The Hermit by Pamela Colman Smith: a close reading

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Most close readings on this site are about paintings that hang in museums. This one is about something you might have in a drawer. The Hermit card from the 1909 tarot drawn by Pamela Colman Smith is printed in the millions, shuffled, carried in bags and laid on kitchen tables. That makes it easy to stop seeing it. Here I slow down and read it as a work of art, with the tarot meanings kept in their own clearly labelled layer.

At a glance

Because the original drawings are lost, every copy you see is a print, and later editions were recolored. When you study the card, try to look at a scan of an early printing like this one.

First look: what you see

An old man stands alone, filling most of the card. He has a long white beard and wears a gray robe with a hood pulled over his head. The robe falls in heavy folds to the ground. His eyes look down.

In his right hand, raised to the level of his head, he holds a lantern. Inside it shines a yellow six-pointed star, with short rays around the glass. In his left hand he holds a tall yellow staff that reaches from the ground above his shoulder. He stands on a white, snowy height, and behind him the sky is a flat pale blue. There is nothing else in the landscape.

At the top is the Roman numeral IX. At the bottom, on a band, are the words THE HERMIT. On the right, near his staff, is a small sign that looks like a stylized letter mark. That is Smith’s monogram, which she placed on her cards.

Composition, color and light

The design is very simple and very strong. The figure is a tall, narrow shape, almost a column, set slightly to the right. The staff adds a second vertical, and the arm with the lantern makes the only horizontal movement. Your eye goes straight up the robe to the face, then out along the arm to the lantern.

The lantern is the focal point. It is the brightest and warmest thing on the card, yellow against gray and blue, and it is placed at the upper left, away from the body. Smith makes the light feel like something offered outward rather than kept close.

The colors are few and flat: gray, white, pale blue, yellow and touches of flesh tone. Black outlines hold everything together, the way they do in a stained glass window or a woodcut. Smith trained as an illustrator and worked in the theater, and you can feel both here. The card reads at a glance from across a table, like a poster or a stage set.

Space is shallow. The snow at his feet suggests height, but there is no horizon and no distance. He stands on top of the world, and the world has been reduced to a white edge.

Symbols and story

The lantern. Light in darkness is one of the oldest symbols of knowledge and guidance. Here it is held up, not hidden.

The star. The six-pointed star inside the lantern is made of two interlaced triangles, a sign with many meanings in Western magic, often read as the joining of opposites.

The staff. A traveler’s staff and a support for an old man. It also reminds us that the Hermit has walked a long way to reach this height.

The hood and robe. Gray, plain and heavy, the clothing of a monk or pilgrim. It hides the body and leaves only the face and hands.

The snowy peak. A high, cold, lonely place. Waite wrote that the figure is shown “holding up his beacon on an eminence,” a height, as a sign of attainment.

The story is not an event but a role. Someone has climbed alone to a high place, and now holds up a light for others who are still climbing.

Context: the artist and the period

Pamela Colman Smith was born in London in 1878 to American parents. She was an illustrator, stage designer and storyteller who worked in New York and London. She joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society, where she met the writer A. E. Waite. In 1909 Waite asked her to illustrate a new tarot deck, and Rider published it that year, with Waite’s book The Pictorial Key to the Tarot following in 1910. You can read more about her life on my page about Pamela Colman Smith.

The Hermit was not new. He appears in the earliest surviving tarot decks of fifteenth century Italy, where the old man often holds an hourglass, a sign of time. In the Tarot de Marseille cards of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he holds a lantern, partly hidden under the fold of his cloak. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds Hermit cards from Marseille style decks printed by Nicolas Conver and Jean Dodat, and comparing them with Smith’s card is an excellent exercise.

Waite himself pointed to the change. He wrote that “the lamp is not enveloped partially in the mantle of its bearer,” and that “it is a star which shines in the lantern.” In other words, Smith and Waite deliberately took the light out from under the cloak.

The esoteric angle

Historical The tarot began as a card game in fifteenth century Italy. The trump of the old man had moral meanings about time, age and wisdom, but no evidence links the early cards to divination or secret teaching. Historians such as Michael Dummett and his co-authors have documented this.

Later tradition From the late eighteenth century, French occultists began to read the tarot as a book of hidden wisdom. In the Golden Dawn, each trump was linked to a Hebrew letter and a path on the Tree of Life. Waite’s program for the 1909 deck came out of that world, and he explicitly rejected some older readings of the Hermit as a figure of “occult isolation.” For him the Hermit is a card of attainment: “where I am, you also may be.”

Modern In tarot reading today, the Hermit usually stands for solitude, reflection, inner guidance and seeking. Those meanings belong to modern practice, built on Waite’s book and later writers. My card page for the Hermit covers them in detail, and my tarot lessons show how to use the card in a reading.

Modern One way to bring the art history into practice: before you read the card’s meaning, read the image. Ask what the old man is doing with the light, where he is standing, and who might be below him. You may find the card speaks more clearly once you have actually looked at it.

Try it yourself

Here are the worksheet questions I use for every close reading. Copy them into a notebook, open the image as large as your screen allows, and give yourself twenty minutes. Fill them in order and do not skip ahead to meaning.

1. Basic information. Write down the title, artist, date, material, size and collection number from the At a glance box. Size matters: picture the real object on a wall or in your hand.
2. First look, two minutes. Before you read anything else, write three words for your first reaction.
3. Description. List at least fifteen things you can see, without explaining any of them. People, animals, objects, places, colors, marks, writing.
4. What is going on here? Then ask: what do I see that makes me say that? What more can I find?
5. Formal analysis. Where are the lightest and darkest areas? Where do the lines lead your eye? Is the space deep or shallow? What is the focal point?
6. Meaning in three levels. What is shown (a woman, a dog, an old man)? What story or theme do those things stand for? What does the work tell you about the time and place that made it?
7. Evidence check. Mark each statement you wrote with E for evidence you can see or document, I for an interpretation, and P for your personal response. For this card, add one more: put Smith’s Hermit next to a Marseille style Hermit. List three differences in the figure, the lantern and the setting, and say what each change does to the meaning.

If you want the full method with a worked example, my page on how to look at a painting walks through it step by step.

Sources and the image record

The image is a scan of an early printing on Wikimedia Commons. The quotations come from Waite’s The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. For Smith’s life and the making of the deck, the best book is Pamela Colman Smith: The Untold Story by Stuart R. Kaplan and co-authors. For the history of tarot before the occultists, see A Wicked Pack of Cards by Decker, Depaulis and Dummett. The Marseille Hermit cards are in the Met’s collection.

If you want to go deeper into the cards themselves, my tarot book teaches the meanings step by step, and the art history of the whole deck is on my page about tarot and art history.