The Moon

The eighteenth trump is the strangest picture in the deck and it has been strange from the beginning. The French pattern shows two dogs or wolves baying at a moon that has a face, drops falling from the sky, two towers behind, and a crayfish or lobster in a pool in the foreground. Contrary to a common assumption, none of that is a modern invention. The crayfish and the dogs are in the older cards; Pamela Colman Smith rearranged the composition in 1909 but did not create it.

What nobody can supply is a source. There is no medieval commonplace that assembles these particular elements, no obvious allegory, and no text that explains the crayfish. Proposals exist, a lunar eclipse diagram, an astrological illustration, a scene of the dog-days, the moon drawing water from the earth, and none is established. This is one of the few tarot images for which the honest answer is that its origin is not known.

The Golden Dawn assigned it the letter Qoph, the sign Pisces, and the twenty-ninth path from Netzach to Malkuth, which is the lowest and most material of the paths connected to the personal sphere. Qoph is usually read as the back of the head, and the order connected the card with the parts of consciousness that are not available to inspection. That is a good fit for the picture and, like every such fit, it was arrived at long after the picture existed.

Waite's own commentary on the card is unusually murky even by his standards, which may be the most honest response available to a picture nobody has satisfactorily explained in six hundred years.

This card is read for the state in which the querent cannot tell what they are looking at, and the readings split on how alarming that is.

The cautionary reading takes it as deception, illusion, distorted perception, and information that is being withheld or misremembered. On this reading the card's advice is to defer: do not decide anything by moonlight.

The receptive reading takes the same uncertainty as productive. Dreams, intuition, imagination and material rising from below the waterline are all in the card's range, and on this account the querent is not being deceived but is being shown something that will not survive translation into daylight terms. Both readings are old and both are widely taught.

A third reading, more practical, treats the card as anxiety specifically: fear that is real as an experience and unreliable as a description. This is often the most useful of the three, because it lets a reader take the querent's distress seriously without endorsing its content.

What all three share is that the card refuses to resolve. It is one of the few in the deck whose honest reading is that no answer is currently available, and a reader who forces a verdict out of it is usually supplying the verdict themselves.

Waite's reversed meanings run to instability, silence and a deception exposed rather than committed. Readers who do not turn cards read the neighbours, which for this card matters more than for almost any other.

It is also the card most often misused as a warning about other people. Its uncertainty is generally the querent's own, and a reading that turns it into a stranger's bad faith has usually taken the easier of two available answers.