“Midnight Dew and Golden Sunflakes”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: In 1962, Canadian folksinger Bonnie Dobson wrote and recorded Morning Dew, an anti-war song in which the “dew” was nuclear fallout. In this essay, the analogous but hardly-as-lethal condensation is the “midnight dew” shed by the Moon in the Tarot de Marseille card of that name. In 1969, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame wrote Grantchester Meadow s, a pastoral, acoustic paean to the English countryside that included the verse “All around me golden sunflakes/Settle on the ground.” Here I’m borrowing it to describe the flaming motes unleashed by the TdM Sun. (See the scan below).
Much has been written about the comma-shaped symbols appearing on both the Moon and Sun cards of the Tarot de Marseille. Later authors have often explained them as “Yods” after the Hebrew letter associated with the masculine principle of insemination (think “sperm”) while others with a mystical bent have called them” “drops of blood” that express the material coalescence of spiritual being. The interesting thing is that — at least in the Conver TdM — there are 19 of them in the Moon card and 13 in the Sun’s image, neither of which aligns with any established occult system of my acquaintance (lending credibility to the tarot historian’s insistence that the TdM is not an esoteric deck and its compositions are allegorical rather than metaphysical). But of course nobody knows the mind of its creator.
Waite and Smith reduced the Moon’s quotient to 15 recognizable Yods (but I still can’t deduce an arcane connection from Waite’s writing), while Paul Foster Case finally got around to making it 18, which at least has numerical justification. Ever the completist, he observed in The Tarot: Key to the Wisdom of the Ages:
“They are eighteen Hebrew Yods, corresponding to the number of the Key. (In the Rider pack the number is 15, which somewhat confuses the symbolism.) The number 18 is the value of the Hebrew noun ChI, Chai, signifying ‘life.’ Thus the falling Yods refer to the descent of the life-force from above into the conditions of corporeal existence.”
Case was uncharacteristically silent about why he adopted the 13 “sunflakes” of the TdM Sun card when they are absent from the RWS precursor to his BOTA deck, offering no details on that artistic decision. In the Thoth deck, Aleister Crowley omitted the solar Yods and (never one for superfluous decorum) altered the Moon’s discharge to “nine drops of impure blood” (by which he customarily meant menstrual fluid). Crowley’s use of the number 9 is an allusion to Yesod, the ninth sphere of the Moon on the Qabalistic Tree of Life.
Another curious impression is that the suspended “commas” on the TdM Moon card are “tail-down” and appear to be ascending from the world below rather than descending upon it, as if the tableau is portraying evaporation and not precipitation; I recently read (although I can’t immediately recall the source) that the Moon visits subconscious enigmas upon us and then withdraws them at the end of the night in deference to the rising Sun. Rather than spreading moon-dew in the wee hours, this apparently rising moisture may be showing the migration of that subliminal intrusion back to its rather harried-looking begetter (“Where am I gonna put all this stuff?”) as the dawn’s light gathers just below the horizon in the form of the emerging crustacean.
Conversely, the TdM Sun at noon appears to be tossing small bombs of solar fire at the landscape, creating the imminent risk of not only illuminating but also torching the environment and its residents. While the Moon could be harboring the fantasies to which we aspire in our dreams, the Sun is indifferent to our aspirations; it doesn’t care whether we’re enlightened or incinerated, it just goes about its business while letting us make what we can of the largess it broadcasts so carelessly. There isn’t a cloud in sight, so the twins in the scene have only a half-wall to shield them from the solar radiation. In keeping with the theme of duality that flows throughout the series of trumps, the Moon displays two menacing canines guarding the nocturnal crossing until the Sun comes up (nobody goes that way without their leave), after which they retire (or perhaps they morph back into their human form of seemingly-innocent children) and the direction of energy flow is reversed in a seamless loop from centripetal (collecting and distilling Moon) to centrifugal (endlessly outpouring Sun) and back. For its part, the solar countenance looks like the smug “cat who ate the canary” . . . or maybe it just has a tasty crawfish in its belly.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on January 17, 2024.
