The Hermit gives the period a color of stepping back: taking stock, seeking meaning, and choosing what you keep for what follows.
Gaining perspective becomes easier. These years help you reread your path, tell what nourishes from what clutters, and move closer to your true priorities. A calmer mind makes it possible to draw out personal convictions, and sometimes to accompany someone else thanks to what you have understood.
Distance can slide into lasting retreat or criticism: cutting yourself off from others, judging that nothing is worth the effort, ruminating on the past. Solitude stays useful when it prepares a return to the world. Keeping small, regular ties keeps wisdom anchored in reality.
By Thomas Guilhot · updated
A period marked by the 9 invites stepping back.
The desire to go out may diminish, the desire to understand grow: why this job, why this relationship, what is left to learn? Questions of meaning often rise, and many people feel the need to slow down, sort through their belongings, spend time in nature, or enroll in a long training course. For the method, this is not a time of agitation but of maturation. What has been lived in recent years needs to be reread, and the lessons drawn now can serve for a long time. Older or more experienced people may play the role of a guide, and people might also come to seek your advice. Your role during these years: to deepen and to share. The people around you may ask you to explain, to train a new recruit, to help a friend weigh a difficult choice, to look after an aging parent. The more you pass on what you have understood, the more likely the period is to brighten. Areas that might be concerned: studies and training, inner life, pace of life, relationships with elders, writing, housing, savings. Practical tips: reserve a time of chosen solitude each week so that it does not become isolation you suffer; keep at least two social appointments a month; note your reflections in a journal; alternate hours of reading with time in the open air; and finally, accept the help you are offered.
An autumn evening, a lamp on and a drawer open: old photos, former projects, letters kept out of habit.
During a Hermit period, this kind of stock-taking happens by itself. You ask yourself what still matters, what can be put away, what deserves to be told to someone younger. A logbook, a walk in the forest, or a dinner with a trusted person gives it the shape of a chosen pause rather than an endured withdrawal.
A long training course or a degree that opens a new field
A feeling of isolation after a departure or a distancing
Possibilities, not a prediction: no period announces a certain event.
The peaks of the ring reuse points you already know: age 0 the portrait, age 10 the paternal corner, age 20 the talent, age 30 the maternal corner, and so on up to age 70.
Between two peaks, you add to find the midpoint, then repeat for the quarters. On the fictional example of March 14, 1987, you find 14 at birth and 17 at ten. The midpoint, around age 5, is 14 and 17, making 31, reduced to 4. Around age two and a half, 14 and 4 give 18; around age seven and a half, 4 and 17 give 21.
No. It invites times of withdrawal, not disappearing. Many people mainly appreciate in it more chosen relationships and a slower pace. Between two stretches of silence, a few sincere exchanges provide a precious counterpoint and keep reflection from going in circles. This back-and-forth between withdrawal and contact keeps the balance.
Through simple gestures: telling an experience to a loved one, writing a few pages, accompanying a younger person in a project. The Hermit lights the way all the better when he shares his lantern. You do not need to be an expert: an honest account, without a lesson, is often enough to help. This sharing keeps wisdom alive, and it also relieves the person who offers it: experience circulates.
Get back in touch with the concrete: an outing, a manual activity, a meeting. Setting a small regular appointment with yourself, like a walk or a journal page, restores a thread. If discouragement persists, confiding in a friend or consulting a professional is an act of wisdom, not weakness.
Illustrations: Nicolas Conver’s Tarot de Marseille, dated 1760, restored by Tarot World Project, CC BY-SA 4.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons — images resized and compressed by Versana.