Queen of Tarot

The ancient wisdom of the cards

The Traitor Tarot Card Meaning and Art Tarot Genoves Deck

Designation

The Traitor

About the Deck

Tarot Genoves Deck

A reproduction of an authentic Genovean Tarot exhibited at the Fournier Playing Card Museum.

Provenance

Genova, Italy. 1887.

Description

This extraordinary symbol is almost unintelligible in the double-headed cards. Properly, it represents a man hung head downwards from a sort of gibbet by one foot (his hands are bound behind his back in such a manner that his body forms a triangle with the point downwards), and his legs a cross above it. (Two sacks or weights are attached to his armpits.) He symbolises Sacrifice.

Meaning of The Traitor from the Tarot Genoves Deck

Upright

Self-sacrifice, Sacrifice, Devotion, Bound;

Reversed

Selfishness, Unbound, Partial sacrifice.

According to Many Schools of Thought

A. E. Waite's Secondary Meanings

The Hanged Man. This is the symbol which is supposed to represent Prudence, and Eliphas Levi says, in his most shallow and plausible manner, that it is the adept bound by his engagements. The figure of a man is suspended head-downwards from a gibbet, to which he is attached by a rope about one of his ankles. The arms are bound behind him, and one leg is crossed over the other. According to another, and indeed the prevailing interpretation, he signifies sacrifice, but all current meanings attributed to this card are cartomancists' intuitions, apart from any real value on the symbolical side. The fortune-tellers of the eighteenth century who circulated Tarots, depict a semi-feminine youth in jerkin, poised erect on one foot and loosely attached to a short stake driven into the ground.

S. L. MacGregor Mathers's Divinatory Meanings

Upright

Self-sacrifice, Sacrifice, Devotion, Bound

Reversed

Selfishness, Unbound, Partial sacrifice.

Papus's Divinatory Meanings

Trials. Sacrifice.