The Moon

There are light and dark sides to the symbolism of the Moon, just as there are to the planetoid sphere. Developers of the Tarot have persistently gravitated towards the High Priestess to represent the White-Goddess or Diana’s side of the meaning, and so, half counter-intuitively, left the Moon card to represent the dark side and eventually the sign of Pisces. This in its turn provides the most obvious clue to look to the natural Houses of the Signs for sympathies with their Trump assignments. In this case we have the Twelfth house, the darkest of them all, with its self-undoing, secrets, delusions, undercurrents, and hidden enemies. Spooky. This house is physically where the waning crescent moon is before sunrise, as depicted on the card. While the alphabet symbolism from the Kabbalah isn’t always very relevant, the association here to Qoph, as the back of the head, is useful, as it suggests the older, more primitive and instinctive portions of our brains, the fish, lizard, and early mammalian cortices that we still carry with us, with their basic cognitive functions and fuzzier logic, together with the fight-or-flight feelings. And as dim as these functions are, they at least kept single every one of our ancestors alive long enough to successfully breed the next generation, and did so through several mass extinction events. And even today, most of our decisions are made in the lower brain and unconsciously, by feelings and emotional reactions, many of which are our fears and insecurities. The unconscious is far more than a burial, compost, or septic pit for things discarded or forgotten. More goes on in darkness than in light. It’s this ancient mind that’s waking up in this card, at least as well as it can. But we will probably be reminded that we are still not all that evolved. Instinctual intelligence is hasty and approximate at best, almost reflexive, and largely projection and guesswork. It jumps to conclusions. This is the mind that strings our flashes of dream parts together into coherent dreams. It’s the mind thrilled by Lovecraft and Poe. It’s also the mind that divines, and does mysteriously well at times. When we lose or remove the oversight of our higher cognitive functions, this is what we fall back on. We are back in the tide pools of our deep past, and here we must again face all those ghosts from our earlier days, the creatures from the id, and the demons from our scariest dreams, without the aid of reason, logic, and language. This happens in madness, or lunacy, of course, and depression, but it also happens during our ebb tides, and in periods of exhaustion. As Nietzsche wrote, “When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.” Low flow, low tide, and low-light conditions characterize this card. It’s our incon- stant moon. This may show us ourselves in a much diminished state, groping our way through shadows and phantasms, wading through the muck, in used or half light, perhaps having lost our orientation, direction, or purpose. The primordial depths of the psyche come to the surface, but that’s all that seems to be rising up here, because the surface is falling. The feelings that kept us buoyant may have sunk into a depression, leaving just broody moods. Reason and words aren’t helping. We just question and exaggerate everything, and need to be reminded that it’s no time for big decisions. The Yijing counterpart is Gua 47, Exhaustion or Oppression. The waters are drained out of us. We have little left to defend ourselves with. We’re beset by the world around us. The texts of the lines have a lot of fun with this, trying to tease us back into lightening up, advising us to lose the speeches and the complaints, to shut up, to mistrust what we see and hear, and just rest, or wait for rising waters to return. We could also have some fun in the tide pools. We could stomp in some of those puddles. This is, after all, where we came from, so long ago, or not so long ago. We are not descended spirits or angels. We began in these pools. We can still dream ourselves around, and learn to direct our dreams as long as we are having them. We could take a little journey through that crack between the worlds. Yes, we are in a suggestible state, but suggestion can work both ways. There are still good times to be had at low tide. At least pain and suffering might be optional, and a little rest could be welcome. Today we think we’ve outgrown the dark ages, the passing age of Pisces. But if we had, we might appreciate mystery more. The deep remains the final frontier, the benthos of the ocean as well as the benthos of the mind. On the whole, humans are still quite superstitious. We get into these depths and panic instead of explore. We still fear our ancient selves and call them beasts. We still fear the unclean things that hide in the womb, and act out our mental illnesses on young girls and women. We are haunted by our own origins. We will persecute midwife and medicine man, instead of giving them chickens and goats in trade for their gifts. Our repression leads to sepsis. We have yet to master the crises of faith, the sloughs of despond, the dark nights of the soul, the weltschmerz, the existential nausea. To think that we are not angels come down from on high is cause for great nihilism and despair. The succubus and incubus still make the blood run cold. But because of these fears, the dark side of the Moon must be faced and explored. Because of this, we must make friends with our witches. It’s our cowardice that gives us reason for despair.