Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
I think I’m going to have to employ my son, Noah, as my official ‘Weekend Tarot Reading Card-Puller’. He obviously has a certain knack. Today, when he saw me shuffling the deck in preparation for writing this article, he asked me if he could choose the card, so I fanned the pack in front of him, and he pulled The Moon. On the day that we have a Full Moon. Perfect.
There is a certain ‘slipperiness’ to The Moon. It is as if the world that it portrays, and the mood that emanates from that, are off kilter — somewhat awry — which I find entirely in keeping with what the card symbolises.
Picture yourself in an unpopulated, rural landscape on a night when the Moon is full in a cloudless sky. Perhaps you’ve been in just that situation, in which case you will know what I mean when I say that the light that the Moon emits is deceptive. Contrasted with those nights when the Moon is absent, a Full Moon can seem unusually bright. The landscape stands out in relief. Trees and rocks throw shadows. The light catches the back of a passing owl or mouse.
When I am in the heart of the South African bushveld far away from towns that throw their light into the sky, a Full Moon is exciting because I am able to experience my surroundings in a different light, so to speak. Things look unfamiliar, and the lines between objects are more fluid than they are in daylight. Ask me to get up and walk off into the long grass as I would do during the day, however, and that sense of wonder is replaced with wariness and some trepidation.
And that’s the thing with a Full Moon: you can see things you wouldn’t ordinarily see most nights, but it’s not what you would see during the day either. Much of the world is still cast into shadow… and in fact the contrast between what is light and what isn’t adds a certain confusion rather than a clarity.
The Moon — the eighteenth card of the major arcana — is concerned with that space in the psyche where things are not immediately discernible; where reality segues into another, less concrete, dimension; and where fear can lurk in the shadows. The ‘true’ light of the Sun (and The Sun card) doesn’t exist here, because with The Moon, the light is reflected. The source of the light is hidden from view, while the Moon takes it and projects it. So the light we are seeing is at one remove from source. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t real. What it does mean is that our perceptions are more easily influenced by other factors.