The Hermit in love, and which direction the withdrawal points

The Hermit in love means somebody has gone inward. The reading is which direction that turn points, because withdrawing toward something and withdrawing away from someone look identical from where you are standing and are two different events.

Upright it is nearly always the first kind. A man on a hillside with a lamp is doing something, and it has an object that is not you.

Reversed is where the second kind lives, along with the version where the thinking finished months ago and nobody has come down.

there is no door in this card

Start with what is missing, because it is the part everybody supplies for themselves.

There is no room. No house, no shut door, no back turned on anybody. The figure is outdoors, on a mountain, at night. Nothing has been closed against you, because nothing in that image closes.

He holds the lamp out in front of him, at the end of his arm, over ground he has not walked yet. That gesture is the whole argument of the card. The light goes forward, not back down the path he came up and not against his own chest.

The robes are grey, worth noticing in a deck that is not shy with colour. No anger here and no grief, and both of those have reds and blacks of their own elsewhere in the majors. Grey is the tell that nothing is aimed at anyone. He leans on the staff rather than using it, which tells you the climb took something out of him.

toward something, or away from you

A withdrawal toward something has a subject. A decision being made, a piece of his own life being sorted, something he will not show anybody until it is finished. It is impersonal in exactly the way that hurts most, because impersonal cannot be argued with and cannot be fixed.

A withdrawal away from someone has a target, and it looks different once you know where to look. It has edges. It is selective, it warms up when other people are in the room, it has a temperature. The Hermit has no temperature at all.

The hard thing here is that a man can go quiet for weeks in a way that genuinely is not about you. Every hour you spend inside it is about him, so it seems impossible that none of his are about you. That asymmetry is real and it is not evidence of anything.

The test that works is not a feeling. Ask whether the quiet is aimed. Did it start with something between the two of you, or in a month when his own ground moved. Is it only you, or is it everyone, and you already know that second one. You have probably been discounting it, because if it is everyone there is nothing to solve, and nothing to solve is unbearable at five weeks.

when it turns out to be your card

It lands on the person who laid the spread more often than anybody expects, and the tells are dull. Relief when a plan falls through. A preference for the version of him that lives in your head, who is easier to be around than the one in the kitchen. If that is familiar, the climb may not be his.

reversed, and the part that is not comforting

Reversed the card keeps its shape and loses its use. Same figure, same hill, nothing coming of it. Somebody went up to think, finished a long time ago, and stayed, because coming down means being seen and asked. That is isolation rather than solitude, and the difference is whether anything is being produced up there.

The other reversal is hiding with reflection painted over it. Silence used to avoid a sentence. It looks like the upright card for a fortnight and then stops looking like it at all.

Then the part that is not comforting either way up. This card carries no clock. A withdrawal that is nobody's fault can run long enough to end something anyway, and time converts the first kind into the second without anybody deciding. Not being blamed for a silence is not the same as being able to live in one.

how Stella reads it

The Hermit is Virgo's card, which is why it comes up in Stella's readings more than a tarot card has any business doing in an astrology one.

Her opening move follows from that. Earth withdrawal has an object, so she does not start with how he feels. She asks what he has been carrying since the last time he was himself, and she wants it in items. A parent who is ill. A job gone wrong in a way he has not admitted to anybody. Money. Whatever he would need to get right before he would let it be looked at. Name one and the card is behaving normally, and the reading goes there.

When you cannot name anything, she goes to the chart. She will want his birth time, and she is looking for whether there is anywhere in his own map for a Hermit to live. A man built quiet going quieter is a season. A man who talks for a living going silent for five weeks is an event, and those two arrive with the same card and get completely different readings.

The third thing is what people remember afterwards. She will not read it as a phase with a return date on it. What she can see gives a stretch of weeks and never a Thursday, and she says so early rather than letting you leave with a fortnight circled that she made up.

the cards that change it

With the Four of Swords the news is duller than you fear. Two cards saying stop, which read together as somebody with nothing left rather than somebody reconsidering.

With the Eight of Cups it hardens. Cups left standing in a row, somebody heading off into the hills by moonlight, and set beside a man already up on a mountain it stops being a pause and becomes a direction of travel.

Pull it about an ex and the reading changes shape completely, which is why that one sits on a page of its own.

So the picture gives you the shape of the quiet. Which kind you are in comes out of the month behind it, and describing that month to somebody with no stake in the answer beats another hour with the deck. A chat will do it tonight.