Is The Hermit a yes or a no?

This card does not answer cleanly either way. It points to something unresolved, unseen or still in motion, which in practice usually means "not yet" rather than "no".

The Hermit withdraws on purpose. This is not loneliness or avoidance. It is the deliberate removal of noise so that something can finally be heard. He carries his own light, which means the answer is not out there.

The lantern is the detail that governs the reading. It is small, it is held up rather than swung about, and it illuminates the next step and nothing further. The card does not offer a view of the whole road. It offers enough to move once, which is a more honest picture of how anybody actually proceeds.

He stands on a bare peak, which the tradition reads as achievement that turned out to be empty on its own. The Hermit is frequently the card of somebody who got what they were working towards and found the summit unpopulated.

Yes/no readings are the most popular use of tarot and the one it is worst suited to. A seventy-eight card deck built to describe nuance is being asked for one bit of information, and most of what it knows is discarded in the process.

A more useful version of the same draw: read The Hermit as what shape this takes, not whether it happens. 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.

Reversed, the lean weakens or inverts. 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.