The Hermit
"It has to be said that it’s a very male archetype, the sorcerer secluded in a high place with his books and lofty insights."
The figure of the Hermit has fascinated me for a very long time, from years before I encountered Tarot, in fact. My first encounter would have been the inner sleeve of Led Zeppelin IV (aka Four Symbols), where a tiny figure at the very bottom of a steep, rocky crag is struggling to reach a bearded and hooded sage holding a lantern whose glow forms the shape of a six-pointed star. At the age of 13, I’d yet to encounter the Tarot or Pamela Colman Smith or Aleister Crowley but I was pretty sure that something was going on here. Fast forward six years and nineteen year old me was discovering Yeats, the occult and…Oh! So that’s where that album cover comes from?
The Hermit crops up in all manner of iconography. There’s a definite echo in Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World’ or Dumbledore in his tower, Gandalf wrapped in his grey cloak, Yeats in his Martello ready to “crack his wits” night after night, Caspar David Friedrich and his ‘The Wanderer above a Sea of Fog‘. Or even Yoda!
It has to be said, though, that it’s a very male archetype, the sorcerer secluded in a high place with his books and lofty insights. Women of power tend to gravitate to one another. Witchcraft, after all, is a much more social business than the solitary necromancer and his browning parchments. But a key part of the Hermit’s power is that sense that he is coming from a high place with hard-won gifts of insight and knowledge.
The original could be seen as Moses who certainly operated from a place apart from the rest of the Israelites. From his birth to his death, he lived on a curious boundary between the secular and the divine. He was undoubtedly a wizard of some kind, able to turn his staff to a serpent and back again. And, of course, he spoke in a high place with the God of the Israelites, the challenging, intemperate Yahweh of the Old Testament.
The Tarot Trumps’ Hermit has the number nine and is the tenth card in the sequence. If the traditional arrangement of the Major Arcana is a kind of life’s journey from birth through material success to a deeper kind of spiritual travelling, then the Hermit is on the cusp of that change, situated just before the life change indicated (recommended?) by the Wheel of Fortune. The Hermit isn’t about speculation – his is a path of learned insight into one’s situation. His message is to step back and ask “What now?” When the Hermit appears in a spread, I look for evidence of a lesson that someone either needs to learn or finally has time to take on board. The card is also often seen as heralding the appearance of a teacher or some other provider of wisdom. Reversed, it could mean the wrong teacher or a delay in the right teacher appearing or, more simply, “Not yet.” If the questioner is looking at a change of career, the Hermit could suggestion a period of solitariness as an inevitable part of that. But the Hermit is also a promise. The lantern he carries is a spark of the divine, of your or my immortal spirit. It’s shaped like a star to remind us that we are indeed star-stuff – of the stars – and will eventually, albeit as part of a cycle of billions of years, return to the stars.