The Hermit

The picture

An old man in a grey hooded cloak stands facing left. Only his face, his beard and his two hands are outside the fabric. He holds a lantern out at head height with a six-pointed star burning inside it, and a long yellow staff in the other hand.

His eyes are closed.

He is standing on a narrow strip of snow at the very bottom edge of the card. Behind him is flat grey-blue with nothing in it: no stars, no landscape, no horizon line. Nothing indicates how he arrived or where the ground continues.

Upright

Withdrawal chosen for the sake of seeing clearly, and the cold that comes with choosing it.

The Hermit went up there. Everything the card means rests on that having been deliberate, and the entire distinction between this card and loneliness is the word chose. He is not stranded. The cloak is thick, the staff is long, and this is somebody equipped for the trip.

The lantern is held out in front, not up. He is not signalling to anyone and not surveying anything. The light reaches roughly as far as the next step, which is the amount of light this card is about. It describes the deliberate narrowing of attention to the thing directly ahead, on the theory that the answer is close and requires quiet, not distance and searching.

There is no path

Nothing is drawn behind him and nothing is drawn ahead. The snow he is standing on occupies about a tenth of the card, and every other inch of it is empty grey.

That absence is the honest part of the picture. Retreat gets described as though it involved going somewhere — a cabin, a mountain, a month off — and this plate declines to draw the destination or the route. There is a man, a small amount of ground, and a light that reaches a short way.

His closed eyes belong with that. Whatever he is doing up there, it is not looking at the view, and the lantern is not illuminating anything he needs his eyes for. The card is about attention withdrawn from the outside, and it is oddly literal about it.

Reversed

Withdrawal that stopped being a decision some time ago. Solitude gone stale, retreat quietly converted into residence, and the original good reasons still being cited long after they expired.

The second version points outward. A light held so far from anybody that no one can use it. Knowledge kept, help declined so consistently that the offers have stopped arriving, and the person now properly alone instead of usefully apart. The difficult thing about this reversal is that it looks identical to the upright card from inside and completely different from outside.

What it is not

Loneliness. The Hermit walked up. A reading that collapses retreat into isolation has quietly read the reversed card by mistake, and will give advice aimed at somebody who does not exist.

It is also read as wisdom already achieved: the sage on the peak, in possession of the answer. He is holding a lantern out at knee height in a fog. Nobody does that from a position of having understood.

In a reading

The advice reading is plain and should be delivered plainly: go and be alone with this, and mean it — not an evening, and not with the phone. In an obstacle position the card almost always names an isolation the reader stopped noticing a while ago, and the useful follow-up is when it started.

Beside the High Priestess, two cards that counsel waiting, though the Hermit's waiting has a task in it. Among cups the withdrawal has a specific person at the centre of it, and it is worth asking whether the mountain was chosen for the view.

Sitting with it

What makes this card hard to take is not the solitude. It is the size of the ground.

He is standing on almost nothing, holding a light that shows almost nothing, with no route drawn in either direction — and the card presents this as the correct place to be. Most of the discomfort people bring to the Hermit is a wish for the peak to be larger and the lantern to be brighter, which is the same wish as wanting the answer before doing the work of finding it.

The lamp shows the next step. That has to be enough, because it is what there is.