Card IX is the deck’s first real pause — after a chariot ride, a wrestling match with a lion, the whole point of this card is that the hero stops moving and goes looking for something no one else can hand him. It’s also a card whose central image has changed more dramatically over five centuries than almost any other trump. Same ten lenses used across the series so far, applied to card IX.
Historical & Esoteric Systems
1. Rider-Waite-Smith — Attainment, Not the Search
An old, grey-robed figure stands alone on a snowy mountain peak, staff in one hand, a lantern in the other holding a six-pointed star (the Seal of Solomon) aloft. It’s easy to read this as Diogenes the Cynic, wandering with his lamp in broad daylight looking for one honest man — and that reading isn’t invented out of nowhere; it goes back to Antoine Court de Gébelin, the 18th-century French pastor whose 1781 essay first proposed that tarot encoded ancient Egyptian wisdom, and who described this card as a wise man still in search of truth and justice. Waite explicitly pushes back on exactly that: his hermit isn’t searching for anything anymore. He calls it “a card of attainment,” and the line he uses to describe the beacon is “where I am, you also may be” — light already found, held up not to illuminate a search but to guide anyone else willing to follow. It’s the same move Waite made with Strength: take an image everyone assumes is about struggle, and read it instead as the calm that comes after.
2. Marseille — From Father Time to the Lantern
Here’s the real story: this card didn’t start out as a hermit at all. The earliest known version, from a hand-painted mid-15th-century Italian deck, shows a well-dressed old man with a long grey beard holding an hourglass, not a lantern — variously called Il Tempo (“Time”), Il Gobbo (“The Hunchback”), or Il Vecchio (“The Old Man”), and drawing on Renaissance conventions that linked old age, Petrarch’s allegory of time’s passage, and Saturn’s astrological rule over the elderly. The lantern doesn’t show up until around 1500, in the Budapest Tarocchi, where the figure is reimagined as a pilgrim with a staff and a wide hat; by 1557, a French deck by Catelin Geofroy had standardized him into a bearded monk with a rosary and a lantern. By the time the Tarot de Marseille locked in its design around 1650, the hourglass was gone for good, replaced by the lantern half-hidden under the old man’s cloak — the version that’s stayed essentially unchanged ever since, straight through to RWS. That cloak isn’t incidental: esoteric commentary on the Marseille card, including language attributed to Éliphas Lévi describing the figure as wrapped in “his protective cloak of discretion and caution,” reads the mantle as shielding the flame rather than hiding it — light that’s directed and metered out one step at a time, not flashed openly to blind whoever’s walking behind him. The “hermit” searching alone on a mountainside is a relatively late costume change on top of a much older card about time itself running out.
3. Thoth (Crowley/Harris) — Mercury Turned Inward
Crowley’s version carries the Hebrew letter Yod, meaning “hand” — traditionally read in Kabbalistic tradition as the seed-point every other Hebrew letter is built from strokes of — paired with the sign Virgo, ruled by Mercury. The card shows a cloaked, wheat-crowned figure holding a lamp that contains a radiant sun rather than a star, leaning on a staff wound with a serpent (a caduceus reduced to its simplest form), surrounded by Cerberus, the three-headed dog, standing in for the three classical forms of Mercury. The background is filled with spermatozoa-like forms, representing seed-potential that needs darkness to germinate rather than light to be seen. Where RWS reads the card as wisdom already achieved and now offered outward, Crowley reads it as the opposite direction entirely: Mercury, the planet of communication, folded back on itself into pure interior contemplation — creative power that isn’t ready to be shared yet, because it hasn’t finished forming.
4. Etteilla — A Deck That Resists the Comparison
This is the one card in the series so far where a clean numbered correspondence isn’t really available. Etteilla’s Grand Etteilla restructured the entire trump sequence around his own biblical-creation framework, and while seventeen of its twenty-two majors visually echo Tarot de Marseille imagery, they don’t sit in the same order — tarot historians studying his deck have specifically warned against trying to force a one-to-one match between his numbering and the traditional trumps, since doing so obscures rather than clarifies what Etteilla was actually building. What is documented, and worth naming directly: his version of this figure is card 18, titled Le Traître (“The Traitor”), also catalogued under the alternate keyword “Le Capucin” — a nice, unplanned echo of the RWS Hermit’s own Capuchin-style robes in Section 1. The imagery is the familiar hooded, lantern-bearing old man, but the meaning is a sharp departure from every other tradition in this series: not wisdom or solitude, but hypocrisy and false devotion, a warning that someone posing as trustworthy is spreading slander behind your back. Reversed, it doesn’t pivot to caution or discretion so much as simply soften — the deception gets exposed or defused rather than the card taking on a gentler meaning of its own. Either way, it’s a reminder that Etteilla’s deck was never trying to be a gentler restatement of the Marseille tradition in the first place.
5. Golden Dawn — Yod, and Another Path to Beauty
The Golden Dawn assigns The Hermit the Hebrew letter Yod and the sign Virgo, on the 20th path connecting Chesed (Mercy) down to Tiphareth (Beauty) — the same sephirah The Lovers’ path (Zayin, Binah to Tiphareth) and The High Priestess’s path (Gimel, Kether to Tiphareth) already lead to. That’s a third distinct route into Tiphareth so far in this series, which fits: Tiphareth sits at the literal center of the Tree of Life, the most-connected sephirah on the whole diagram, and a card about withdrawing to find one’s own inner light arriving there by yet another road only reinforces the point — there’s more than one way to reach the center of yourself.
Psychological, Structural & Modern Lenses
6. Reversed — Isolation Instead of Solitude
Traditional reversed meanings point to withdrawal that’s curdled into avoidance: loneliness instead of chosen solitude, paranoia or excessive secrecy, or refusing help and connection out of fear rather than genuine need for reflection. The lantern is still lit reversed — it’s just turned inward and shuttered, lighting no path for anyone, including its own bearer.
7. Numerological — Nine as the Last Single Digit
Nine closes out the single digits before the cycle resets at ten (The Wheel of Fortune, next in line) — the last stop of introspection before the wheel turns again into something new. Numerologically, 9 is frequently read as a number of completion, culmination, and old-soul wisdom: not an ending exactly, but the final turn inward a cycle takes before it’s ready to let go and start over.
8. Jungian / Archetypal — Individuation, and a Tower of His Own
Rather than another archetype, this card lines up with something more specific in Jung’s own life: in 1923 he began building a stone retreat at Bollingen, on the shore of Lake Zurich, where he would withdraw — often alone, without electricity or running water for years — to think, write, and carve stone. He described this kind of periodic retreat as essential to what he called individuation: the lifelong work of integrating the unconscious with the conscious self, which by his own account can’t be done entirely in company. He even carved the connection into stone, literally: a cube he cut and inscribed at Bollingen in 1950 bears, on one face, a small hooded figure with a lantern — Telesphorus, a minor healing-cult god from antiquity — alongside a fragment from Heraclitus about time. A hooded lantern-bearer, carved by Jung’s own hand into the retreat where he did his most solitary work, is about as direct a link between this archetype and its theorist as this series is going to find.
9. Modern Intuitive / Self-Reflection
Contemporary journaling-style tarot treats this card as a prompt about deliberate withdrawal: Where do I need to step back from noise and other people’s opinions long enough to actually hear my own? Am I isolating out of fear, or am I genuinely making space for something that can only happen alone? The distinction between the two questions is usually the whole reading.
10. Comparative Mythology — Belly of the Whale
This entry leans on the note from the Strength write-up that this series has been borrowing Campbell’s stages out of his own order, not in it. “Belly of the Whale” is the point in the departure stage — right after the hero crosses the first threshold, and well before the trials, temptations, and boons this series has already assigned to earlier cards — where the hero passes fully out of the known world into total isolation, often literalized as being swallowed whole, with no aid or company left to rely on. Campbell frames it as a worldwide womb-and-tomb motif: the hero’s old self is symbolically killed off, sealed away from the outside world, so that an interior transformation can happen before any re-emergence is possible — it’s a death that’s also a gestation. Read that way, the Hermit’s mountain peak or cave is the same sealed chamber in a different shape: the outside world goes silent specifically so something inside has room to re-form. It’s hard to find a more literal match anywhere in this series than a hooded old man standing utterly alone on a dark mountainside with nothing but a single light he carries himself.