The Moon

▲ Upright Meaning

The Moon is the card of illusion, intuition, and the deep, shadowed waters of the unconscious. It is the realm of dreams and fears, of half-seen truths and shifting shapes, of everything that cannot be grasped by daylight reason. Its teaching is subtle and unsettling: that not all is as it appears, that the path through uncertainty must be walked partly blind, and that the unconscious holds both monsters and treasures, fears and intuitions, which the wise learn to navigate rather than flee. To draw it is to enter a landscape of ambiguity, where intuition is the only reliable guide and nothing should be taken at face value. Its imagery is dreamlike and rich with primal symbol. In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck a great moon, both crescent and full, drops moisture upon a path that winds between two towers into distant hills. A dog and a wolf howl up at it - the tamed and the wild aspects of the psyche - and from a pool in the foreground a crayfish (or lobster) crawls onto land: the most ancient, primal contents of the mind emerging from the deep waters of the unconscious. The path leads forward but is uncertain, lit only by reflected, shifting light. The Moon governs the borderland between the known and the unknown, the conscious shore and the unconscious sea. This is the card whose very name declares its lunar nature, and it has always carried the moon's traditional associations: the tides, the menstrual cycle, madness ('lunacy'), dreams, deception, and the things that move in the dark. In the Tarot de Marseille, La Lune shows the moon with falling drops, two towers, two dogs baying, and a crayfish in the water below - read traditionally as deception, hidden enemies, illusion, and emotional confusion, the night-time of the soul where danger and falsehood lurk. The Marseille reading leans hard toward the deceptive and the perilous. The esoteric traditions deepened the darkness and the depth. The Golden Dawn assigned the card to Pisces, the fish, sign of the boundless ocean of the unconscious, of mysticism and dissolution, and to the Hebrew letter Qoph, the back of the head, the seat of dim instinct. Crowley's Thoth Moon is the dark night of the soul, the path of glamour and deception that the initiate must cross, beetle-borne, between the towers of certainty - a card of trial and the testing of the spirit in the dark. Across all the traditions the Moon is the place of intuition and illusion intertwined, where the gift and the danger are the same faculty. In a reading the Moon counsels trust in intuition and caution toward appearances. It favours dreamwork, the heeding of instinct and the unconscious, the patient navigation of uncertainty; it warns against taking things at face value and against the self-deceptions that fear and desire breed. Of all the cards its relationship to lunar phase is most direct and most potent - it is the Moon - and practitioners regard it as resonating with the full moon's flood of intuition and dream, and especially with the dark and waning moon, the times of deepest unconscious work, divination, and the meeting of one's fears. It reminds the querent that the way through the dark is felt, not seen, and that what frightens us in moonlight is often smaller by day.