The Year of the Hermit

This year, the Tarot card I have drawn on my birthday is a mighty fitting one for where I am in my life.

The Hermit has two interpretations: the recluse who lives alone, or, the returning hero, who learned fantastic new things during a solitary journey into the wide world beyond.

This card is drawn when a period of profound seclusion and introspection is begun, or is ending – and the fruits are borne and shared.

I have spent the past five years, ever since the year of The Fool, traversing the new Wild West of the digital age. That was the year I left corporate America and struck out into the frontier, teaching myself web design and digital marketing, and working from afar.

Now that I have completed my solitary journey, I return home, to “bestow boons on my fellow man,” as Joseph Campbell has put it, in The Hero With A Thousand Faces:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” -Joseph Campbell

This is the Hermit, not as a recluse, but as a returning hero with a singular perspective, making this an especially empowering card for me this year, when interpreted in the evolution of my career.

The skills I have learnt allow me to decipher how an expert is able to package their knowledge into an online product that can be sold, and how to reach the audience to deliver that information to those who are searching for it. I have set up or created dozens of these products for my clients, and recently I have started to sketch the blueprint for a system that can create these information products en masse.

This digital sales funnel, from start to finish, is a wide set of arcane infrastructure that I have studied and learned how to produce.

In 2015, I will be creating these sales funnels for many more authors and experts who have a package of information to share, and want to have their own product to sell at the end of their digital sales funnel, as well as free incentives to build their list at the front end.

Making a website is only one of a series of steps. I have seen, out in the digital frontier, how successful internet entrepreneurs have crafted comprehensive digital sales funnels, and I have decoded the mechanics for constructing them. I like doing it, and I’m getting good at it.

This year I am returning to the world of the common day, and crafting this new digital platform for my fellows, to bring success, notoriety, and fortune to those who work with me – that is how I optimistically interpret the drawing of the Hermit card this year.

The Hermit Tarot Card Symbolism

The IX of Trumps is potent. The Hermit carries a lantern of illumination, and is accompanied by the unrealized egg and homunculus, the components of the idea that he alone is able to construct out of disparate elements.

Because of his journey and travels into the unknown, the Hermit is able to apply foreign ideas into his own society,and he is able to advance the culture around him by sharing it. The wheat that bends to the Hermit is a symbol of the productivity fostered by his fertilization.

I hope to spend this year in fruitful labor, and to help those around me to prosper and grow. The Hermit is the bearer of illumination, and this is the year when I bring light onto others, that their works may be seen and cherished. I no longer want to take the stage myself; the light I bear does not cast well on my own features, I have found, so it is perhaps in this withdrawal from the spotlight that I am, this year, a recluse.