What is a hermit?

In the Middle Ages, someone who believed that living in a monastary or nunnery was not bringing them close enough to God may have chosen to live alone, often in wild or deserted places.  They spent their time thinking about Gods ways in the hope that it would bring them wisdom and allow them to better serve God.

Some would live near a ford or marshy swamp to act as a guide to travellers.

Sometimes a nun  would have herself shut away in a tiny cell next to the church, with only a tiny window looking into the church, a nun who did this would be called an anchoress.  A famous anchoress from the 14th century was Mother Julian of Norwich, she saw a series of 16 visions realting to Christ.

What is the difference between a vision and a hallucination? 

The Desert Fathers

Antony is known as the first christian hermit, he was made famous by the biography of St Athanasius of Alexandria.  He became the model for ascetic training and resistance to temptation.

However some accounts, particularly that of St Jerome stated that St Paul was the first hermit.  He fled from persecution when a teenager and found a great cave in the Egyptian desert, with plenty of water and palm trees, where he lived for the rest of his days, until he died at the age of 113years!

Although this story is questionable in its truth, it does seem to represent one of the defining qualities which is at the heart of why there is a continued interest in the people who choose to live there lives in solitude.  The ability to surround a life which is impossible to understand in myth. To exaggerate the truth is a persistent attraction for us, and a hermits life is so mysterious, it offers ample opportunity to do this.

The Hermit of Tarot cards

In tarot the hermit is a sage, not simply seeking truth and justice in solitude but bringing them to others.  He stands at the edge of a precipice, like the Fool, but knows when to stop.  He is not, like the Fool, on a quest for adventure.  He seeks to bring the light of enlightenment to others.

Info was sourced from www.hermitary.com

It seems to me that the limiting down of preoccupations is a form of dieting, and dieting to be a form of purification that allows one to focus their concentration onto matters that are found, in the time of solitude and reflection, to be matters of true significance.

It is perhaps a tenuous link but is this the reason why slim is seen to be attractive in modern society?  Slim suggests abstinence and abstinence suggests mental fortitude and purity.

Abstinence is living off nothing other than yourself, to be self-sustained, at its most extreme it is Christ taking bread and wine from his own body.

This is the ideal we have been bombarded with in the western world.

Splendid Isolation

It is a suggestion, in itself, of perhaps a greater truth. The existential realisation of the impossibility of understanding anything or anyone outside of your own sphere of experience.  Of how we are isolated sacks of flesh and blood and memories, and we only ever have this to feed off when trying to interpret or understand anything outside of ourselves.

Maybe the suggestion is that by understanding this premise we can find wisdom.

The Allotment

On a slight deviance, the allotment is gowing in strength again.  I don’t think this is solely because of a reaction to the economic downturn, but in fact also as a reeaction to the corrosion of the publics trust in politics.  We are cloaked in a climate of fear, largely the governments doing, so people are retreating metaphorically and literally into their own back yards.  To find sustainability at close quarters, relying less on institutions that have such a grip on the control of the country that even if we were to succeed in changing  the people in office, the end result would be pretty much the same.  This secret and seruptitious erosion of freewill has caused a zeitgeist of mistrust and no hope that has resulted in an attempt to gain some more control over our individual lives.  The increase in daytime tv programmes that include gardening and agriculture as part of their remit is a response to this shift, as is Jamie Olivers (the UK chef) most recent cookery book about growing your own.