In the fifteenth Postcard of the series, Anna Kate Blair contemplates Pixie Colman-Smith’s designs for the Rider-Waite tarot deck and pays close attention to the Hermit, a card whose solitary figure resonates with our times.
I prop the Hermit like a postcard on my noticeboard, arranging pins around the edge so that they hold the card without piercing it. I have been interested in tarot cards for a long time but now, at the start of a pandemic, a little heartbroken and afraid to be alone, I decide to study them, to see if esoteric practices might offer something that’s eluded me elsewhere. I place the Hermit here, where I can see him, because he has been falling out of the pack regularly, insistently, demanding my attention.
•
I knew of Pixie Colman-Smith, the illustrator of the Rider-Waite tarot deck, before I knew her drawings, though this isn’t usually how it goes. It’s only recently that Colman-Smith has begun to receive credit for her tarot illustrations, though it’s her imagery that’s responsible for this deck becoming commonplace.
A.E. Waite, who commissioned Colman-Smith’s illustrations in 1909, gave descriptions for the images on the Major Arcana, most of which are similar to those on previous tarot decks. Colman-Smith’s illustrations for the Minor Arcana, though, are her own conception, based only on a brief list of intended meanings. It is the depth of these images, particularly, each of which appears as if a scene in a story, an opening into a complex world, that is generally seen as lending this set of tarot cards their richness, though I feel, looking at the Hermit, that the designs for the Major Arcana, too, share this particular pull.
•
Waite writes, in Pictorial Key to the Tarot, that the difference between Colman-Smith’s Hermit and earlier versions of the image is in the lantern, which contains, here, a six-pointed star and the separation of this lantern from the sleeves of the cloak.
Colman-Smith, though, does more than this, creating a more ascetic Hermit than those elsewhere. There is more empty space in Colman-Smith’s version than in the card in the earlier Tarot de Marseille, and this Hermit is hooded, with head bowed and eyes closed, heightening the figure’s mystery. The colours, too, are cold, with a striking suite of grey, black, beige and white interrupted only by the yellow lantern and staff.
It is easy to see the influence of Colman-Smith’s time in the theatre, designing sets and costumes, on her tarot cards. The Hermit is framed, as if on a stage, and the gesture of the lamp, held high, is pronounced as it is balanced by the figure’s bowed head. As in the theatre, character is communicated through costume.
•
I’ve just finished a big job for very little cash! Pixie Colman-Smith wrote, about the tarot cards, in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz. Some people may like them.
•
I read that the Hermit is a card that often shows up for those who are newly single, cautioning us not to leap into another love affair too quickly. I read that the Hermit is a figure who leaves society to go on a creative or spiritual journey, that this deliberate withdrawal allows us to reckon with ourselves and our place in the world. I know, also, flicking through tarot accounts on social media, that the card has been appearing for many people as we prepare for mass solitude. It is a card of self-reliance, but also a card of steadiness, of wisdom found within, of light in darkness.
•
I pull three tarot cards from the pack, each morning, and then I record voice messages for my best friend, in London, analysing the spread and reporting on the previous day, on how I wove the lessons of the tarot into my life. We live on opposite sides of the planet and so she responds, usually, just after I’ve had dinner, with text and voice messages offering her own reading and reflections.
I give tarot readings for other friends over Zoom and everybody tells me that I’m good at it. It’s flattering, but it isn’t surprising; I am trained as an art historian and reading tarot cards is basically visual analysis with a Jungian slant. I long to give them to my students to explore, believing that reading tarot cards would form a perfect introduction to art history’s basic skills.
I do not live, at all, as Pixie Colman-Smith’s hermit, standing silent atop a mountain.
•
There are many shades of solitude and some are chosen while others are not; some are nourishing while others are dangerous. I am independent and have always benefitted from periods alone, I think, though I’ve also feared them.
•
I learn from every relationship, every breakup, though the lessons are bittersweet, stinging. I see, too clearly, that if I’d learnt these lessons earlier I might still be happy, and yet there’s no educational program as effective as loss. It’s hard to learn when you’re high on dopamine, confused because you’re falling in love, instincts arguing that something’s wrong while your mind, more rational, tells you that everything’s fine.
(You, I write, when I might just mean me.)
•
Lucy Ives writes, in The Hermit, that commiseration is “improved despair.”
If I improve despair by asking others for support, I tell myself, I will only be outsourcing it, not processing it, learning to endure it. I’ve done this before, crying in the hope that I’ll be comforted. I wonder if my relationship ended because I wanted reassurance where that was impossible, though I know I’m oversimplifying things. I wonder if crying, if explaining myself to another person, asking for commiseration, is a means of asking somebody else to save me when I can only ever save myself.
If you speak of being shattered then you are seen as being shattered, Lesley types into a Zoom chat. We’re all shattered, though, and we’re other things, too, that go unseen.
•
The Hermit is a figure of stillness, set apart from the mediating influences of others, surrounded by sky, engaged with the heavens, and yet stable, grounded by his staff alongside his feet. This is not a visually complicated card.
•
Pixie Colman-Smith was not, herself, anything like a hermit. She seems more like the Page of Cups, playful and creative. Arthur Ransome describes her, in Bohemia in London, as childlike and enthusiastic, wearing an orange coat and a green skirt with black tassels, living in “a mad room out of a fairy tale,” filled with artwork and unusual objects. She is surrounded by people, most of whom are drinking Opal Hush, a cocktail made of lemonade mixed with red claret. She looked as if she had been the same age all her life, and would be so to the end, writes Ransome.
•
I know many writers who think of writing like planting crops, as a practice that requires fallow periods. I need that sort of patience now, really, as I integrate knowledge that was previously theory, held outside my body. It is hard, though, to simultaneously be a hermit and a freelancer under capitalism.
•
You cannot win, writes Lucy Ives. There are no winners.
•
I talk about hermits, over WhatsApp, with a friend in Los Angeles who studies nuns and saints. She tells me of anchoresses, religious recluses of the middle ages, who retreated from society whilst staying indoors, secluded in small rooms attached to churches.
They’d literally be walled into their cells sometimes, she writes.
I imagine living like this, so close to others and yet so far apart, and it feels familiar. I live in an apartment yet never see my neighbours. I know, though, that it is different, that I, with telephone and tarot cards instead of prayer, cannot think myself into that space.
•
In 1911, Pixie Colman-Smith moved to Cornwall and converted to Catholicism. This initially sounds like an abandonment of the esoteric practices with which the tarot is aligned, but was, really, more continuity than break. It was common, in the early twentieth century, for both lesbians and those involved in magical practices to turn toward Catholicism. A.E. Waite, who commissioned Colman-Smith’s drawings, was a devout Christian, and his faith shaped the strains of magic practiced by his Holy Order of the Golden Dawn, to which Colman-Smith belonged and which Waite wished to communicate through the tarot. In Cornwall, Pixie Colman-Smith lived with a woman named Nora Lake at a house called Parc Garland, where the pair made money by renting spaces to retired priests.
•
I feel, each time I strip a layer of myself away, less fear. I think of the Hermit, atop the mountain, unprotected, facing the precipice of fear, watching emotions pass like dense clouds in the valleys. I could reach that height, I think. It doesn’t frighten me.
•
Carl Jung wrote that the strength of the tarot was in the tensions of the deck, its rhythm of the negative and the positive, of loss and gain, of light and dark. I can’t find a solution, neatly, that works for every situation. I shuffle the cards again, often, replacing the Hermit each time, and it is different cards, soon, that tumble out, sending my thoughts in new directions.
About Anna Kate Blair
Anna Kate Blair is a writer from Aotearoa. She holds a PhD in History of Art from the University of Cambridge and her work has recently appeared in Reckoning, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow and Landfall.
This piece was commissioned as part of Postcards in Isolation
In times of loss and separation, art can be a source of inspiration, solace and connection. In her self-conceived series, Postcards in Isolation, writer and editor Rochelle Roberts has turned to the art on her bedroom wall to reflect on the difficulties quarantine and social distancing presents. Looking at artists as disparate as Claude Cahun, Dorothy Cross, Eileen Agar and Dorothea Tanning, Roberts has explored the sadness, uncertainty and joy of life in lockdown, and demonstrated how art can help us grapple with such feelings. As a guest editor for Lucy Writers, Roberts has opened up the series to other writers. See here to read the series so far.
