The Hermit passes on a taste for understanding: in your family, a quiet wisdom made of perspective, questions, and shared learning.
You bring perspective where the family gets agitated. Faced with a disagreement or a hard decision, you take time to think, then offer a calmer view. The younger ones find a patient guide who answers their questions seriously, and the elders a conversation partner who knows how to listen to their memories.
Withdrawing to think can be mistaken for distance. If loved ones don’t understand this time apart, they may read indifference into it. Explaining simply what you need, then coming back to them with what you have understood, keeps the bond warm.
By Thomas Guilhot · updated
Placed here, the 9 evokes a childhood where warmth and exchange may have been lacking: parents who were present but distant, who answered questions without really listening, or who kept their own worries to themselves.
Placed here, the 9 evokes a childhood where warmth and exchange may have been lacking: parents who were present but distant, who answered questions without really listening, or who kept their own worries to themselves. This grievance loses its force once you look into what they themselves went through: asking a parent how they experienced their youth, reading family letters, or simply spending an afternoon listening to them without trying to correct them.
The 9 makes you pass on a taste for learning: books all over the house, serious answers to the strangest questions, walks where you name the trees and the stars. The fitting stance is to stay present: listen to the child to the end, tell them how you got through your own difficulties, tell them what you feel. The trap would be distance: answering in a word to get some peace, withdrawing into your office, or expecting from the child a maturity they do not yet have.
From parent to child, the Hermit questions the place of perspective and knowledge within the family. Your parents’ home was rather sober: displays of tenderness were measured, and work, reflection, or discretion were valued. What may remain is the impression of having learned many things alone.
To the younger ones, you offer books here and there, serious answers to their questions, silent walks. They keep an art of patience, and the certainty that it is allowed not to know everything.
Finally, this line invites you to pass around what you have understood. Telling what taught you something, listening to what the neighboring generations have to say, opening an exchange on the big questions: the Hermit flourishes when his light shines on others besides himself, and when the family becomes a place of real transmission, lived without solemnity, day by day.
One rainy Sunday, a child in the family asks you why the sky changes color in the evening.
You don’t answer right away: you take out an old atlas, look it up with them, note what you find. A little later, you call one of your parents to ask about a memory from their youth, and you listen at length, without interrupting. In the evening, you keep a moment of silence, which puts you back in balance before you rejoin the others.
Answer the younger ones’ questions by searching together with them
These points: portrait, parents and children, parents and children (inner).
A symbolic reading of the Destiny Matrix: food for thought about yourself, never a verdict or an established fact.
The portrait is the starting point, then the center is added to it.
Fictional example, March 14, 1987: the portrait is 14 and the center 3. The transmission point adds the two, 17, the Star. The received inheritance point adds the portrait and this transmission: 14 and 17 make 31, then 3 and 1 make 4, the Emperor. The full line therefore reads 14, 4, 17, from the portrait toward the center.
He points to the wisdom, perspective, and knowledge that circulate between generations. He can suggest a sober, thoughtful family, sometimes more at ease with actions than with tender words. You can decide, among these qualities, which ones you want to offer in your turn and in what form.
By letting them know about your need for solitude and returning to others with attention. A regular message, a short call, or a simple invitation shows that your withdrawal is not distance. Your presence, rarer but full, then becomes a real pleasure, looked forward to, for your loved ones as for you.
By taking their questions seriously and searching for the answers with them. An open book, an observation walk, a conversation without screens show them that knowledge is an adventure. This attitude counts for more than perfect explanations, because it teaches them to search for themselves, long after your answers.
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.