The Moon

The Moon: a path by moonlight

A big yellow moon hangs in the sky, with a sleeping face drawn inside it. Drops of light fall from it like dew. Below, a dog and a wolf howl up at it. Out of a pool in front crawls a crayfish. A path winds from the water, between two grey towers, far off toward the mountains. There is no person on this card at all.

Follow the Major Arcana in order, as a road, and you have just left the open sky of the Star. Here the road goes on into the night. Whoever walks it now can only see by moonlight.

The image

Look at the moon's face. It is in profile, eyes closed, tucked inside the curve of a crescent. Waite counted its rays in his guide to the deck: "sixteen chief and sixteen secondary". Under it, the drops fall. He called them "the dew of thought".

The two animals look alike, but they aren't the same. The dog, on the left, is orange and tame. The wolf, on the right, is pale and wild. They howl at the same moon. Waite said they are "the fears of the natural mind", out here where "there is only reflected light to guide it".

The crayfish climbs out of the pool onto the land. Waite wrote that such creatures from the deep try to come up, and "as a rule" sink back. Will this one make it?

Most of this was on the card long before 1909. Waite noted that older Moon cards already had two towers, a path running between them to the horizon, "a wolf and dog" baying, and a crayfish moving "towards the land". Smith kept the old pieces and gave the wolf a red eye.

Then the path. It runs past the animals, between the towers and on, until it is too small to see. Waite called it "the issue into the unknown". You may have seen towers like these before. Two stand on the horizon of Death, with a sun between them. Here the sun is gone and the moon has come.

• DeathTrump XIII

The inner journey

Taken in order, the trumps have passed the Tower and the Star to come here. Now the walk goes through the dark. Nothing is clear. Everything shines with borrowed light, and the path is hard to see.

Waite said this card shows "life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit". It can sound like a warning. You could turn that around. The Moon is where the imagination runs free. Dreams, moods, old fears and strange pictures come up here, like the crayfish from the pool.

James Hillman thought the soul speaks in images like these. He asked us to look through the literal, and to let an image stay strange and many-sided. By moonlight, a coat on a chair becomes a figure. A dog becomes a wolf. You could take that as a gift as well as a trick of the light. What does the night show you that the day hides?

On this road the Moon is the last dark stretch before morning. Waite called the next card, the Sun, "the direct" light, the opposite of the reflected kind. You could also stay out on the path a while, listening to the dog and the wolf, and let the moon keep its secrets.

Across traditions

For all the howling, the moon's own face is calm. Waite heard a message in the card: "Peace, be still". Those are the words of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. He and his friends are crossing a lake in a small boat when a storm blows up. The friends are terrified and wake him. He says to the sea, "Peace, be still." Then, in the old King James words, "the wind ceased, and there was a great calm."

In 1633 Rembrandt painted that storm as Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee. The boat tips up on a huge wave. Men haul at the ropes and the flapping sail. At the back of the boat, in the shadow, Jesus sits among them. In 1990 thieves cut the painting from its frame at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It has never been found. Now we know it only from photographs, like a reflection of something no longer there.

The Golden Dawn's Book T gives this card the title "Ruler of Flux and Reflux", the ebb and flow of the tides. The order matched it with Pisces, the Fish, the twelfth and last sign of the zodiac, and with Qoph among the Hebrew letters.

Try this

Tonight, sit for a few minutes in a room lit only by one small light, or by the moon if you can. Let your eyes get used to it. Notice how shapes change. A chair, a coat, a plant: what do they become? Leave them as they are, and let them be what they seem for a while. Then come back to this card in the same dim light. Which parts of it come forward?

Questions to sit with

• Which is louder, the dog or the wolf?
• Will the crayfish reach the land, or sink back?
• Once the path is past the towers, where does it lead?
• What have you only ever seen by moonlight?
• What in you howls, and what stays calm?

The film

No film for this card yet.