The Hermit.
The lamp held out to one side.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
An old man in a grey robe on a snow peak, eyes down. He holds a lantern out at the end of his arm, a six-pointed star burning inside it, and leans on a long staff. Nothing else is in the picture.
One man, one light, and the light is aimed away from him. It is off to the side, away from his own feet, where somebody coming up behind him would see it first. You are not lighting your own way with this. Somebody below you is using it.
Four things people go to on this card
- the lantern
You went to the lamp. A six-pointed star is burning inside it, and he is holding it out sideways rather than in front.
A light held for other people. It is not on his path and it is not near his feet; it is out at the end of his arm, off to one side, where somebody still climbing would catch it.
He has gone to the highest point available and made himself into a marker. That is a job, it is useful, it is done alone, and nobody at the bottom of the slope knows his name. Somebody is navigating by you at the moment. There is a fair chance you have not been told.
Who are you holding a light out for, and do they know you are up there?
- his eyes
His face is where you stopped. Eyes down, nearly closed, not looking at anything.
Attention turned inward at the top of a climb. He is not surveying the country he has just crossed and he is not checking the weather. He reached the top and shut his eyes.
Which is the actual content of retreat, as against how retreat gets sold. Nothing is revealed by the view. The work happens with the eyes down, in the cold, and it looks like nothing from outside. Whatever you have been watching most closely lately is the thing least likely to tell you anything.
What would you have to stop looking at to hear yourself think?
- the staff
The staff caught you. Plain, taller than he is, in the hand that is not carrying the light.
The difference between what holds you up and what you are giving away. One hand has the lamp, which is for other people. The other has the thing that stops him falling over.
Neither hand is free. That is an accurate description of a certain kind of life and the card is not romantic about it: no bag, no companion, no spare arm. Work out what is keeping you upright while you carry the other thing, because if it goes you will find out about it suddenly.
What is keeping you standing while you carry the other thing?
- the snow
You went to the ground. Bare snow on a summit, and then nothing at all.
The plainest card in the deck: one man, one light, one stick. No landscape, no second figure, no building, no animal. The Fool at least had a dog.
The picture is honest that this is the price. There is no company at this height and the card does not pretend otherwise or promise anybody arriving later. If what you are doing is being done alone, the useful question is not whether that is hard. It is whether you chose it.
What are you doing alone at the moment, and is it alone by choice?
On the Tree of Life, The Hermit is the twentieth path, Yod, from Chesed to Tiphareth, in the Golden Dawn's attribution (Liber 777).
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.