Standing in a barren and hostile wasteland, a recluse carries a lit lantern containing a six-pointed star. A cloak shrouds his body. The Hermit is retreating into solitude and isolation, and thereby descending into his own hidden depths. It is a lonely but voluntary journey.

 

This card is about what we find when we seek silence from the constant demands and persuasions of those around us, and perhaps silence from our own desires and arguments as well. New truths are found by isolating ourselves from our relationships to others and to society. It might be time to integrate all we've learned and accomplished into one body of knowledge, a personal synthesis that is much more than just the sum of its parts. To learn what only we can teach ourselves. To define our own values.

 

One example of a hermit is Lao Tzu, the founder of the philosophy of Taoism. Lao Tzu found that only solitude enabled true human nature to be made manifest. In an essay on female hermits, Rhian Sasseen writes:

 

This is the feeling, sadly rare, of no longer being watched. The psychotherapist Carl Jung, after seeing a photo of the Arctic explorer Augustine Courtauld, remarked that Courtauld’s was the face of a man ‘stripped of his persona, his public self stolen, leaving his true self naked before the world’.

 

(...) The hermit is truly free from acting as lord or master, proprietor or minister, soldier or citizen, serf or king. The hermit is free even from the simple expectations of being a neighbour.

 

However, it's worth asking what remains in this state of freedom. What remains if we are able to, just for a moment, see ourselves only in relation to ourselves? Does anything remain? We are never islands. We have been formed by our environment, and the very fact that the Hermit resists and rejects this means that he is defined by its influence. 

 

What does it mean to sincerely be oneself? The French author André Gide writes in his dairy:

 

My mind was quibbling just now as to whether one must first be before appearing or first appear and then be what one appears. (Like the people who first buy on credit and later worry about their debt; appearing before being amounts to getting in debt toward the physical world.)

 

Perhaps, my mind said, we are only in so far as we appear.

 

Moreover the two propositions are false when separated:

1) We are for the sake of appearing.

2) We appear because we are.

 

The two must be joined in a mutual dependence. Then you get the desired imperative. One must be to appear.

 

The appearing must not be distinguished from the being; the being asserts itself in the appearing; the appearing is the immediate manifestation of the being.