The Moon

Johnny, take a walk with your sister the moon
Let her pale light in, to fill up your room.
You’ve been living underground, eating from a can
You’ve been running away from what you don’t understand.

She’s slippy, you’re sliding down.
She’ll be there when you hit the ground.

It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright.
She moves in mysterious ways…

She’s the wave, she turns the tide
She sees the man inside the child…

Move you, spirits move you
Move, spirits move you, oh yeah.
Does it move you?
She moves with it.
Lift my days, and light up my nights, oh.

“Mysterious Ways” by U2 (Hewson/Clayton/Mullen/Evans)

Welcome to my circle of The Moon! The Moon is the wild card of the Major Arcana. She has been popularly described as the ‘Wild Unknown’ that lies within all of us, or, by Thoth creator Aleister Crowley*, as representing the “Long Dark Night of the Soul”. The Moon certain is an unsettling card, but then – too much settling is not necessarily A Good Thing. Sometimes we need to let our fear turn to wonder, and enjoy the thrill of adventure.

Much like the real moon, the card is commonly associated with mystery, uncertainty, confusion, duplicity, fear, darkness, nightmares come to life, illusion, and madness (lunacy, indeed). But also with visionary foresight, genius, astonishing creativity, poetry, romance, powerful magic, and deep intuition. Jen Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt argue that whether we choose to focus on the negative or the positive aspects in a reading may well depend on our feelings towards the actual moon: “Is she a soft and silver watcher who keeps our secrets, or a spotlight that reveals things in too-stark detail? Is she our benevolent line manager in the sky, or a maddening force to whose will we are constantly bent?” Likewise, Bakara Wintner asserts that “the negative associations The Moon has come to embody [often] speak to a deficient and malnourished relationship with wildness“. For, as Jessica Dore points out, “in a culture that worships at the altar of knowledge, confusion is generally seen as void of value“. People fear The Moon coming up in a spread as it appears to be the opposite of what they think they need from a Tarot reading: clarity, guidance, answers. But confusion does have value: “when someone who is stuck gets confused, the tight path they have been walking vanishes and they’re forced to forge a new way”.

On the face of it, a lot of the imagery we can see in Moon cards is beautiful and tranquil, but this obscures the full picture, as The Moon so often does. As Thomas of Hermit’s Mirror explains, “The Moon is the guiding light in the darkness that lets you release your grip on reality in order to experience what can’t be understood by the rational mind. But the shift out of reality can be distorting. It reveals other worlds and other possibilities – whether they are real or fantasy is for you to determine. If you need convincing, just look at your lover’s face in moonlight: you’ll often see the hint of someone else. Have you caught your own reflection in moonlight? It can be terrifying to see the hint of someone else there [too]”.

The  tranquillity is also a bit of an illusion, as, symbolically, it’s a super ‘busy’ card. Folks, there is a LOT of symbolism going on here! While in many decks the artist may focus on a handful of elements (or even just hone in tight on the beautiful face of the Moon), in total we have: the moon (obvs), flecks of light (yods), dogs and wolves, towers, paths, crustaceans, and pools – all as possible symbols that can feature on this card. Phew! I tried to work my way through all this rich symbolism in as logical way as possible, but in the end I gave up, and embraced my inner Moon chaos ;-). Enjoy…(?)

Kicking off this exploration of symbolism, in ‘traditional’ Tarot imagery (like the RWS, pictured here), the focal point of The Moon card is often – d’uh – the moon! It’s important to note that while many cards depict the moon as shining brightly, in reality moonlight is not direct. In fact, it’s not even the moon’s own light, but rather, it’s ‘borrowed’, or reflected, from the sun. This distinction is particularly apparent in the RWS where we can see the moon almost super-imposed on top of a drawing of the sun. Whenever something is reflected, it is distorted and more difficult to understand. So it is with The Moon’s central message of a lack of clarity, or uncertainty, or confusion (be this for good or ill). Some have posited that the RWS (as well as other early Tarot decks) seem to depict a literal moon-on-top-of-a-sun – i.e. a solar eclipse – which would still be very in-keeping with this message. After all, what could be more unsettling than night in the middle of the day? Plus an eclipse often reveals as much as it hides – it is the one time we can clearly see the solar flares that are usually invisible to the eye. The Moon is about things shrouded in darkness, yes, but also about seeing things (wonderous, magical things) that would never dare to show themselves in the harsh light of day.

The Cosmic Cycles Tarot captures the thrill of sneaking out into this eclipse-drenched world, where the woods suddenly seem wild and magical, and full of adventure. For exploration is another message of The Moon card, that we can see represented in the yods (divine flames) in the RWS card. These heavenly drops of energy remind us that, even if we do feel unsettled or scared, we will receive blessings if we have the courage to face our fears and continue our journey. In his guide notes for the original RWS Moon card, A.E. Waite wrote of the yods, “the dew of thought falls“. While The Moon card speaks to aspects of irrationality and wildness, the ‘moonlight’ also serves to illuminate our base drives and fears – things that usually lurk in the darkness – and enables us to thoughtfully reflect on them. As Tarot so often tells us, the only way forward is through the darkest parts of ourselves. Unless we embrace them, and truly come to understand them, we cannot grow.

Traditional Moon card imagery often shows a path leading towards and between two tall watch towers. Waite writes that the towers (the same two we see on the Death card, and with a striking similarity to both the two pillars of the High Priestess and those of Justice) “signfy the ramparts of the visible world, and the space between them is the issue into the unknown“. The term ‘ramparts’ implies these towers are defensive structures, erected to protect us from this great, wild unknown – the darkness of our own psyches, as well as all the weirdness and chaotic wonder the world has to offer if we take the time to gaze below the surface of things. The towers, then, are a protective barrier between the invisible and the visible, the rational world and the dim dreamworld of intuition. But the path leads us on, past these defences, deeper into our own shadowed interiors.

In Cabalistic tradition, the two towers are meant to be Jachin and Boaz, the pillars that formed the entrance to Solomon’s Temple (the first temple in Jerusalem), and also call to mind the two pillars of justice: mercy and severity. The pillar of mercy represents forgiveness for our wrongs. The pillar of severity represents the law of necessity – that we must reap what we sow (or, karma if you will!) Both are necessary for justice to be served. So, like much symbolism in Tarot, these two towers relate to finding the middle path (quite literally a middle path in much Moon imagery) between two polarities or opposites (mirrored in the frequent use of black and white to shade in the towers, and the images of the dog and the wolf – more on them later…) The towers can be seen to represent two extremes: undue harshness and hardship, which is destructive, and too much ease and comfort, which can be just as bad (although, note that the moon is ‘waxing on the side of comfort‘ 😊 Thanks, sister Moon) Our path, though, leads through the middle: once again highlighting the importance of balance (I swear to god, pretty much every card in the deck is about balance!)

The Prismatic Tarot does a great job of depicting the path between the two foreboding watch towers, though I also like that the Fyodor Pavlov Tarot has replaced the original man-made structures with two trees: “the Moon pours its light out onto a craggy forest in which we can get lost if we are not careful“. The card shows us fairly explicitly how not to get lost though, by providing us with the handy path. Many cards depict this path as winding its way through rough terrain; to follow it we’ll have to push ourselves up rocky, unforgiving slopes, and pick our way gingerly down steep steppes. Much like life, to stay on course we’ll have to power through the pitfalls and pick ourselves up after minor defeats. And we must be ever mindful not to lose our way in the dark. In the irrational, unknown, and unseen, much is possible, but nothing is certain: “watch your steps as you walk the path of moonlight” (Hermit’s Mirror).

Cra(z)yfish

The Moon reminds us that we need to take the time to explore and engage with these dark, hidden memories and feelings, even if the process makes us feel wild or out of control. The Moon card in a reading may speak to times when “old memories are dredged up like shipwrecks” and when you must reckon with experiences that have shaped who you are without you even noticing.

It’s also worth noting that most crustaceans are able to live on both land and water equally, they’re liminal creatures that freely transit between two worlds. The Moon teaches us that we need to learn to be as comfortable in the dark as we are in the light.

“We may certainly conjecture that the moon is not unjustly regarded as the star of our life. This it is that replenishes the earth; when she approaches it, she fills all the bodies, while when she recedes, she empties them. From this cause it is that shellfish increase with the increase of the moon and that the bloodless creatures especially feel the breath at that time; even the blood of men grows and diminishes with the light of the moon, and leaves and herbage also feel the same influence, since the lunar energy penetrates all things”

Pliny The Elder

Waite described the crustacean in the RWS deck as our deepest primal fears emerging from our subconscious, as nightmares growing from the shadows. But The Moon card doesn’t suggest our fears and nightmares are real, rather it urges us to reflect on the power these fears have over us, particularly when we don’t have full oversight of an issue or situation. The pool itself is often understood to be the water that we can see ‘beyond the veil’ in the High Priestess card. Much like the waters in the High Priestess, this pool reminds us of the importance of working with our subconcious, and of bringing that primal wisdom through to the waking, physical world. But whereas the High Priestess represents channelling our subconscious into the tool of intuition, Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt note that The Moon “serves it up undiluted, pure, raw, and wild”. Writing on the Aeclectric Tarot website, Thirteen agrees, noting that the High Priestess is a kind of filter for our primal intuition, giving us “only the important stuff from The Moon, the [pearls] with none of the sand, the visions that are true instead of the illusions that trick [us]“. It’s not that The Moon is a ‘bad’ card and the High Priestess is a ‘good’ card, it’s rather that, with The Moon, you get EVERYTHING. That is both the gift and the curse of The Moon card. Sometimes we can miss the High Priestess’ guiding hand, but there is also a great lesson in working our way through and out of the waters of our own intuition.

Entre Chien et Loup

The inclusion of both the wolf and the dog imagery together on this card also brings to mind an old French saying, ‘l’heure entre chien et loup‘, from the Latin phrase ‘inter canum et lupum‘ – between dog and wolf. The French linguist Jean Pruvostr explains that, in ancient times, villages were often built in clearings on the edge of forests, to give easy access to both firewood and hunting/gathering. The Latin word foris (which is the root of both ‘forest’ and ‘foreign’ in English) means ‘outside’: “the forest was the outside, the territory of the wolf – the dark, the night, and fear… There is a threat in [inter canum et lupum]. It implies something unsettling – you can’t distinguish what is tame from what is wild. The wolf conveys something frightening and nightmarish. He represents the night, while the dog represents the day“. Indeed, in the French phrase, the saying is a metaphor for twilight – the moment when the sky darkens as the sun sets, and our eyesight struggles to adjust to the dimness, making it hard to differentiate between dogs and wolves, friends and foe.

“Between Dog and Wolf is a phrase used to describe the moment between sunset and dusk, when indistinct shapes suggest both something friendly (the dog) and something savage (the wolf): here everything happens in the twilight zone, and for that reason it is impossible to distinguish one character from another, the real from the fanciful, the dog from the Wolf”

Mark Naumovich Lipovetsky, ‘Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos’

However, the phrase isn’t just used to talk about dusk. It also expresses that boundary between the familiar and the strange, the comfortable and known versus the unknown and dangerous (or between the domestic and the wild). It is an uncertain threshold between wonder and fear. The Moon card can come up to represent a time when one is going through a period of change or uncertainty. In that hour between the dog and the wolf, we cannot know if we’re safe or threatened. We can’t be sure if our eyes deceive us, if we truly know what we think we know.

“…the expression entre chien et loup suggests a lot of other things besides the time of day. The colour grey, for instance, and the hour when night approaches as inexorably as sleep, whether daily or eternal. The hour when street lamps are lit in the city, and which children try to drag out so that they can go on playing, though their eyes, suddenly active, are closing in spite of themselves. The hour in which – and it’s a space rather than a time – every being becomes his own shadow, and thus something other than himself. The hour of metamorphoses, when people half hope, half fear that a dog will become a wolf. The hour that comes down to us from at least as far back as the early Middle Ages, when country people believed that transformation might happen at any moment.”

Jean Genet, trans. Barbara Bray, ‘Prisoner of Love‘

We can see the obvious parallels with the Moon card here; both the scary, unsettling connotations, and the more positive ones. The psychologist and writer Melissa Burkley writes about the phrase entre chien et loup as a metaphor for hypnagogia, the phase where we transition between wakefulness and sleep. While this can be a disturbing transition (think of the times you jerk awake in a blind panic), it’s also been identified as a time of unusual creativity (Thomas Edison and Edgar Allan Poe are among the creatives who have tried to induce hypnagogia to stimulate fresh styles of thinking). Burkley describes this state between dreaming and waking as “a special moment that occurs every day of your life when the veil between your conscious and unconscious mind becomes thinner. A magical moment when you are able to access a bottomless fountain of creative potential.” It’s those crossover moments “when great transformation is possible”.

For me this phrase sums up the meaning of The Moon card perfectly. A time of unsettled strangeness, a time of fear and confusion – but also a rare and precious moment when a completely new path opens up before us, and a new, creative way of living our lives suddenly becomes possible. As Jessica Dore points out in Tarot For Change, confusing times/situations can actually be “perfect openings to call on parts of ourselves that we can’t otherwise access… Knowing can expand what we see as possible, but it can also be like a box we settle into where we unconsciously defend against our own growth. To be in a state of not knowing creates openings, illuminates new pathways, and is thus ripe with potential, even as what we can’t grasp yet may scare us. When defences drop, new edges and footholds appear, and when we’re flailing, we’re a lot less picky about what we grab hold of to stay alive”.

Take A Walk On The Wildside

“Here is the magical forest in fairytales, the wasteland in myths where heroes meet with spirits, oracles, sphinxes, and their own shadow selves”

Thirteen (Aeclectic Tarot)

Thirteen explains that we can do two things when we find ourselves in a Moon card moment – wander through the crazy landscape howling at the moon (e.g. get drunk, wallow in depression, indulge in wild, antisocial behaviour) or we can stick to the path and go through the moonscape purposefully (i.e. take up poetry/painting and transform all the weirdness and uncertainty we’re seeing/feeling into something beautiful). However, sometimes indulging in the call of the wild might not be a bad option. As Meg Jones Wall explains in Finding The Fool, “we have so few opportunities to completely succumb to our wildness, to go feral, to allow instinct to take over – and in giving ourselves permission to explore this untamed part of ourselves, in honouring our impulses and running barefoot through the forest and screaming at the sky, we make fierceness a part of our natural cycle”. They go on to expand: “when we allow ourselves to get lost in our own dreams, when we find beauty in the darkness, there can be such wonder to discover. There’s essential medicine in exploring our own mysteries, in letting ourselves examine the truths we are usually unwilling or afraid to acknowledge – and when we work with The Moon, we give in to those hidden impulses, discover where we end up when we surrender any sense of restraint and dive into our own enchanting, intoxicating wildness”.

I like the way the Holloway Tarot shows us the beauty of the rare night-blooming flowers, which only unfurl their petals under the moon’s soft glow; and the octo-mermaid of Dame Darcy’s Mermaid Tarot coming to the surface of the ocean to dance under the full moon. By embracing the Moon’s energy we can open ourselves up to all sorts of new understandings: “What wisdom would we find if we moved beyond what we’ve been taught and leaned into the information encoded in our bones?”  (Bakara Wintner).

Good God!
What did I dream last night?
I dreamt I was the moon.
I woke and found myself still asleep…

Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight.
Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer.
Made almost of water, which has strictly speaking
No feature, but a kind of counter-light, call it insight…

I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible.
There’s no material as variable as moonlight.
I was climbing, clinging to the underneath of my bones, thinking:
Good God! Who have I been last night?

From ‘Full Moon’ by Alice Oswald

Let’s not forget that though Alice fell down the rabbithole accidentally, she then purposefully went on to explore Wonderland. Sometimes the energy of The Moon card is something that you want to feel as Jen Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt explain: “you might want to dance naked and free in the moonlight. You might want to let your subconscious roam for the night. That is alright too. The Moon would never judge you for that”.

By The Silvery Light

In their book Wild Card, Jen Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt describe the moon as “reliably unconstant”. She waxes and she wanes, she falls and she rises. As the poet John Keats once wrote, “there is a budding morrow in midnight“. Numerologically, The Moon (XVIII) relates to both the Minor Arcana Nines, and, to a lesser extent, the Eights (1+8=9 and 9×2=18). The Nines are usually ‘winding down’ cards – cycles coming to a close – as well as very solitary cards (I’m thinking of the Nine of Wands here bravely making her last stand). The Eights are also about cycles and repetition (just think about the shape of an 8!) The Eights also have to do with expansion, and forward motion, like the path leading us on between the two pillars on The Moon card. When The Moon comes up in a reading, it could be a reminder that our lives are often cyclical, that things resurface and reoccur over time. Or possibly that we are moving back and forth between choices.

Kalyn Anderson notes The Moon is also pretty anti-capitalist. Capitalism worships only the “waxing” part of our own rhythms, it wants to grow and grow and grow and grow… without every stopping, or waning, or saying ‘I am full. Enough’. But nature knows growth cannot be exponential, we need to wax and wane. To embrace the unseeable and unknowable just as much as the physical and the rational.

Moonlight itself is always shifting. The hazy, shimmering quality of the moon’s glow is partly what has led to the moon being seen as a symbol of romance – after all, everyone looks a lot more attractive by moonlight, lol. The ‘romance’ of the moon is something we’ve seen unpacked in countless examples from art and literature, and this also ties in to the uncertainty of the card. In the thrill of the moonlight it’s hard to know if what you’re feeling is lasting and genuine, or if you’re caught up in the moment.

‘I thought you loved me.’
‘No, it was only fun.’
‘When we stood there, closer than all?’
‘Well, the harvest moon
Was shining and queer in your hair, and it turned my head.’
‘That made you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Just the moon and the light it made
Under the tree?’
‘Well, your mouth, too.’
‘Yes, my mouth?’
‘And the quiet there that sang like the drum in the booth.
You shouldn’t have danced like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘So close,
With your head turned up, and the flower in your hair, a rose
That smelt all warm.’
‘I loved you. I thought you knew
I wouldn’t have danced like that with any but you.’
‘I didn’t know, I thought you knew it was fun.’
‘I thought it was love you meant.’
‘Well, it’s done.’
‘Yes, it’s done.

From ‘In The Orchard’ by Muriel Stuart

That is why the next card in the deck, The Sun, depicts the ‘clear light of day’ when you can see if what you experienced the night before is still around and still real. Did the moonlight play a trick on you, or were you right? Meg Jones Ward reminds us that when the moon draws us too deep into fantasy, we must rely on our intuition, our sense of wisdom and truth, to “help us remember who we are and keep us from getting too caught up in what-ifs”.

Both the Out of Hand Tarot and the Tyldwick Tarot feature mirrors prominently, emphasising the theme of reflection. Like a mirror, the moon is a reflector; and in much the same way the imagination distorts because it is reflecting inner experience to the outer mind. Sawyer says about the mirror in her card “is it real or one of those photos where someone juxtaposes themselves next to it for the sake of tricking the eye? Again reminding us that not everything we see is true” (As an aside, can we just take a moment to roll around in all the glorious easter eggs on the OoH Moon card – the dog tattoo and the crayfish mirror handle are just 😍).

Mirror imagery can also indicate an opening from one reality into another (the subconscious). The real moon effects our planet in all sorts of profound yet invisible ways: the tides, our menstrual cycles, our dreams, our moods. The unseen pull of its gravity symbolises the pull our subconscious can have on our words and actions. All those slips of the tongue and dreams we half remember are evidence of its power. So too are our instinctive reactions that seem to come out of nowhere. The Moon is a mysterious card because delving into our subconscious is hard; the language it uses is that of symbols. But when we do have an ‘aha’ moment it usually means we’ve discovered something important.

“The Moon is a place of great depth and takes a long time for us to come to terms with, but it’s always been a room in our house. Before we know the true function of The Moon, it is easy to use it as a storage space wherein we throw everything we don’t want, everything we don’t know how to deal with, everything we’re embarrassed about or fear we cannot show to the world. By the time we consciously enter The Moon, we find it full of these unpacked boxes of shame and secrets. Here we must heed my dude Nietzsche’s warning to ‘be careful, let in casting out your demon you exorcize the best thing in you’…  When we free ourselves from shame and claim our nature, we give other people permission to do the same by the sheer fact of our wild existence…  When we unpack these boxes and share these secrets, we learn to love the powerful medicine [The Moon] offers us. Like the moon itself, seeing the light in this part of ourselves is dependent upon external reflection”

Bakara Wintner, WTF is Tarot

The Comfort of the Moon

“Dark night, sweet night, so warm and yet so fresh,
so scented yet so holy, cover me, cover me!
Let me be no more!  Let me be Thine; let me be
Thou; let me be neither Thou nor I; let there be
love in night and night in love”

Aleister Crowley

I’ve talked a lot about its weirdness and uncertainty, but I also think The Moon can be a very comforting card, in the right spread. To be in the energy of The Moon is to enter a dreamscape, and dreams are absolutely vital to us as a species. Dream-time is necessary for our sanity – not only do we need to sleep, we need to dream. Neuroscientific research out of Berkley University’s Centre for Human Sleep Science suggests that time spent in dream sleep is what heals us, psychologically speaking. As Prof Matthew Walker explains, “REM sleep dreaming appears to take the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes experienced during the day, offering emotional resolution when you awake the next morning”. REM (dream) sleep is the only time our brain is completely devoid of the anxiety-triggering molecule noradrenaline. Our brains also experience a surge of activity in key emotional and memory-related structures when we dream. This means that emotional memory reactivation is occurring in a brain free of a key stress chemical, which allows us to process our upsetting memories in a safer, calmer environment.

I love how comforting and nurturing The Moon card is in the Figuratively Speaking Tarot, with the figure curled up in foetal position inside the moon’s glowing embrace. There’s also a great deal of tenderness and wonder in Penrose’s image for the Tarot of the Crystal World. I really love doing what the person in the Lightseer’s Tarot is doing (drifting down to the bottom of a body of water like looking up at the sky). It captures the way we sink down into the healing waters of sleep.

A few more favourites below. I wish the Spiritual Tarot was more than just a Majors deck, as I’m obsessed with the art style. Obsessed. The Tarot of the Divine depicts the story of Princess Kaguya, who is a daughter of the moon, sent to Earth to remain protected while a celestial war is fought in the heavens. And The Bottanical Deck shows a drawing of a willow tree. Not only do willows traditionally grow by water, they are also used in rituals pertaining to psychic powers, intuition, and imagination.

Addendum: My Personal Moon Story

The Moon card is tied to my only personally uncanny Tarot experience (I’ve had uncanny pulls for others, but this my only personally eerie experience). Very early on in my Tarot journey, I got the Wild Unknown deck (ironic, given the ‘wild unknown’ is a phrase often used to describe the general vibe of The Moon card). I was staying with my sister in the Netherlands for a few days, and she really wanted a reading, but I’d forgotten my cards. So she very kindly offered to buy me a pack. Wild Unknown wasn’t a pack that immediately resonated with me ‘on paper’, but I knew a lot of folks like it, and I didn’t want to burden her with buying me an expensive indie pack off my wish list, so it seemed a good choice. I introduced myself to the deck and I actually liked it more than I thought I would. It picked a lot of prophecy type cards to introduce itself, which I thought was interesting, as most of my other packs at that point had identified as either no BS / clear judgement, or love/support type decks (though, NB, as readers of this blog know, I don’t generally think Tarot can ‘tell the future’ in a meaningful way).

Anyway, I slept with it by my pillow the night it arrived, and had a horrible, vivid nightmare where I was slowly (and graphically) ripped apart by a giant crab – primarily through it tearing open my chest – to the point of my “dream death”. Dying in dreams is certainly not a regular occurrence for me. I woke up at the point of “death” with my heart pounding, feeling very unsettled.

On the surface this seemed like some Bad Vibes, but I also was aware that crabs/lobsters represent the subconscious in the traditional RWS imagery, particularly in The Moon card, so I wondered if it was just me being scared about what Tarot might tell me about my inner self (again, ironically, crustaceans don’t actually feature in The Wild Unknown’s Moon card!)

Anyways, I posted about it on r/Tarot and someone responded, thinking about the crab and associated symbolism, saying “do you have someone in your life who is a cancer, and are they having problems?” Which I completely misread as someone in my life who *has* cancer (capital letters are important, folks 😉), and replied the following: “I mean, I know people who have cancer (sadly I imagine most of us do), but no one in my inner circle. So your suggestion didn’t even occur to me until I read your reply, then I remembered that the crab’s initial attack was v focussed on my chest so I did a thorough palpation in the shower – we’re all good! My stepmother has (possible) long Covid so has been having some investigations on that. Obvs most symptoms (exhaustion) could also be cancer, so I’ll make sure she keeps following up (she’s crap with medical stuff)”.

Sadly, my stepmum went on to be diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer about six weeks after my dream, and died from it five months later. So even though I misinterpreted what the poster suggested, I now wonder if this is what the dream/deck were trying to tell me? Like, I knew on some level she had lung cancer, and this was the deck telling me to get involved with urging her to investigate her illness? (Which I did). So on some level, this was Tarot literally clunking me over the head with The Moon card, trying to get me to take action: you know there is something going on underneath the surface here. Uncover it. Obvs the symbolism of the crab (literally cancer) and its attack on my chest (literally the lungs) is pretty on the nose, but I think the fact my subconscious also chose to communicate via Tarot symbolism is very revealing of how powerful these ancient archetypal images can be.

She said, “The one thing you gotta learn
Is not to be afraid of it”
I said, “No, I like it, I like it, it’s good”
She said, “You like it now
But you’ll learn to love it later”

From ‘Somewhere Down The Crazy River’ by Robbie Robertson

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*also a total shitbag, obvs, but still fairly important to the history and interpretation of Tarot!