Major Arcana · 18
The Moon
La Lune (Tarot de Marseille) · La Luna (Italian tarocchi) · Ruler of Flux and Reflux; Child of the Sons of the Mighty (Golden Dawn)
A moon with a face shining over a path between two towers, with a dog and a wolf howling and a crayfish crawling from a pool. In the Waite–Smith tradition it stands for uncertainty, dreams, imagination and the half-lit unconscious.
Upright illusion · uncertainty · dreams · intuition · the unconscious · fear · imagination
Reversed confusion lifting · truth revealed · released fear · self-deception · repressed feelings · clarity returning
- Astrology
- Pisces
- Element
- Water
- Hebrew letter
- Qoph
- Number
- 18
- Golden Dawn title
- Ruler of Flux and Reflux; Child of the Sons of the Mighty
- Yes or no
- Maybe
Upright
The Moon lights the way only dimly. In the Waite–Smith tradition the card signifies uncertainty, illusion and the strange territory of dreams, fears and imagination. Things are not as they seem; shapes shift; what is felt may be truer than what is seen, or it may be pure projection.
Love and relationships: confusion, unspoken fears, idealisation or a situation where one partner's true feelings are unclear. Readers often advise patience before drawing conclusions.
Work and money: unclear information, hidden factors or plans that rest on assumptions. It is not a card for signing in haste. On the other hand it can favour imaginative, artistic and intuitive work.
Advice: move slowly and trust your instincts while testing them against the facts. Readers describe the card as a passage through a night journey: fear lessens when it is faced, and the path between the towers does lead somewhere.
Reversed
Readers often take the reversed Moon as fog beginning to clear. Confusion lifts, a deception comes to light, or a long-held fear loses its grip. Some see the opposite emphasis — anxiety turned inward, feelings pushed down, or self-deception that is harder to notice than another's.
In relationships it can show a truth emerging. In work it may mark the moment a hidden problem becomes visible.
Many readers do not use reversals, letting the cards around an upright Moon indicate whether its mists are thickening or thinning.
The image
In Smith's Moon a large moon, drawn as a face in profile within a full disc ringed by rays, hangs in a blue sky, and drops of light fall from it toward the earth. Below, a dog and a wolf bay up at it from either side of a path. In the foreground a crayfish crawls out of a pool of water onto the land. The path winds between two grey towers and on toward distant blue hills or mountains. The landscape is quiet, empty of people and washed in pale light.
History
The Moon belongs to the celestial group of trumps. Fifteenth-century Italian cards show a woman holding a crescent moon, or astronomers measuring the heavens. The Tarot de Marseille's La Lune already contains most of Smith's elements: a moon with a face dripping drops, two dogs, two towers and a crayfish in a pool. Court de Gébelin read the drops as tears or dew, and occult writers turned the scene into an allegory of the soul's nocturnal journey.
The Golden Dawn attributed the card to Pisces and the letter Qoph. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) describes the card as the life of the imagination apart from the life of the spirit, with the dog and the wolf as the fears of the natural mind and the crawling creature as something rising from the depths that sinks back again.
Symbolism
The dog and wolf represent the tame and wild sides of animal nature, both stirred by the moon. The crayfish signifies the earliest stirrings of consciousness emerging from the unconscious, or primal fears surfacing. The towers are the gates of the known world, and the path beyond them leads into the unknown. The moon's falling drops, often shaped as Yods, suggest something given from above even in obscurity. Water ties the card to the High Priestess, whose robe the pool seems to continue.
Pisces, the last sign of the zodiac and a mutable water sign, rules dissolution, dreams, compassion and confusion. Qoph means "back of the head", which Golden Dawn writers associated with the old brain and the sleeping mind. On the Tree of Life its path connects Netzach with Malkuth. Eighteen reduces to nine, the number of the Hermit, whose lantern is a light for exactly such a darkness.
In a reading
Readers usually read the Moon as a call to caution and self-knowledge. With the Seven of Cups it emphasises illusion and wishful thinking; with the Sun that follows it, confusion giving way to clarity; with the Two of Swords, a decision made harder by missing information. Attention to dreams and intuition is often part of its advice.
Sources and further reading
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot — A. E. Waite, 1910
- The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City — Michael Dummett, 1980
- Secrets of the Waite-Smith Tarot — Marcus Katz & Tali Goodwin, 2015
- Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom — Rachel Pollack, 1980