24 (~1478). In Canto 34, Virgil & Dante approach Satan. Starting at line 70, Dante grasps Virgil around the neck and Virgil begins to climb DOWN the body of Satan (Figure 25, 14th century). At line 79, Virgil reaches Satan's hip, turns upside down and starts climbing UP (Figure 26, ~1400). In line 90, Dante finds that they are climbing up one of the legs of Satan.
At the literal layer of interpretation, what has happened is simple. When the prideful angel Lucifer was cast down from heaven, he fell headfirst into the earth. His hips are lodged at the center of gravity. Climbing down the body, gravity was pulling them toward the hips. Beyond that point, the center of gravity was below them as they climbed up the leg.
But at the third level of interpretation, Freccero maintains that Dante is
representing a conversion of values, a change of life. 
Beyond
this conversion point, the journey reverses direction and is aimed straight
upward to the highest sphere of heaven. Dante hints at some deeper meaning when
he says (Inferno 34:91-93) that the ignorant should not judge his state of confusion
because they do not understand "…what point I had crossed."
Freccero reinforces his argument by a citation from Plato's Timaeus. This was one of Plato's dialogues that was available in Latin and well known in Medieval Europe. In the Timaeus, Plato describes the confusion of the soul undergoing a conversion, i.e., being united to a body. The faculties, describes as circles of reason and passion, are disrupted. The circles are "barely held together, and though they are moved, their motion is unregulated, now reversed, now side-long, now inverted. It is as though a man stands on his head…". Freccero also cites the apocryphal Acts of St. Peter as depicting reversal/inversion as an act of spiritual conversion: "Unless ye make the right as the left and the left as the right and the top as the bottom and the front as the backward, ye shall not know the Kingdom [of heaven]."
Whatever credence the reader decides to place on Freccero's mystical interpretation, it remains evocative and fascinating. Most importantly, it demonstrates once again that multiple layers of meaning are possible in the Commedia. And given that such was the contemporary approach to designing and interpreting symbolic systems (de Lubac 1959) we should not shy away from multiple interpretations of the early Tarot. So stating that the Hangedman is a "shame painting" isn't the end of the story, its only the first or literal layer.
One final note on the Hangedman. Despite the similarities, there is an interesting difference in the sequencing between Dante and the Tarot. In Dante the sequence is Fortitude (Virgil's advice to Dante), then the Devil, then the Hangedman. In the Tarot the sequence is Fortitude, Hangedman, Death. Perhaps if we understood why the two sequences differ we would understand the Tarot more deeply.
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