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The Hermit ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of the Hermit portrays an old man with a grey beard, shrouded in grey robes with his face half-hidden by a cowl. In his right hand he carries a lamp which burns with a bright golden light. In his left hand he wields a scythe. A crow perches on his shoulder. Behind him a cold, misty landscape ofprev mountains bleeds into an oppressive grey sky.

The lamp which Cronos carries is the lamp of insight and understanding, gleaned from the loneliness and patient waiting which the card of the Hermit implies. The crow is Cronos’ bird because it was believed to be the embodiment of the spirit of the old king who has died to make way for the new cycle.

The crescent blade of the scythe is also the crescent of the moon, given to Cronos by his mother Gaea, and symbolizing the eternal fluctuations and cycles of time.

Major Arcana ~ The Hermit

Here we meet the ancient god Cronos, whose name means Time. In myth, Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth) mated and produced the first race, the Titans or earth-gods, of whom Cronos was the youngest. But Uranus regarded his progeny with horror, for they were ugly and imperfect and made of flesh. Thus he shut the Titans up in the depths of the underworld so that they might not offend his eyes. But Gaea grew angry and meditated a terrible vengeance upon her husband. From her bosom she drew forth flint, fashioned a sharp scythe, and gave it to the astute Cronos, her last-bom. When evening fell Uranus came as usual to rejoin his wife. While he unsuspectingly slept, Cronos, who with his mother’s aid lay in hiding, armed himself with the scythe, castrated his father, and cast the bleeding genitals into the sea.

Cronos then liberated his brothers and became sovereign of the earth. Under his long, patient reign the work of Creation was completed. This time on earth became known as the Golden Age, because of the abundance over which Cronos presided. As god of time he ruled over the orderly passage of the seasons, birth and growth followed by death and gestation and rebirth, and was worshipped both as a grim reaper who set the boundaries past which man and nature could not go, and as a god of fertility. But Cronos could not himself accept the cyclical laws which he had inaugurated, for when it was prophesied that one day his own son would overthrow him as he had his father Uranus, he swallowed his children as they were bom so that he could preserve his rule unchanged. Thus follows the story of Zeus, the youngest of Cronos’ children, whom we met in the card of the Emperor and who in myth overthrew Cronos and ushered in the reign of the Olympian gods. Cronos was banished, some say to the depths of the underworld, but others say to the Blessed Isles where he sleeps, awaiting the beginning of a new Golden Age.

On an inner level Cronos, the Hermit, is an image of the last of the four Moral Lessons which the Fool must leam: the lesson of time and the limitations of mortal life. Nothing is allowed to live beyond its span, and nothing remains unchanged; and this is a simple and obvious facet of life which despite its simplicity and obviousness is painful for us to leam and often only comes with age and hard experience. Cronos is a god who both embodies the meaning of time and also rebels against it.

So he is humbled and overthrown, and learns wisdom in solitude and silence. In many ways he is an image of the body itself, which inexorably grows older yet rebels against its mortal fate. The problem of solitude and the discovery that one is ultimately alone and mortal are dilemmas which all human beings must face. Acceptance of this condition is also, in a mysterious way, a true inner separation from the parents and from childhood, because it means the sacrifice of the fantasy that someday, somewhere, someone will come and magically make it all better. ‘And then they lived happily ever after’ is a sentiment that cannot survive in Cronos’ world. Youth passes into maturity, and can never be regained in any concrete way; but memory and wisdom are distilled from the passage of time, and also the gift of patience.

The lesson of the Hermit is one which cannot be learned through struggle and conquest. Thus Cronos stands in counterpoint to Heracles for struggle will not stop time. Only acceptance of time yields the rewards of Cronos’ Golden Age. Through enforced limitation and through circumstances which only time, not battle, can release, the Fool develops the reflective, introverted, solitary stance of Cronos the Hermit.

Thus Cronos is in some ways an image of humility, which often begins with humiliation in the face of that which we cannot change, but which can result in a quality of stillness and serenity without which we cannot endure the obstacles and disappointments which life sometimes brings. However clever the intellect, however warm the heart, however strong the sense of identity, the vicissitudes of life would shatter us if we were unable to find somewhere within the patience and prudence of the Hermit, who teaches us how to endure and wait in silence.

The negative face of Cronos is calcification, a stubborn resistance to change and the passage of time. But the creative face of this ancient and ambivalent god is the shrewdness to change what we can, to accept what we cannot, and to wait in silence until we can tell the difference. On a divinatory level, the card of Cronos, the Hermit, augurs a time of aloneness or withdrawal from the extraverted activities of life, so that the wisdom of patience may be acquired.

There is an opportunity to build solid foundations if one is willing to wait. Thus the Fool at last arrives at maturity, having developed a mind and a heart, a firm sense of identity and finally a deep respect for his own limitations in the great passage of the round of time.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]