What is the role of the Hermit in modern society?
I'm not sure. I have devoted a lot of time and energy in my life to thinking about hermits or hermitage in general. When I was 18, I thought long and hard about finding a monastery to join. But for a time in my life, a good year, every time I read tarot – a few times a month, nothing exceptional, maybe – I would always draw the Hermit.
There's nothing really to Tarot, right? It's just probability, and then the reader sees what they want to see, right?
Well, during that time in my life, the relationship I described yesterday had fully dissolved, I was effectively homeless – doing the You, Me And Dupree thing in the basement of my best friend from high school – while all my other relationships withered and died. That one, too. By the time I gave up reading regularly – because I got tired of seeing the Hermit, frankly – I had settled into a studio apartment, as the narrator of The Beast in the Cave puts it so much better than I could:
“The horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recesses” of my grief and despair.
Before I turn to historical hermits to try to answer the question of what the role of the Hermit is in modern society, I want to look at the magickal tradition. In my experience, traditional systems are traditional because they work often enough to have a, how do they put it, statistically significant effect. But also because if we're going to do science, we have to have hypotheses and acquire data – and how vain of me to think that I could ignore the entire substrata of Tradition?
So.
According to the interpretation of the card which is given by Rider Waite, in what I guess was among the first established Tarot Decks: “The Hermit stands alone on the top of a mountain. The snow-capped range symbolizes his spiritual mastery, growth, and accomplishment. He has chosen this path of self-discovery and, as a result, has reached a heightened state of awareness.
“In his right hand, he holds a lantern with a six-pointed star inside; it is the Seal of Solomon, a symbol of wisdom. As the Hermit walks his path, the lamp lights his way – but it only illuminates his next few steps rather than the full journey. He must step forward to see where to go next, knowing that not everything will be revealed at once. In his left hand, the side of the subconscious mind, the Hermit holds a long staff (a sign of his power and authority), which he uses to guide and balance him.”
From Wikipedia: “The Waite version of the card shows an old man, standing on a mountain peak, carrying a staff in one hand and a lit lantern containing a six-pointed star in the other. In the background is a mountain range.
"According to Eden Grey, his lantern is the Lamp of Truth, used to guide the unknowing, his patriarch's staff helps him navigate narrow paths as he seeks enlightenment and his cloak is a form of discretion.”
Further: “According to AE Waite's 1910 book, Pictoral Key to the Tarot, The Hermit card carries several divinatory associations: THE HERMIT — Prudence, circumspection; also and especially treason, dissimulation, roguery, corruption. Reversed: Concealment, disguise, policy fear, unreasoned caution.
"The card is usually thought to connote aspects of healing/recovery, particularly the kind that happens over time. In that regard, the Hermit is sometimes considered the mature and wiser version of The Magician. As such, both cards represent the astrological sign of Virgo. It is the critical factor for the issue at hand. The Hermit is the 'withdrawal from events and relationship to introspect and gather strength'. Seeking the inner voice or calling upon vision from within. A need of understanding and advice, or a wise person who will offer knowing guidance. A card of personal experience and thoughtful temperance."
Every time I read those words – and I have read them repeatedly today – they read as significant to me.
I know I'm doing that thing that people do with Astrology: Confirmation Bias. And yet – I didn't ask for the Hermit card. In fact, I grew to resent it. It felt like pressure. It felt like I was being pushed into doing all the things that were happening in my life. All I have ever wanted was stability. Every choice I had made in my life up until the point it all started to fall apart, was made so I could have a roof over my head and food in my belly. That's all that mattered - survival.
I felt totally out of control, and like there was some outside force influencing my decisions – and their outcomes.
“Oh, woe is me, everything falls apart for me,” is what I wanted to be doing – I didn't want to be finding the lesson in my failings.
I'd done that my whole life, and what had it amounted to?
Well, on the other side of it all, now, as far as I've made it (that is to say barely at all), it amounted to making the same mistakes in different ways – because I'm stubborn as fuck. That's what it amounted to.
Lol
Before I try to explain why it did and continues to read as significant – and why, to a degree, I'm almost concerned I haven't seen THE HERMIT in a while – let's talk about historical hermits and the Western tradition.
Hermitage is the act of leaving civilization and going solo in the wilderness. We all know this, ja? It's a thing the religious and the principled have done since time immemorial. Since long before the 7000-year barrier between settled and so-called hunter-gatherer civilizations. This is where I imagine the shamanic tradition began: in the Way-Way-Way Back.
A shaman is defined as: “A person regarded as having access to, and influence in, the world of good and evil spirits, especially among some people of northern Asia and North America. Typically such people enter a trance state during a ritual, and practice divination and healing.” Shaman is the word the Siberian people gave to their Medicine Men, as they're known in the Native North American tradition.
So when we're talking specifically the Western Tradition, we have to look at people like the Oracle of Delphi or Philosophers such as Socrates – but really more like Diogenes of Sinope – for a sense of what our hermitic forebears thought of their roles. Or the biblical Prophets. But in those worlds, those Ages, the hermitage tradition had already become what it will become again in the Medieval Period – that is to say urban and supported with rich hierarchies and infrastructures for profiting off the prophets. Temples, traditions of supporting would-be hermits/prophets/oracles, all of those had existed as far back as we have a written record to account for them.
When we look across the Common-Era Line (a Mason-Dixon Line reference for my Southern readers), we find that hermitage in general is outlawed by the State. The Roman Republic had worked for centuries to undermine the “natural” (read: feminine) religions of their day, and by the time of Christ's Proselytizers, had effectively infected those governments which would follow them. Really, what they did is lay the groundwork for not having to deal with religious dissenters anymore: prophets, oracles, hermits, but especially priestesses.
That isn't to say there weren't early-Christian hermits. Especially in Egypt. There's a lot of wilderness down there to disappear into. And Eastern hermitage, that is Hindu and Buddhist asceticism, had an especially interesting and intense impact on the Eastern part of the Empire. But I'm not talking about that today!
In the latter centuries of the Western Roman Empire, that part now seated in Ravenna, religious ascetics and hermits lost themselves in the vast wildernesses of the Germano-Frank forests. It blows my mind to imagine— Most of Europe and the British Isles were so densely forested in the first millennia after the Common Era (and before, naturally) that most of the continent was, indeed, unexplored. These forests were called Solitudes (Or however you pluralize Latin) because once you entered them you were completely alone. And that's exactly what a hermit wants, right?
Cities sprung up, over the course of centuries, around these Medieval Christian hermits. It's amazing to think but it really happened. Once someone went out there to live, they became, just as a matter of fact a wise person. They knew how to feed themselves, how to heal themselves – and others, presumably. And they were believed to be closer to GOD – because they went out there to be closer to GOD.
So what does it mean that my goddess was telling me for that year that I was the HERMIT?
I don't know.
Yeah, we got all the way to the end of this, and I still don't have anything more to say than that. Am I the Hermit? Is it I who has gained wisdom in my solitude in the Big City? Am I now meant to return to civilization and guide the way to what I have found? Am I meant to hope for or expect a city to rise up around me ang my daily communion with the Divine? Or was all of that designed to break down my psychic barriers, like I described yesterday? Is that the Mephistophelean bargain The Serpent offered Eve? Eat the Fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil and be as GOD. And, if so – because I think that's more likely than anything, given what I've learned about the Other Side since I started looking – to what end?
To make me listen to Rob better? Or to give me a false sense of self-importance so I can get over my need to distance myself from my work in order to produce?
Is all of this a psychodrama playing out in my head and before my hands?
Or is it just the THC affecting the novelty receptors in my brain telling me my thoughts matter?
Dunno.
We'll have to talk about that another time.
Thanks for stopping by! Haha What an ending, huh?
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