What is The Hermit advising?

Step back. Solitude, reflection, a period of deliberately reduced input. The card also indicates a teacher or guide, and equally you becoming one. Answers arrive here through quiet rather than through consultation.

What it asks for is specific and slightly unfashionable: less advice, not more. The Hermit is the card for the person who has asked eleven people and is now more confused than when they started, and its instruction is to stop gathering and go and be alone with it.

Virgo brings method, so this is not drifting. A retreat under this card has a purpose and an end, and the difference between that and hiding is whether you could say what you went in for.

Isolation that has curdled, withdrawal as hiding, loneliness rather than solitude. Or the reverse: so much noise and company that no reflection is possible.

Both are common and they are opposites, which makes the surrounding cards unusually important. The first is somebody who went quiet for a reason that has expired and cannot find the way back; the second is somebody so surrounded that they have not had an unobserved thought in months.

The kinder and often correct reading is that the retreat has served its purpose and it is time to come back. The Hermit reversed is not always a warning. It is frequently permission.

Upright: solitude, introspection, guidance, inner light, withdrawal, searching

Reversed: isolation, loneliness, avoidance, lost, refusing help

• What would I know if I stopped consulting other people about it?
• Is my solitude restoring me or hiding me?
• What single step does my lantern actually light right now?