The Hermit: 12th House Profection Year

What do the Hermit card and a 12th House Profection year have in common? For starters, both the year and the tarot card indicate a journey of self-reflection that often takes place in solitude. This journey can feel as if we’re in a cosmic limbo as we navigate the intricacies of ourselves.

12th House Profection: A Scheduled Intermission

Annual profections start the day you are born. At that very moment, you enter your 1st house profection year. By your first birthday, you will enter your second, and so on and so forth. Each of these houses has themes that will be an emphasis in your life from birthday to birthday.

The 12th house profection year focuses on mental health, confinement, and seclusion. This is the last stop in a twelve-year cycle before it resets, and you roll back into the 1st house. I’ll be including both the ages and themes of each profection year later in this article.

In 2022, I landed in my 12th house profection year. Contrary to my expectations, nothing came crashing down immediately. Or if it did, I was too busy nursing my existing grief to notice. What I did manage to notice was that it wasn’t long after that I was confronted with my approach to processing grief—or, rather, my lack thereof.

I’m no stranger to solitude. After all, I require 2-3 business days of alone time to recharge after most social gatherings. However, this ushered in the need for deeper solitude. It was clear that my standard processing procedures were going to be put through rigorous testing.

I needed to formulate a plan to amp up my mental health arsenal. I knew I was entering what was shaping up to be the year equivalent of a “Come to Deity” meeting. It was clear I was going to need to answer the hard questions.

Journaling: A Survival Tactic

Around this point, I decided that in order to survive this, I would need to journal. The thoughts in my mind needed to be exorcized and channeled onto paper. This served a couple of purposes. One, I was no longer white-knuckling them. I could let them go because they were outside of me, and I was able to view them objectively.

I used this journal to process my day-to-day but also to reconcile my past. Sometimes the trauma of our lifetimes accumulates and gets stored in the most random of places. Even if it’s not at the forefront of our minds, it’s in the peripheral. After a while, that baggage starts to feel like an old friend or, worse, a part of our identities.

A breakup with another entity is hard enough. How could I divorce myself? I live here.

I quickly realized self-divorce wasn’t in the cards, and much to my dismay, lobotomies fell out of favor around the 1950s. I needed to restructure my plan of attack. In doing so, I began to understand that what I could do was refine this version of myself. To start, I would need to let go of some of the weight I had been carrying for much longer than I consciously realized.

Through the process of journaling, we are able to see ourselves and our thoughts from an aerial view. This symbolic detachment from the words and thoughts themselves assists us in processing them. When the words are on paper before us, we can approach them objectively and catalog the thoughts as we see fit.

I must note that while I am an anxious person, I don’t often struggle with depression or other mental illnesses. If you are, journaling should not take the place of proper mental health care. Unfortunately, even stating that feels trite, considering I reside in the United States, where mental health care is a luxury. As a person who was not born with a silver spoon, I’ve often sought cures for my ails at home. This includes mental woes.

In my experience, journaling has worked wonders by allowing me to go deeper into my psyche. Journaling becomes a mirror, and we are provided the space to confront ourselves: our fears, traumas, and our lives as a whole. Subsequently, we are able to learn and grow from trials and tribulations rather than identify as them.

The Hermit Card: Is There Anybody Out There?

The Hermit card and the 12th house profection year share similar energy. In the Rider-Waite deck, this card is presented as a wandering vagabond or holy man carrying a staff and a lantern. Within the lantern is a six-pointed star representing the Seal of Solomon, which signifies wisdom. The lantern itself is symbolic of illuminating the journey ahead, one step at a time.

When the Hermit card comes up in a reading, it often illustrates a period of introspection that takes place in isolation. After all, the journey toward personal enlightenment and self-examination is one that we must make alone. The compass exists within us.

This card is also a reminder of cycles. The card before The Hermit is Strength, and the card after is the Wheel of Fortune. Even this sequence parallels the profection years. Ultimately, the year after the 12th House will be followed by the 1st House. The first house is often a more jubilant experience as its themes are new beginnings and personal growth.

Healing: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

In my experience, true healing is messy. It’s not a linear process. Grief itself is frequently described in stages, but they are not experienced in a sequence. Sometimes they occur out of order, and other times they occur in rapid succession or all at once.

Too often, we’re told to think positively or to rid ourselves of negative emotions. This is to our detriment. The only thing that is accomplished is spiritual bypassing in efforts to live up to the toxic positivity movement.

These are not just buzzwords. I’ve troubleshot the “vibrate higher” movement since inception. It’s always felt inauthentic to a genuine human experience that encapsulates both positives and negatives and highs and lows. Vibrating higher won’t right every wrong, and it certainly won’t resurrect the dead.

So, where do we go from here? We sit with ourselves until we uncover solace in the silence. We go on the hermits’ journey through our minds. We turn every corner in our minds and dust off the cobwebs of our memories. We thumb through them, determining which to keep and which to release. When we’re done rummaging through the proverbial boxes, we rest. We give ourselves time to feel and process our experiences. We begin to heal. Slowly—so very slowly—but we do.

Profection Years

Please note, this is a very brief synopsis of profection years. For more information regarding profection years, I recommend Kelly Surree’s article, “Soul Growth And Your Age: Annual Profections And Life Cycles.”