The Moon

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18. The Moon

✦ Associations

Water / Pisces (Neptune)

✦ Keywords

The unknown, the hidden, the void, the subconscious and unconscious; feeling lost or confused, following intuition, mysticism, psychic signs.

✦ Quote

What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. — Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

✦ Meaning

✦ Night Spaces and the Subconscious

The Moon rules the night spaces, the unknowns, the underworlds, and all the wild beasts and bugs that emerge to frolic and hunt beneath its silvered half-light. When night falls and the dark descends, the human imagination stirs to life, dancing with shadows and fearful, slinking things. As such, the Moon rules the subconscious and unconscious, the deeper realms that lie beneath our conscious awareness, the shadows in the deep that crest the surface only by its sylvan light. But this lunar domain of monsters and phantoms must be traversed in order to proceed on our journey, because these beasts are in fact a part of us. Beneath the civilized veneer of domesticated humanity, we are all, each of us, wild.

✦ Threshold Between Star and Sun

The Moon is a threshold card, a necessary gateway between the inspiration and hope of the Star and the luminous joy of the Sun. The waters in the Moon card are the same as in the Star, but where the Star dips in a foot, retaining a firm grounding in the outer world, the Moon plunges us headfirst into its soaking depths, demanding that we journey through the nether-realm of our own psyche so that we may finally pass through into the light of the Sun.

✦ Teacher and Lunar Gifts

In this capacity, the Moon is a huge teacher, showing us the feral unknown expanses within us are natural and necessary. With our culture's lofty Age of Reason ideals, these Moon qualities of fear and phantasm are often considered 'problems' that need fixing—fear must be conquered, confusion clarified, the wild tamed, and unknowns thoroughly demystified and catalogued. Oh, and grow up; imagination's just for children. The Tarot, on the other hand, shows us that these lunar mysteries are not problems at all, but gifts. They are as necessary as the moon's orbit, as the Earth's stellar pirouette turning half itself always into darkness. As the tides rise and fall, so do we and our emotions, our energy levels, our sleep cycles. The Moon rules our dreams as well, and there in our REM sleepscapes, where primeval sea monsters creep from their unconscious underwater vents, where wolves roam and fantasy flies as bats on the wing, we may recognize the wild phantasmagoric truth of ourselves. For we're all monsters here, and to pretend otherwise would be to reject an essential part of ourselves, and then we would remain shattered and bifurcated, never to truly bask as our whole selves in the light of the Sun.

✦ Readings: Intuition and Confusion

In readings, the Moon can herald a period of enhanced intuitive perception and imaginative or creative breakthroughs, but it can also represent a time of confusion, of uncertainty, or of physiological or emotional disturbance. In Moon times, we may feel lost in the dark, unable to see the path forward, but that's the Moon's gift. The Moon teaches us to be okay in the dark, in the not knowing, and to trust our intuition, our Moon-ruled sixth sense. That's perhaps the most challenging aspect of this card, and why many traditional interpretations associate the card with fear—because it's scary to release conscious control. Our conscious minds grapple for the familiar, for the known, for concretely-definable meaning, but the Moon asks us to turn off those ever-turning gears of rationalization and logic. It asks that we open ourselves to receiving other signals: pings of gut feeling, messages on the radio, patterns in graffiti, words we keep hearing or images we keep seeing, dream symbols, a bird crossing our path at exactly the right time.

✦ Irrational Signs and Lunar Marginalization

Some may call these signs and sensations irrational, and that's because they are. That's the point. The modern insistence on rationality has long shut down any mode of communication, practice, or knowing that doesn't meet its empirical standards of 'sense.' Anything it can't slot conveniently into its shallow understanding, it demonizes as 'lunacy' (root word luna, or 'moon') or 'witchcraft.' (Though witches, who have always known the power of the Moon, of the hidden and unseen and wild, may take no offense at the comparison.) It diminishes the Moon as being only a reflection of the Sun's grand luminescence, as nothing more than a weak mirror, as a pretender grasping at half-light. But by deriding the Moon's influence, these demagogues of reason prove their reason has no sense but for what can be seen with the sense of sight, for our other senses awaken when the sky is dark, and the Sun only shines for half the day anyway, so perhaps they are the ones working in half-light.

✦ Challenge and Blessing

The challenge and the blessing of the Moon is learning how to lift the filter of "reason," how to expand our awareness to include sensing and receiving through channels other than the conscious mind. In the Moon, we become more expansive beings, unafraid of our own shadows and familiar friends with the unknown, capable of surviving and thriving in the dark as well as the light.

✦ Imagery for Fifth Spirit

In our card for Fifth Spirit, a cloaked and hooded figure wades into waters of a swamp that opens to a vast body of water. They are surrounded by will-o'-the-wisps, floating orbs of light that appear in swamps, marshes, and other boggy areas. While the scientific explanation for this natural phenomenon has to do with methane gas, folklore is, as usual, far more interesting and far more telling of the human psyche, attributing the orbs to ghosts, fairies, or other spirits. In the tradition of the British Isles, will-o'-the-wisps have a long history of luring travelers off their paths so they become hopelessly lost and die, never to leave the marsh again. (And adding their decomposing body to the waters, to produce even more methane gas, becoming will-o'-the-wisps themselves in the process.)

✦ Orbs as Specters and the Route Through Fear

These orbs are the specters of our imagination, our personal fears and long-dead ghosts rising up from the swamp of the subconscious to say boo. But if we turn tail and run, then we'll remain afraid forever. The only way through is onward, down into the waters, down into our depths. Because that's where we can parse our fear from our intuition, down in the snake-land amongst the tangled roots and silt. That way, we can recognize those fears when they inevitably slither out to scare and thereby control us. We can say boo right back, and then continue down our path guided by true intuition, illuminated by the full light of the moon.

✦ Perseverance of the Cloaked Figure

We are the cloaked figure wading straight through the waters, unfazed by the ghost lights, unafraid of what lies beneath the surface, undaunted by the unknown. Because we're on the path, even if we don't yet know where it leads. The important part is in continuing. When it's too dark to see, we close our eyes and let our other senses guide us. And we keep going.

✦ Trailing Punctuation

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