Moon Mastery: Making the Darkness Conscious
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Although not alluding directly to the tarot Moon, Carl Gustav Jung wrote the following observation that has a bearing on the subject: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” In other words, we must draw it forth and examine it, not try to hide from it or suppress it.
Surpassed in foreboding only by Death and the Tower, the Moon card presents a disturbing image that gives one pause when it appears in a reading. (Even the Devil and the Hanged Man are less daunting than the Moon; the former can always be understood from a cynical point-of-view as suggesting entirely human temptation and lust, while the latter — for all its appearance of sacrifice — offers an initiatory journey into Inner Space.) At its most basic, the melancholy Moon represents outward illusion, confusion and misapprehension. There may be nothing at all wrong with the distorted vista it reveals, it’s just showing us things we don’t ordinarily see, or at least not in the same light, which can be both disorienting and unsettling. One must pass the test shown by the beasts and the towers in order to stand tall and unflinching in its brooding gaze.
One key feature of the card is the crawfish (French readers of my acquaintance insist it’s a “shrimp”) crawling up out of the depths bringing who-knows-what unconscious psychic garbage for our mortification. The implication is that the “magic mirror” of the Moon will show us our darkest self-image, the person we see when we step out of the sunlight and into the half-light of lunar ambiguity. It may be an unflattering reflection that carries intimations of the Jungian “shadow-self,” and the challenge of the Moon is to readmit this creeping crustacean and its furtive hints of alien wisdom into the waking persona.
But I’m more inclined to interpret the crawfish as bringing renewed hope in its portrayal as the scarab beetle of Egyptian mythology carrying the solar disk over the eastern horizon from the dark side of the globe, as shown in the Moon card of the Thoth deck; the suggestion is of the diurnal resurrection of the Sun as it once again escapes the “Dark Night of the Soul.” At its best it hauls the residue of our dreams (and night-terrors) to the surface so we can confront it in the light of day, where most of its power has been banished. (Some see the falling droplets of the Tarot de Marsille Moon as “moon-dew” depositing those nocturnal memories on the landscape each morning.) At its worst it rekindles that subterranean dread in conscious form on a daily basis, constantly refreshing our existential angst.
In a reading it can denote being locked into a pattern of paranoid delusion, such that nothing is what it seems to be. We see the truth only dimly, if at all. Despite a tendency for relentlessly optimistic readers to put a “happy face” on it by imagining an uplifting amalgam of intuition and emotion, that’s more the astrological Moon, not its tarot cousin. The tarot Moon is murky and moody, not the least bit cheerful; as in the desolate 10 of Swords, the rebirth augured by the rising Sun has not yet happened.
Of it, Aleister Crowley says “This is the waning moon, the moon of witchcraft and abominable deeds” (of the sort carried out by burglars and night-stalkers, who revel in its dusky rays). He goes on to add “This is the threshold of life; this is the threshold of death. All is doubtful, all is mysterious, all is intoxicating.” In short, to plunge too rashly into its entrancing abyss is to court madness; its twilight caress is not at all a charming psychic interlude but rather an invitation to contemplate dark magic at a deserted crossroads at midnight (even if only to attempt demystifying it). No “moondance” this; getting right with the Moon is serious business.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on December 18, 2023.
