Marseilles Tarot: The Hermit

• Posted on January 23, 2010 at 3:56 pm

Today’s card is drawn from my Tarot of Marseilles deck and is the first Major Arcana card I’ve drawn.

Tarot de Marseilles is an old deck, with simple drawings using primary colors. While I like the colors and the style of it, it’s not an easy deck to use if you’re not proficient with the cards for a couple of reasons. First because the Minor Arcana, i.e. the Suit cards, aren’t illustrated like most other decks. They’re more like standard playing cards with a number and symbols of the suits. Second, the LWB is very perfunctory and not terribly helpful. In all fairness, they had to condense the material in order to fit both French and English versions into the book. It includes some information on how to use the cards and sample spreads. It’s also a good deck if you don’t like a lot of nudity in your cards. (Some can be quite explicit. I don’t have any of those, yet.)

The Hermit, l’hermite in French, is card nine, here represented as VIIII. It shows an old man in a robe holding a lantern in one hand and a walking stick in the other. The hermit represents the Wise Old Man (or woman) who often plays the role of mentor in the Hero’s Journey.

The LWB for this deck lists two sets of meanings for this card:

Moral: Wisdom, meditation, morality, respectability
Physical: Long life but trouble by chronic disease.

The second one had me saying, Duh! Anyone who lives a long life will undoubtedly have chronic health problems. But maybe that wasn’t so obvious 200 years ago when most people didn’t live very long.

So I turned to Corrine Kenner’s Tarot For Writers for more information:

Other keywords for the card include introspection, solitude, mysticism and illumination.

According to Kenner, in earlier tarot renditions, this card was referred to as Time. (The source of our modern archetype of Father Time, perhaps?) His robes suggest austerity. The number nine signifies “selflessness, compassion, universality, humanitarianism and spirituality”.

Kenner says the Hermit is sometimes compared to the ancient Greek Diogenes, the cynic, who roamed the streets of Athens with his lamp looking for an honest man. Some things never change, do they? She also draws parallels with Merlin the Magician and the Greek figure of Chiron, the wounded healer.

What does this card say to you?

Lyndi

Note: This post was edited to correct a misstatement at 6PM PST.

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