Sketch of a Hanging Man

In the stiff brown pages of an old textbook I found an illustration of a man hanging from a gibbet.  A pair of small creatures were drawn clinging to the man's body.  They were dressed in the rough robes of monks, but they had insect heads and long claw-like fingers protruding from their sleeves.  One of the creatures clung to the man's back, and it seemed to be whispering in the man's ear, but looking closer, I could see that it was actually gnawing at the rope around the man's neck.  The other creature clung to the man's legs, and it rested its head against the man's knees as it grinned lasciviously.  There were more hands and claws breaking through the ground beneath the man, grasping for his swinging feet.  A few inches away a single antenna with sharp spikes was drawn breaking through the soil like an infernal weed.

The caption below the picture explained that back before people knew anything about gravity, it was believed that it was a hanging man's sins that weighed his body down, that it was the demons trying to pull his soul down into the earth that put the fatal strain on his neck.  The counter force of the gibbet and the rope, being applied from above, pulled back and cinched the noose with the authority of divine justice.  The condemned man was caught between them, literally made to choke on his own guilt.