{"id":31049,"date":"2010-11-21T11:44:57","date_gmt":"2010-11-21T16:44:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=31049"},"modified":"2010-11-21T11:46:05","modified_gmt":"2010-11-21T16:46:05","slug":"the-weekend-tarot-reading-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/reading-tarot\/the-weekend-tarot-reading-the-moon\/","title":{"rendered":"The Weekend Tarot Reading: The Moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator<\/a> using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article<\/a> tells you how to use the spread<\/em>. You can visit Sarah’s website here<\/a>. –efc<\/em><\/p>\n

By Sarah Taylor<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Moon from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot deck. The Moon is the eighteenth card of the tarot's major arcana.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

When I am in the heart of the South African bushveld<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In the case of The Moon, that influence is from our primal nature — embodied in the wolf, the dog and the lobster. When The Moon is at play, both our rational and our intuitive natures fly at half-mast, and the instinctual life takes over. Instinct can be very helpful. It protects us from danger and can assist us especially when we are in survival mode. It can, though, also cause us to imagine things that aren’t there, and to retreat into a state where it paralyses both our intuition and our power of reasoning. We can then become slaves to it, rather than it serving us when we most need it.<\/p>\n

The Moon itself in this card interests me. Wikipedia states definitively that the face in the Moon “is frowning, reflecting displeasure.” I disagree. Yes, I can see that it could be interpreted that the face is looking down displeasingly on the howling dog and wolf. However, I have always felt that the celestial bodies depicted in the tarot have no specific need to be judgemental about life on the Earth, and how it conducts itself. They are disinterested (as opposed to uninterested) witnesses to our lives. For me, the face is bowed in focussed concentration, captured in the act of doing what she does, which is to share her light. Fragments of it rain down on the animals below her. To see her as expressing displeasure is to make the same mistake as to believe that it is the Moon herself who is at fault for our inability to see clearly.<\/p>\n

We are simply not meant to see things in the same way that we do when our world is illuminated by the light from the Sun. It is our projections into the world around us that cause us to fear, and it is we who take our own lives into our hands when we choose to navigate a landscape that is not fully known to us, at a time when our instinctual nature is at its most activated. When it is, objects like the two towers at each edge of the picture can lose their perspective: their bases sit in a part of the landscape that is indistinct, and it is difficult to see how big they really are.<\/p>\n

Do you take the pathway that they flank; or do you stick it out with the creatures and wait until dawn? Which feels more compelling to you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":470,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[183],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31049"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/470"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31049"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31049\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}