The Hermit
Trump IX of the tarot: a cloaked figure holding up a lantern. A. E. Waite read it as prudence and circumspection.
Meaning
Waite's Hermit holds up a lantern with a star shining in it, on a height, and Waite called it "a card of attainment" rather than of searching. Court de Gébelin had read him as a wise man in search of truth and justice, and Éliphas Lévi allotted the card to Prudence.
Waite's meanings
Waite gave the Hermit "prudence, circumspection", "and especially treason, dissimulation, roguery, corruption"; reversed, "concealment, disguise, policy, fear, unreasoned caution".
In older decks
Papus gave the card the ninth Hebrew letter, Teth. The nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum calls it L'Eremita. Waite gives two other names: the Capuchin, and, "in more philosophical language", the Sage. Court de Gébelin thought the card-makers had turned a philosopher into a hermit, and saw no harm in it.
Lantern or hourglass
Romain Merlin, quoted in the British Museum's 1876 catalogue, traced the card to Saturn in the engraved Italian series called the Mantegna cards, an old man leaning on a staff. He wrote that "the idea of Time has continued to be linked with this figure": in the fifteenth-century cards in Paris long misnamed the cards of Charles VI, "the hermit holds an hour-glass instead of a lanthorn". The Visconti-Sforza cards at the Morgan Library & Museum, painted in Milan about 1450–1480 and attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, include a card the museum titles Time. Waite's one change to the conventional design was that the lamp is no longer "enveloped partially in the mantle of its bearer".
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsWheel of FortuneTrump X of the tarot: a turning wheel with creatures rising and falling on it. A. E. Waite read it as destiny and fortune.
- The same shape in Historical flagsBennington flagA flag of thirteen stripes, white at the top and bottom, with “76” under an arch of stars in the blue canton, long said to have flown at the Battle of Bennington in 1777. The Bennington Museum, which owns it, dates it to between 1812 and 1830, because it is made entirely of cotton.
See also
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
- Time (Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards), The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (Wayback Machine copy, 10 July 2026), MS M.630 (no. 10)
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from letters and numbers, squares and rectangles or stars.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 3, 2026. How we research
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