Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
After a period of significant isolation and/or introspection, you are ready to emerge, triumphant, with a sense of the resources you have gathered which are now able to take flight.
This week’s reading is about no small-fry stuff. The appearance of a major arcana card (one of the 22 archetype-driven cards in a traditional tarot deck) tends to indicate an experience that is deeper-reaching in nature than the everyday. It draws our attention to a process — sometimes apparent to others but often conducted behind the scenes in a person’s inner life — that is linked to transformation. When we encounter a major arcana card, we are encountering our own spiritual evolution… and I use “spiritual” here in the sense of the soul.
The Hermit is often not an easy card to go through for many of us, although there will be those who welcome it more than others. It points to a period of separation, physical or psychological, where we encounter our own dark night of the soul (see this definition in Wikipedia). When we embrace the archetype of The Hermit, we feel unable to fully explain or justify what is going on to others. We may feel out of the flow of things, we may feel misunderstood or contrary, we may feel abandoned. It is at times like this that we might feel that it is all a terrible accident, or that we have done something to ‘deserve’ it.
However, look at The Hermit. He is solitary, yes. His heavy cloak and the grey of the night sky behind him envelope him in the half-light, indeed. But, but… His face is gentle and wise. It is old, but not ravaged. He has a long, sturdy staff in his left hand; he has shoes on his feet. He seems warm. And, most importantly for me, in his right hand he carries a lamp. But this is no ordinary lamp. Inside, there isn’t simply a flame: there is a star. A celestial body. It might not be casting huge light, but the light is there — enough to reflect on to the staff to emphasise the presence of support, and enough to light the way ahead, and ultimately through the night and into the dawn. The Hermit does not rely on the daylight to see. Instead, he relies on the inner light — his own truth and connection to the divine. Isolation encourages him to look inside rather than around him. Hence his eyes are pointed downwards. He needs no outside cues to show him where he is going. He trusts that he has all the guidance he needs right there with him. It is that trust in the process that makes the journey more bearable.