The Hanged Bat
This piece came to me about six months into being thirty-six. If you’re into profections, you might know thirty-six is a first house year, a cycle of beginnings. In numerology, one is the same: fresh starts, new energy, the opening of something. Coming out of my twelfth house year, I felt hopeful. Maybe “hopeful” isn’t quite the right word, but I was holding expectations that this year would bring lightness and renewal.
What I didn’t fully remember at the time is that beginnings are rarely soft. They’re messy, disorienting, often demanding. My first house year has felt like a dark night of the soul— not only heavy, but also laced with big transformations and as always, moments of unexpected beauty.
Illness, Grief, and Thresholds
Around the winter solstice, my body began to unravel in new ways. I was navigating strange and intense physical symptoms that seemed to crescendo through December. Christmas Day was spent driving home before sharing a home cooked meal with friends, because I felt so sick.
Not long after, in early 2025, my beloved cat, Monster — who was just shy of 11 yrs — was diagnosed with cancer. Her decline was quick. We let her go on March 3, after weeks of caregiving and heartbreak. The grief was raw, acute, and it cracked me open in ways I’m still making sense of.
A month later, just after my half-birthday, I found myself sketching The Hanged Bat.
Meeting Bat Energy Medicine
I’d already been working with animal energy; first frog, then bat. Bats arrived with their own kind of fierce tenderness: rebirth, facing fear, entering the cave of shadow to emerge transformed.
As I researched and practiced with bat energy, the image just dropped in: the bat as The Hanged Man. It made immediate sense. Here was an archetype of suspension and inversion, but instead of a man strung upside down in divine punishment or sacrifice, we have a bat. A creature who chooses to rest in inversion. Who hangs upside down not because it must, but because it knows that’s where renewal begins.
Later, when I finally reached The Hanged Man in my visual tarot study, I noticed Kim Krans had also drawn a bat for the archetype in The Wild Unknown Tarot. I hadn’t known this when sketching, and it felt like one of those synchronicities that keeps me tethered to the universe; a wink, a nod, a reminder I’m in conversation with something larger.
Why The Hanged Bat?
Traditionally, The Hanged Man is about surrender, pause, and perspective shift. But it often carries undertones of martyrdom — a patriarchal flavour of sacrifice for enlightenment.
The Hanged Bat reframes that story.
For bats, inversion isn’t punishment. It’s rest, roost, and reset. They don’t see well in daylight, but in darkness they flourish; using echolocation to sense what’s unseen, navigating through vibration and frequency. This is mystic technology. It mirrors how we’re called to trust what we feel in the void rather than cling to external sight.
Bat energy also carries the medicine of thresholds. Emerging at twilight, they dwell between worlds: night/day, life/death, seen/unseen. They invite us into that liminal terrain, where identities dissolve and rebirth begins.
What The Piece Taught Me
Since finishing this piece, I’ve realized it continues to teach me. My understanding of both bat energy medicine and The Hanged Man has deepened. But not in ways that I can express in language, yet; except this:
Surrender is not stagnation. It’s a natural rhythm of transformation. Hanging upside down isn’t being stuck; it’s being held in the womb of becoming.
This year has asked me to surrender. Surrender to illness, to grief, to the dismantling of expectations I carried into thirty-six. I’m grateful for the bat to remind me over, and over, that this too, is natural rhythm.
An Invitation
The Hanged Bat is for anyone moving through thresholds: grief, identity shifts, dark nights, initiations. It reminds us that surrender isn’t about giving up, but about trusting what can’t yet be seen.
Next time you feel suspended in the in-between, I invite you to imagine yourself as the bat: resting upside down, listening for vibrations in the dark, and knowing that flight — and rebirth — will come in its own time.
“I surrender to the unknown. I hang suspended in love. I trust the dark to rebirth me.” ✨
