Initiate

The image of the hermit on the ninth tarot card

November 12th 2025

It is quite amazing how you can find Initiates everywhere you go nowadays, even in nightclubs and other such haunts. And how do you recognize them? Well, it is quite simple, they themselves tell you, ‘I am an Initiate!’ Some will even add that they have reached the seventh, eighth or ninth level of Initiation; much to the delight of the naïve and the blind who imagine they have found a real Initiate who will initiate them too within just a few days.*
In the past, the identity of an Initiate was hidden from all except those who sincerely sought them out and knew how to recognize them. They never said they were Initiates: they remained private, unknown and hidden, like the Hermit on the ninth Tarot card. The old man holding a lamp, shielding it in the folds of his large cloak to hide it from the crowd’s eyes: this is the image of a true Initiate.
* Related reading:

A true Spiritual Master is not only a being who knows the essential truths, who possesses control, domination and self-mastery. He is above all a being who, in his multiple past incarnations, had to make the same experiences, the same mistakes, overcome the same obstacles as us before becoming...