The Hermit in the Tarot

The tarot originated in the Renaissance as a tool of divination, but was popularized as ancient Egyptian occultism in eighteenth–century France and beyond by Antoine Court de Gébelin (1725–1784) and Jean-Baptiste Alliette (1738-1791), the latter calling himself Etteilla. Belief in the Egypt connection lingers. With the advent of modern psychology, the universality of the images of the tarot are now perceived as representations of powerful archetypes of the subconscious (in the style of Carl Jung).

The hermit is the ninth card of the Major Arcana. The hermit represents a universal stirring of feelings and emotions with respect to society and human interaction. In the popular mind, the hermit represents solitude and self–determination in a positive sense, but negatively (reversing the card) holds a misanthropic and anti–social attitude. The tarot taps this paradox.

The striking image commissioned for the Rider–Waite set of tarot cards and Arthur Edward Waite’s 1911 publication of Pictorial History of the Tarot present the full accoutrement of symbolism in the hermit. The hermit in Waite is not garbed like a beggar but like a friar, a Capuchin. He is not a wanderer but projects a mission with his lantern and staff. Waite does not mention it, but the lantern clearly suggests Diogenes the Cynic, the Greek precursor of the Western hermit, who searches for a wise person among a world of fools. Not being a beggar, the hermit does not represent isolation, idleness, or inability. His long white beard, habit, and walking stick remind Waite of the Ancient of Days (William Blake’s depiction), and his lantern is the Light of the World, shed for enlightenment of others. Hence, the hermit is not Diogenes the miscreant, the mischievous, the misanthrope. The hermit is a sage, not simply searching for truth and justice but bringing them to others. He stands at a precipice, like the Fool (card 1), but knows when to stop. He is not, like the Fool, on a quest or an adventure. The hermit seeks to bring light to others.

The mystery and motive of the solitary in Western history has always proven unsettling to the common person. The image of the hermit outside the context of daily life or subordination to authority has perplexed many. In Mary Rotha Clay’s classic The Hermits and Anchorites of England (1914), and in later research, we see glimpses of hermits in medieval England categorized by dwelling–place: island, fen, cave, lighthouse, forest, hillside, highway, bridge, town, and cloister, demonstrating by their independence why ecclesiastical authorities preferred for them the anchorhold. In the history of the Tarot, this antipathy is carried over; the hermit has represented negative values: circumspection, dissimulation, roguery, and corruption at worse. Reversed, the card came to represent disguise, concealment, fear.

To which Waite replies that the negative characteristics are “artificial and arbitrary.” Waite rehabilitates the hermit based on its universal archetype, going so far as to reject the concept of prudence assigned to the hermit by some, for this card is not mere temperance but enlightenment. The Hermit has attained enlightenment and now offers it to those who emulate his path.

The other image in the Tarot associated with the path of solitude is the Four of Swords, effectively rendered in Rider–Waite as a knight or effigy of a knight lying on a tomb in an empty church. A stained glass window in the background depicts a mother and child. The image of the knight and swords projects finality, whether triumphant or failed. The silence of the church is either serenity or abandonment. But the image of the Madonna and Child is so universal a portrait of nurture, protection, and refuge, that the viewer concludes that the solitude represented in this card suggests continuity, rebirth, and transformation.

The archetype affirms the putting away of the vanities of the old self, of resting in contemplation before marking the clean and innocent slate of a new life. The Four of Swords signifies the need to experience the solitude of the knight, and the embrace of the Universe.

The Hermit in the Tarot represents introspection, spiritual maturity, discipline or control, protection of the reservoir of wisdom versus dissipation of energy, active cultivation of sagacity, equilibrium between reality and wisdom and between authority and self–confidence, self–enrichment by all that contribute to wisdom, prudence associated with silence and measure, love as the protection of universal balance, creativity as the life force preserving wisdom and harmony, with its ability to offer these virtues as renunciation and as humaneness.

Russian–born P. D. Ouspensky (1878–1947) popularized interest in the occult and the ideas of G. I. Gurdjieff. In 1913, Ouspensky penned The Symbolism of the Tarot, a short work on the images of the tarot, using the recently issued Rider–Waite pictorial deck as his basis. Ouspensky (incorrectly) interprets the hermit as Hermes Trismegistus, and his accoutrement as an occult or gnostic symbol. Here is his rumination on the symbolism of the hermit:

After long wanderings over a sandy, waterless desert where only serpents lived, I met the Hermit. He was wrapped in a long cloak, a hood thrown over his head. He held a long staff in one hand and in the other a lighted lantern, though it was broad daylight and the sun was shining.

“The lantern of Hermes Trismegistus,” said the voice, “this is higher knowledge, that inner knowledge which illuminates in a new way even what appears to be already clearly known. This lan-tern lights up the past, the present and the future for the Hermit, and opens the souls of people and the most intimate recesses of their hearts.

“The cloak of Apollonius is the faculty of the wise man by which he isolates himself, even amidst a noisy crowd; it is his skill in hiding his mysteries, even while expressing them, his capacity for silence and his power to act in stillness.

“The staff of the patriarchs is his inner authority, his power, his self–confidence.

“The lantern, the cloak and the staff are the three symbols of initiation. They are needed to guide souls past the temptation of illusory fires by the roadside, so that they may go straight to the higher goal. He who receives these three symbols or aspires to obtain them, strives to enrich himself with all he can acquire, not for himself, but, like God, to delight in the joy of giving.

“The giving virtue is the basis of an initiate’s life. His soul is transformed into ‘a spoiler of all treasures,’ so said Zarathustra. “Initiation unites the human mind with the higher mind by a chain of analogies. This chain is the ladder leading to heaven, dreamed of by the patriarch.”

THE

BOOK OF

HERMITS

A History of Hermits

from Antiquity to the Present

Robert Rodriguez