August 21, 2008
THE HANGED MAN
| CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE |
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In the 1912 Qabbani deck, completed shortly before the designer’s death in a Tangiers brothel, the Hanged Man, most unusually, takes the place of The World at the terminus of the Major Arcana. Qabbani, a profligate student and senet gambler, was branded on the right knee and taken on in bondage by a fortune teller of great beauty. When his debt to her was satisfied, she left him without pity, distraught, destitute, and possessed by his worship of her. Ferocious and determined, he used the last of his money in the senet slums and won enough to collapse into a brothel where he directed for several weeks a pair of underage twin prostitutes to paint seventy-eight cards for him. Qabbani married the sisters and widowed them on the same night in a rite he believed, along with the alchemical energy of the cards, would grant him immense powers and bind the four of them, Qabbani, his new wives, and his lost fortune-teller, through all their subsequent incarnations. Heavily dosed with laudanum, he chanted and whipped his own flesh into a wreckage of blood and lymph. At his inevitable climax, the girls strangled him on a makeshift altar.
The deck was unknown until 1997, when it was made public and immediately sold to US Games by Firyal and Widad Ghobril, aged 17.
The doublet of the Qabbani Hanged Man is colored in gold leaf, the only card in the deck to receive such expensive attentions. The pinks of the sleeves are scarlet, giving the appearance of slashing, weeping wounds. So too are his eyelids traced like a woman’s with a delicate line of gold. He is naked from the waist down; there is a curious scar on his knee where it bends to create that crook of leg common to all known versions of this card. A universally acute angle, right ankle resting across left knee. This is the Mudra of the Hanged Man. He cannot escape this gesture, no more than the Querant can escape the predestination of dolorous sacrifice, the flaying of the heart, release of the will into heaven.
The angle of the knee is 47 degrees.
The penis of the Hanged Man is erect, pointing downward toward his young chin, his tranquil, inverted face. From the corners of the card come snaking, spiraling boughs of mistletoe to entangle and ensnare his member, which extrudes one single drop of gold-tinted blood, or semen.
The face of the Hanged Man is unmistakably that of Harith Qabbani himself. His expression is serene.
Catherynne Valente lives in Ohio. Her short fiction and poetry has appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Fantastic Metropolis, The Women’s Arts Network, NYC Big City Lit, Jabberwocky, Fantasy Magazine, Electric Velocipede, Cabinet des Fees, and Star*Line, and has been featured in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #18. Her novels include The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass Cutting Sword, The Orphans Tales: In the Night Garden and The Orphans Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice.