I like this card! It underscores on of my first and most enduring basic understandings of the Hermit card across a range of decks: The Hermit is renowned for using the hands to promote healing, to provide disinterested comfort, and to create works of incomparable beauty.

Miller’s Hermit is based on the sense of touch, and the personal relationship we have with touch: touch as both physical sensation and as emotional touch.

The Hermit is out of touch with the mundane world. He has detached himself from the material world to quest for self-illumination, and understanding on a level once removed from the wholly material. He is circumspection, prudence, and discretion. His lamp, held in his left hand, the hand of intuition, is symbolic of his own inner light: the circumspection, prudence, and discretion that guide his quest.

The hands in this card are of prime symbolic importance, for not only does the Hermit heal and create with his hands, he exhibit control, albeit it soft and tender, over the lower instincts that are represented by the snake he holds in his right hand. Miller says, “The hand is the instrument of man…” Do we use our hands to clutch or to gently stroke, to bring to ruin or to create?

The grinning skeleton is garbed in the red-robe of the Cardinal, the red signifying the life-blood of the resurrected Christ. The stole is an ecclesiastical emblem of rank; worn over the left shoulder by deacons and over both shoulders by priests and bishops.

The egg that encases the Hermit, as well as the serpent, are representation of wisdom and immortality and a reminder of the importance of creating our own energy is such a way that it is self sustaining without short-circuiting ourselves with too much information, too much supposition, too much wondering, too much. . . P>

The egg, in this instance, has further symbolism as well: within the egg is the essence of being removed from the world and of being in command of gestating a new self based on a new understanding of old knowledge.

Surrounding the egg of gestation is a (BIG) sperm, replete with the glyph of Virgo emblazoned on its head. Virgo, representative of the ability to organize, to categorize, and to efficiently and conscientiously turn mental disorder into rational though. Through reorganization of mental activity we become the masters of our own world, and to rise about material concerns.

About the Hermit’s sequential number Miller says, “The number nine is the last of the single numbers before the onset of double figures, signifying the hibernation before a new beginning.”

The questions that arise from the Hermit being a Daily card are: from what do I need to detach myself either mentally or emotionally? How can I best achieve this detachment? What needs to be healed, what needs to be created, what needs to be controlled?,

The Universal Tarot
Concept & Art: Maxwell Miller
Copyright 1995 Maxwell Miller
First Published in US 1996 Samuel Weiser, Inc.
Published in arrangement with Findhorn Press, Scotland
ISBN 0-87728-840-2