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
A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card L'Eremita. Papus joined it to the ninth Hebrew letter, Teth.
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
Last reviewed September 27, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research