Within the depth-psychology corpus, the gallows functions not as a mere instrument of punishment but as a dense mythological-psychological symbol whose roots extend into archaic sacrifice, shamanic initiation, and the paradox of deification through destruction. Von Franz provides the most sustained treatment, reading the gallows through the lens of Germanic religious practice: hanging originally constituted a sacred offering to Wotan, who himself hung upon Yggdrasil to wrest secret wisdom from the ordeal. This sacrificial logic yields the recurring motif that what is negative or criminal in the living human becomes potent and healing once returned to the divine domain — hence the folk belief in the curative power of the hanged man’s rope. Psychologically, suspension on the gallows is read as an image of individuation arrested: the agonizing stasis in which opposing forces are equally weighted and movement becomes impossible, life itself ‘suspended.’ Neumann echoes this mythological substrate in his treatment of Odin’s tree-wisdom, noting that the English ‘gallows tree’ preserves the memory of an original sacred arboreal hanging. Jung’s Red Book contributes an oblique associative usage — ‘gallows air’ — connoting morally ambiguous, darkly evasive energy. The Tarot literature approaches cognate imagery through the Hanged Man trump, where inversion paradoxically liberates. Across these sources, gallows marks the threshold between criminality and consecration, between psychic paralysis and transformative sacrifice.
The habit of killing bad criminals by hanging them on trees is a very archaic one. It was originally practiced as a sacrifice: Germans in olden days, for instance, hanged prisoners as sacrifices to the god Wotan.
Von Franz establishes the gallows as a site of archaic sacrificial practice, linking execution by hanging directly to the cult of Wotan and the Indo-European mythology of the suspended god.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis
The symbolism of the suspended god on the tree, the gallows, and the cross is very profound. Such a fate normally overtakes that part of the Divinity most interested in man; the philanthropic part of the Godhead falls into the tragedy of suspension.
Von Franz interprets the gallows as a cross-cultural symbol of divine self-sacrifice and the initiatory ordeal through which consciousness advances, linking Wotan, Christ, and Attis within a single archetypal pattern.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis
The remains of an executed criminal are potent medicine. It confirms the idea that execution is a deification, that the criminal had the arrogance to assume the role of the Gods and so is given back to them.
Von Franz articulates the gallows as a site of alchemical inversion: the criminal’s negative energy is transformed into healing potency once restored to its divine source, grounding folk beliefs about curative relics of the hanged.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis
When an inner psychological conflict gets too bad, life gets suspended; the two opposites are equal, the yes and the no are equally strong, and life cannot go on. You wish to move with the right leg and the left refuses, and vice versa.
Von Franz moves from the mythological gallows to its intrapsychic analogue: suspension between irreconcilable opposites, reading the hanged figure as an image of the most painful form of psychological stagnation.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974thesis
The English ‘gallows tree’ preserves the memory of the fact that the gallows was originally a tree. Just as Odin attains wisdom in falling from the tree, so in the medieval ‘Farce of the Turnip’ the hanged man boasts that as he hung on the tree the course of the stars around the pole and the nature of all things was revealed to him.
Neumann confirms von Franz’s thesis etymologically and mythologically, demonstrating that the gallows tree is a degraded form of the sacred cosmic tree upon which initiatory revelation occurs.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955supporting
I cannot skip the ravens themselves. Here we have a group of ravens, birds which belong to the sun god and birds used for divination. Thus they have a connection with parapsychological facts and telepathy.
Von Franz connects the prophetic crows encountered at the gallows in ‘The Two Travelers’ with the broader oracular symbolism of Wotan’s ravens, treating the gallows as a divinatory locus between worlds.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
The Jung man is led to the gallows, but before he is to be killed he asks the king if he might tell the dream he had in the night. Then he relates everything he experienced, but as if he had dreamt it all.
Von Franz illustrates a narrative pattern in which the gallows functions as a liminal turning point: the condemned hero transforms execution into revelation by reframing experiential knowledge as dream testimony.
, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997supporting
You bring a certain gallows air with you, and you’re bound to be from the black school of Salerno, where pernicious arts are taught by pagans and the descendants of pagans.
Jung employs ‘gallows air’ as a qualitative psychic atmosphere — morally suspect, evasive, and reeking of occult transgression — associating the gallows with dangerous liminal knowledge operating outside sanctioned spiritual boundaries.
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009aside
His road through the forest led to the gallows. Worn out with anger and the heat of the day, he threw himself down, and when he shut his eyes and wanted to sleep, the two crows flew down with loud cries and pecked out his eyes.
Von Franz traces the shoemaker’s fate — his road terminates at the gallows — as a symbolic destination for the shadow figure whose evil remains unredeemed, making the gallows the site of compensatory destruction.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
The myth of his hanging from Yggdrasill reflects his relation to the primordially sacred water of destiny, and the tree rooted in them.
Neumann contextualizes Odin’s hanging within the broader symbolism of the World Tree and the chthonic waters of fate, identifying the gallows-tree as an axis connecting the cosmic depths with wisdom.
, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955aside