The Hermit
What happens when the light only shows you the next few steps
The Hermit has always looked lonely to me.
An old man stands alone on a snowy mountaintop, wrapped in a gray robe. He holds a staff in one hand and raises a lantern in the other. His head is bowed. There is no village behind him, no companion beside him, no obvious destination ahead.
Before I knew much about the card, I would have described it with words like solitude, searching, sadness, maybe even lost.
But the longer I sat with The Hermit this week, the less lost he began to look.
Maybe he knows exactly what he’s doing.
Looking Before Knowing
I’m trying to learn tarot differently this time.
Rather than memorizing seventy-eight definitions, I want to spend time with each card before I look up what someone else says it means. What do I actually notice? What story does the image tell me before I know the symbolism I’m supposedly looking at?
With The Hermit, my attention went immediately to the contradictions. He is looking downward, but his lantern is raised. He appears isolated, but he carries light. He is standing in a barren, frozen landscape, yet nothing about his posture suggests panic.
The lantern contains a six-pointed star. The staff looks less decorative than necessary, like something he has relied on for a long journey. And even though he is standing high on a mountain, he does not seem interested in admiring the view. He looks inward.
My first interpretation was that perhaps he was searching for something he had lost.
The traditional meaning suggests something slightly different: perhaps he has stepped away in order to hear himself think.
Solitude With a Purpose
The Hermit is card number nine of the Major Arcana and is traditionally associated with introspection, inner wisdom, withdrawal, research, and the seeker. The important distinction seems to be that his solitude is intentional. He isn’t necessarily abandoned by the world. He has chosen, at least for now, to step outside of its noise.
One interpretation of the lantern changed the card for me. The light does not illuminate the entire mountain. It shows only a small portion of the path ahead. That feels almost offensively relevant. We spend so much time wanting certainty before we move. We want the five-year plan, the guarantee, the map showing where every decision leads. The Hermit carries wisdom, yet even he cannot see the entire road.
He can only see enough to take the next step.
Maybe wisdom has less to do with knowing exactly where you’re going and more to do with trusting yourself when you don’t. The staff reinforces that idea. It represents support, authority, and accumulated experience. He isn’t beginning his journey empty-handed. He carries what he has already learned.
And that makes The Hermit feel less like a card about hiding from life and more like a card about knowing when to step away from it long enough to understand what you’ve experienced.
Why Nine Matters
The Hermit is numbered nine, which in numerology is often associated with culmination, wisdom, and the end of a cycle. Nine comes just before things begin again. That caught my attention because I pulled this card during a week when I may be approaching the end of one professional chapter and the beginning of another.
After years of learning my work, understanding the systems around it, making mistakes, fixing them, and becoming someone people regularly come to with questions, I may soon be stepping into a role where part of my job is helping other people develop that same knowledge.
One interpretation I came across describes The Hermit as the archetypal Wise Old Man: someone whose authority comes not simply from study, but from having traveled the road himself. That changed the way I looked at the lantern. Maybe he isn’t searching at all. Maybe he’s holding the light so someone else can see.
There is something strangely fitting about pulling that card while standing at the edge of a leadership transition. I’ve spent much of my career accumulating experience without necessarily thinking about what it means to become the person who passes that experience forward.
Perhaps there is a point when knowledge stops being something you collect and becomes something you share.
Down the Rabbit Hole: Nine Nights on the World Tree
One of the things I want this tarot project to give me permission to do is wander. Each card contains symbols, numbers, myths, artistic traditions, religious references, and cultural ideas that lead somewhere else entirely. Instead of treating those detours as distractions, I want to follow them.
The number nine led me to Odin. In Norse mythology, Odin hangs from Yggdrasil, the World Tree, for nine nights in pursuit of knowledge. Through sacrifice and endurance, he gains understanding of the runes. That story is not the origin of The Hermit’s number, but the parallel interested me: withdrawal in pursuit of wisdom.
Both images suggest that knowledge sometimes requires leaving ordinary life for a while. Not permanently. Just long enough to encounter something you cannot hear amid everything else.
There is also something compelling about wisdom carrying a cost. Neither The Hermit nor Odin receives knowledge passively. Understanding comes through experience, discomfort, patience, and a willingness to stay with the question. Which feels considerably less glamorous than simply being “wise.”
What The Hermit Means to Me Now
Before this week, I thought The Hermit mostly meant being alone. I pictured retreat. Privacy. Someone turning away from society because they preferred their own company. I still think solitude belongs to the card, but I no longer think solitude is the point. The point may be what becomes possible inside it.
The Hermit steps away so that he can see differently. He carries the experience of everything that came before him, but his lantern still reveals only the next few steps. He does not have the entire journey figured out. Neither do I.
That may be why the card feels particularly appropriate right now. I’m standing near the edge of something new professionally, carrying years of experience with me but without any guarantee that I know exactly what the next version of my work will look like.
The Hermit makes that feel less like a problem to solve. Maybe I don’t need the entire mountain illuminated. Maybe I just need enough light for the next step.
Questions to Sit With
What becomes easier to hear when I step away from the noise?
Where am I asking to see the entire path when I only need to see what comes next?
What knowledge have I earned through experience that I’m ready to share?
Where is solitude restoring me, and where might it be turning into isolation?
What am I searching for outside myself that I may already know?
Learning Tarot is part of the Dive Bar Professor Curiosity series — an attempt to learn tarot slowly, one card at a time, by looking, researching, wandering, and seeing where the questions lead.
