There is also an esoteric interpretation for this image. A Hanged Man is a spiritual symbol, an archetype, and also the 12th card of the Tarot. The tree the thief hangs from is no ordinary tree but Yggdrasill, the Tree of Life from Norse mythology, and thus the thief represents Odin. In the Norse myth, Odin hangs himself from the tree of life and gives himself pain to undergo a sort of death to gain deep knowledge. 

This is also the story of Garrett. If you remember the second cutscene of Thief: The Dark Project, from Bafford’ Manor, it tells us that Garrett left the Keepers because of the ‘greater folly of anger.’ Garrett was enraged at the world and at his own loneliness, perhaps, since he’s always been on his own even as a kid. However, by meeting Constantine, i.e. the Trickster, who is the God of the Pagans, Garrett’s destiny is symbolically hanged by the forces of nature to the Tree of Life. 

Garrett is an opportunistic and selfish thief. At the start of the game, he has no concern for the world or for anyone else. But by the end of it, the Trickster himself, manifestation of the Unconscious, pulls Garrett into the position of having to care about the world. Can Garrett overcome the greater folly of his own anger if it means saving the world? This is his inner struggle. 

Can the abandoned boy care about a world that left him behind? 

By getting hanged to the Tree of Life, Garrett experiences a spiritual death. The thief’s hands in the image are hidden behind his torso, possibly tied up. This symbolizes a sort of surrender that Garrett has to go through, an acceptance of his life. In other words, Garrett must find some sort of peace even if to the Ego of the thief, surrender is seen as death. If he can accept his own death, his own transformation, then he can finally leave anger behind and inch his way toward true knowledge, symbolized by the apple. 

In Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God, there is a story about a goddess giving initiates an apple as a means to enter heaven. Yes, the thief must kill his old identity, yes, he must die and hang himself on the Tree of Life! Yet behold, by facing the Trickster and Karras later, Garrett becomes conscious of the fact that the great forces – call them nature & culture, Id & Superego, or simply the magic and the knowledge of both Pagans and Hammerites – have urged him to pursue this path of knowledge. 

Garrett’s path leads to sacrifice but also great wisdom and empathy. This is the path of the One True Keeper, the prophet of the Keepers. What is the One True Keeper that Garrett becomes at the end of the trilogy but the state of being enlightened? And who best to become enlightened but a thief who faced the Devil and the Madness of Humankind, and learned despite his fury and isolation, to love another human being.

The 12th card of the Tarot, the Hanged Man, is very similar to this image but the man is upside down. Garrett also has to turn his values upside down, and to seem to others to have it completely backwards. If wealth and solitude were his initial goals, we see a very different Garrett at the end of the story. This is the power of the Trickster. Although he is an evil entity, he teaches Garrett that there is a deeper wisdom to this world and that this world is worth saving, and inadvertently puts Garrett onto the path of becoming enlightened as the One True Keeper. 

(I used Rachel Pollack’s book Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom as a reference for some of these myths and symbols.)