Upright meaning
He is grey-bearded, hooded, alone on a bare summit, and the lantern he holds contains a six-pointed star. He is holding it out rather than in, which readers have always taken to mean that solitude here has a purpose beyond itself. The Hermit is usually read as a withdrawal that is chosen and temporary: the walk taken alone, the weekend without the telephone, the decision to stop asking everybody and sit with the question yourself. It often turns up at points where life has thinned out, after a retirement, after children leave, after a long role ends, and the tradition reads that thinning as an opening rather than a loss. The card invites you to consider what you actually think, having spent years accommodating what other people think, and to write some of it down before it drifts off again.
Reversed meaning
Reversed, the solitude has stopped being chosen. The card is often read as isolation that crept in by degrees: fewer invitations accepted, then fewer offered, until a fortnight passes without a proper conversation. It also describes the person who will not be helped, who has turned self-reliance into a policy and finds asking humiliating. The opposite reading appears too, of someone so surrounded by noise, family, obligations and screens that they have not had one honest hour with themselves in months. The reversed card invites you to consider which of those two you are, and to take the small corrective step this week, one telephone call outwards, or one afternoon set aside.
In love
In love, The Hermit describes distance, and the tradition is careful to say that distance is not always trouble. Sometimes it is one person needing space to think, which is wiser than the alternative of thinking out loud at somebody for a month. Sometimes it is a genuinely solitary period, and the card treats that as useful rather than sad. Where it does warn is about silence that has hardened: two people in the same house, both waiting, neither speaking. For anyone alone, it counsels using the time rather than merely enduring it, and being clear about what you would want next.
Work and money
For work, this card counsels stepping out of the room. It appears around people who are too close to a problem to see it, and its remedy is unglamorous: take a day away, look at the whole thing on one sheet of paper, then decide. It also describes expertise built alone over a long time, the specialist knowledge nobody thinks to ask you about, and suggests it may now be worth offering rather than waiting to be invited. The tradition warns against the version of this card that never comes back down the mountain: research as a way of not starting.
Yes or no?
upright: Maybe · reversed: No
Upright the reading is maybe, and it is a deliberate maybe: the card counsels waiting until you have thought properly rather than answering tonight. Reversed the lean is no, usually because the question is being asked from a lonely or worn-out place rather than a clear one.
Ask the cards: yes or no →The card's advice
Take yourself off somewhere for half a day with a notebook and no company. Turn the telephone face down. Ask one question and keep writing until the honest answer appears, which is usually about forty minutes in. Then come back and tell one person what you found. The counsel this card carries is that solitude is only useful if you return from it with something.