A working magical community. The path is yours.
An online school for tarot, magic, and the Western esoteric tradition. Built from real practice, and open to anyone ready to begin.
Magic is a big, sprawling subject, and nobody ever finishes it. There's no fixed order to learn it in, and no single tradition that holds all of it. So the Hermitage gives you courses to choose from instead of one set syllabus. You decide where to start, and the work grows from there.
Every course comes out of years of real practice. You'll keep a magical diary, and you'll be given things to try and questions worth staying with, the kind still working on you a year on. Some people start with the foundations and move outward from there. Others arrive knowing exactly what they came for. Both work fine.
The school is hosted on Mighty Networks, which keeps the courses and the community in one place, on the web and in an app. There's just one membership, £20 a month (or $25 if you're paying in dollars), and it opens everything: every course, the community, and whatever gets added while you're a member. You can cancel any time.
Stop collecting. Start working.
The Hermitage is a living community as much as a set of courses. Members share readings, journey reports, what's worked and what's gone sideways, alongside other people doing the same work. You decide how much of it is study and how much is good company.
The courses range across the Western esoteric tradition and the wider world of practice: tarot in two traditions, ceremonial and chaos magic, Jungian psychology, the body and its energies, esoteric Christianity, shamanic journeying, ancestor work, and the meeting point of magic and nonduality. Each one stands on its own, so take them in any order and at your own pace. Every course opens with a short video introduction inside The Hermitage.
More are on the way, including Land & Place Magic, Transforming the Puer Aeternus, and The Fourth Way and Beyond.
The groundwork everything else rests on. Grounding and centring, building and moving energy, cleansing, protection, and the habit of a daily practice. If you've read widely but never quite found your footing, start here. Nothing is taken for granted, and the skills you build carry into every other course in the school.
A guided tour through the tradition's long, strange history: the Hermetic texts and Neoplatonism, alchemy and Kabbalah, the Renaissance magi, the occult revival, and the currents alive today. Knowing where the ideas came from changes how you work with them, so you come away with a usable map of the whole terrain.
Jung as a working method rather than an exam topic. The unconscious, the shadow, complexes, archetypes, active imagination, and individuation as the long arc of the work. You'll learn the ideas and then put them to work on your own dreams and your own patterns. This is the psychological spine of everything the school teaches.
The deck most people meet first, taken seriously. You'll go card by card through the Major and Minor Arcana, learn the symbolism Pamela Colman Smith built into every image, and pick up the practical craft of reading for yourself and for others. By the end, the cards stop being something you look up and become a language you speak.
The older, starker tradition: pips without scenes, and a reading style that asks more of you. Where Waite-Smith gives you pictures to interpret, Marseille gives you number, suit and pattern. You'll learn to read from those bones, and it sharpens everything about how you handle any deck.
The mystical and hidden streams beneath the surface of the faith: gnosis, contemplation, the inner meaning of scripture and sacrament, and the visionary line from the desert fathers to the Christian theosophers. Whatever your own relationship to the religion, these currents run deep through Western magic, and this course follows them back to their source.
The tradition's laboratory. Belief as a tool, results over dogma, and room to build a practice that works for you. Sigils, gnosis, paradigm shifting, and the practical, experimental attitude that made chaos magic the most influential current of the last century. Bring your scepticism; it's an asset here.
The art of turning intention into symbol, and symbol into result. You'll learn the whole method, design, charging, launching and forgetting, along with the theory of why it works and the variations you can adapt to your own style. It's a compact, practical skill you'll keep using for the rest of your practice, whatever else you study.
Magic that lives in the body as much as the head. Drawing on Reichian and bioenergetic practice, this course works with breath, tension, charge and release, the felt physical dimension that most magical training skips over. The body holds what the mind won't admit, and learning to read it is a practice in itself.
Maybe the oldest technique there is: leaving ordinary awareness on purpose, and coming back with something. You'll cover drumming, the three worlds, meeting helping spirits, and the ethics and hygiene of the work. It's short by design, but enough to give you a practice you can keep. Throughout, the emphasis is on your own direct experience over anything you're asked to believe.
The dead are the oldest spirits we have, and the closest. You'll learn to honour, contact and work with the ancestors: building a shrine, making offerings, tending the line, and telling apart the ancestors who help from the ones still in need of healing. It draws on traditions from around the world without flattening them into one, and stays grounded throughout in respect and careful discernment. Whatever you know of your own lineage, you have ancestors, and they can be reached.
Two paths that look opposed: one reaching out to shape the world, the other letting the separate self dissolve. This course asks what happens when you walk them together. Built around the Ten Ox Herding Pictures, the old Zen map of awakening, it follows you from the first search to the return to the ordinary world with open hands. Along the way it asks the question most magical training avoids: who exactly is doing the magic? It's for anyone whose practice has started raising questions that results alone can't answer.
The school's own living current, for students ready to commit to sustained initiatory work. It draws together the threads running through everything else at The Hermitage into a structured path of its own, revealed in stages. It's open to those who've done the groundwork and want to go further.
The Hermitage was founded by James Ellis, host of Hermitix, a long-running podcast on philosophy, esotericism and the odder corners of both. He trained in Fine Art and Continental Philosophy, keeps a working shamanic practice, and has spent over a decade in serious engagement with the Western magical tradition. He lives in Norfolk.
No. Every course is open to complete beginners, with enough depth for students who've been in the tradition for years.
Wherever feels right. Magical Foundations is a natural entry point, but many begin with tarot, Jung, or whatever drew them here.
Video-based, self-paced, available as soon as you join. Work through them on your own schedule.
A living magical current developed and taught only at The Hermitage, for students ready to go deeper into sustained practice.
Yes. It's a shared space to discuss the work, ask questions, and meet other practitioners.
Every course is written and taught by James Ellis.