La Luna/La Lune/The Moon
Medieval astrologers gave the Moon its reputation for fickleness because of its constantly changing appearance as it travels swiftly across the night sky. As the force driving the tides, the Moon is the ruler of the zodiac sign Cancer and the patron of all things water-related. Cancer’s crab, with its ability to crawl in any direction, became a symbol of indecisiveness and mental confusion. As Queen of the Night, the Moon warns of hidden dangers in a shadowy, moonlit landscape. All these associations influenced the tarot Moon card’s interpretations.
Early Italian and French Moon Cards
The oldest Moon card image, and the one that has endured the longest, depicts astrologers/astronomers with their measuring instruments looking up at a lunar eclipse; or in one case, bending over a desk. The cards left and center above were hand painted in the mid-15th century for members of Italy’s ruling class. The image on the right first appeared about 1500, and has been appearing unchanged on Bolognese Moon cards ever since.
c. 1650
TAROT, 1762
As noted in the article on the Three Celestial Lights, illustrations for the Star, Moon, and Sun cards are quite variable, and often gravitate from one card to another. Astronomers pointing up at the sky appear on the Star card of the hand painted d’Este deck. A young woman with a spindle and distaff is shown facing forward on the Sun card of a 15th century Italian deck, on a 16th century French deck, and on all Bolognese decks. But an elderly spinster appears in profile on the Moon cards of the French Vievil deck and its successors in the Rouën-Brussels pattern. She has been associated with Clotho, one of the three Fates who spin, measure, and cut the thread of an individual’s lifetime. But she might be a housewife taking advantage of the moonlight to spin yarn for the next day’s weaving. Or perhaps she’s a witch spinning a magic spell under the full moon. The Vievil is one of the earliest decks to depict a moon facing front with large rays emanating around it, like the Tarot de Marseille Moon cards discussed below.
A few decks have unique Moon cards that appear nowhere else. The Visconti-Sforza Moon card shows the Roman goddess Diana, who roamed the forests hunting with a bow and arrows. She was the protector of women in childbirth and all animals, but she preferred solitude and was associated with chastity. She might be holding an unstrung bow on this card; but it appears to be attached to her gown, so it could be a white girdle, a symbol of chastity.
On the Budapest Moon card, a man seems to be sagging under the burden of holding up the moon. This brings to mind the mythic figure Atlas, who was condemned by Zeus to hold up the celestial globe for eternity.
On the French Tarot de Paris Moon card, a man strumming a harp serenades a naked woman standing on her balcony.
The Tarot and Astrology
Children of the Moon
Until quite recently, the tarot Moon card was interpreted astrologically. In traditional astrology, the moon is cold and wet. The Moon draws things to it with its gravitational pull. As the planetary sphere closest to the earth, the Moon receives energy from the Sun and the five classical planets, allowing this energy to take material form on earth. The Moon is where mental images are stored that eventually give rise to visions and dreams.
In the early 15th century, about the time the tarot deck was designed, astrology filtered down from the ruling class to the emerging middle class in the form of “children of the planets” poems and engravings. Similar to sun sign astrology, one’s personality, physical appearance and occupation were determined by one’s ruling planet. For instance, professional soldiers and people with hot tempers were thought to be children of Mars. Engravings accompanied by a poem describing people performing the occupations assigned to each planet often appeared in almanacs.
The woodcut shown here illustrates the Children of the Moon. As the ruler of the water sign Cancer, the Moon is the patron of all occupations involved with water: sailors, fishers, and millers who depend on water wheels. At the bottom right of the woodcut, a man hauls a fishing net, while another man stands in a shallow boat in the middle ground. Beyond the stream is a scene directly out of a Bagatto tarot card. Just as the Moon travels quickly across the sky, constantly changing as it goes, people whose occupation requires them to travel from place to place are children of the Moon. The Bagatto is doubly a child of the Moon because not only does he travel from town to town, but he cheats people with his card and dice games, and he practices deception with sleight-of-hand tricks.
“Deception” is one of the oldest interpretations of the Moon card because moonlight distorts one’s vision. Traveling by the light of the moon can be scary, with noises emanating from dark shadows, and familiar trees and land forms looming up like monsters. The over-stimulated imagination conjures up danger where none exists. The first recorded interpretation of this card, from a 1750 manuscript, is “Night”. The Moon card has taken on the negative associations of night time: hidden danger, enemies lurking in the shadows, getting lost in an unfamiliar landscape, nightmares, and being deceived because you can’t see clearly.
Tarot de Marseille
The French Tarot de Marseille offers an entirely new image of the Moon card, with unique features like dogs, towers and a crayfish.
In the earliest 17th century Tarot de Marseille decks (designated Type I) the moon faces front. The Type II style that emerged in the early 18th century displays the Moon in profile. For decades, these two styles were concurrent, until Type II prevailed as the standard Tarot de Marseille deck in the mid-18th century.
The red and gold rays emanating from the moon in all Tarot de Marseille cards, as well as the Vievil Moon card discussed above, most likely indicate a solar eclipse, where the moon blocks the sun except for rays escaping around the moon’s edge. A moon card without these rays, like the D’Este and Bolognese decks above, probably illustrates a lunar eclipse where the moon turns red in the reflected sunlight.
Since the Moon draws things toward itself, it should be sucking up the colored droplets and absorbing their vitality. But the dogs seem to be swallowing the droplets, which means they are falling from the sky. This detail is rather ambiguous, with no accepted interpretation.
Astronomy and the Moon Card
One theory asserts that the two towers are the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the northern and southern boundaries of the sun’s yearly path as seen from earth. The sun and moon cannot pass beyond these gates, so the dogs stand guard to keep the sun and moon within bounds. In another interpretation, the black and white dogs (or dog and wolf, representing the tame and wild aspects of the mind) are day and night in their perpetually alternating cycle. In folklore, dusk and dawn are known as the “hour of the wolf”, when you can’t distinguish a dog from a wolf in the dim light. The canines have also been associated with the constellations Canis Major and Canis Minor, Orion’s hunting dogs. But Orion’s story doesn’t relate to either the Moon or the sign of Cancer.
The Moon and the Unconscious
Due to the crayfish’s ability to swim forward while seeming to go backward, and the crab’s ability to walk in any direction, they have become symbols of indecision and confusion. More recently, both these creatures have come to signify the reptilian brain, the limbic system, primal instincts, and the unconscious mind. By extension, the Moon card denotes people who are gripped by irrational fears and delusions, or suffer from nightmares and unexplained anxieties.
At the bottom of the Moon card, we see jagged rocks lining a natural pool. But the crayfish’s home is bound on three sides with straight edges, the barriers we put up to defend against the irrational contents of our unconscious mind. The crayfish attempting to crawl out of the water represents the repressed emotions, diffuse anxieties and irrational fears that inhabit our nightmares and cause psychosomatic symptoms. As soon as these denizens of the subconscious threaten to break through to the surface, our rational mind puts up barriers to defend our carefully constructed ego.
Interpreting the Tarot de Marseille Moon Card
This card depicts a mysterious, moonlit landscape. The terrain, which evokes the subconscious mind, is dangerous, inhabited by wild animals, and dimly illuminated by a pale light that hides more than it reveals. Hunters and witches take advantage of the light to venture out into the forest, but anyone else can be easily led astray when traveling by moonlight. Nothing looks as it does in clear daylight. At night, we can easily misinterpret what we see and be frightened by a rock or tree branch. At the same time, we can mistake a vicious wolf for a friendly dog.
As the ruler of the zodiac sign Cancer, the Moon is associated with home, motherhood, femininity, and pregnancy. Cancer’s watery nature brings in associations with tides, repeating cycles, biorhythms, and repetitive situations.
The deceptive quality of moonlight links this card to alternate realities, dreams, drug trips, the occult, and visions. More positively, the card is a good omen for doing intuitive work, or anything requiring psychic sensitivity, like poetry or visionary art.
The Occult Moon Card
Nineteenth-century French and British occultists saw this card in an entirely negative light. Taking their cues from traditional astrology and Neo-Platonism, they saw the Moon as the gateway to the soul’s embodiment, and its enmeshment in the material world. Interpreting reality by the light of the moon inevitably leads to error and illusion. These occultists were horrified by the possibility that rational, solar consciousness could be hijacked by the lunar reptilian brain, with its irrational fears and primal emotions.
Eliphas Levi, in his 1856 book Transcendental Magic, described an improved and rectified major arcana. His Moon card is nearly identical to the Tarot de Marseille Moon, with the addition of a path sprinkled with blood that meanders from the pool toward the horizon between the two towers. A. E. Waite used Levi’s description when designing the Moon card for his 1909 Rider Waite Smith deck. French occultists associate this card with the Hebrew letter Tzaddi. This aligns the Moon card with Aquarius, in contrast to the British Golden Dawn system that assigns Aquarius to the Star card.
According to French occultist Papus, in his book The Tarot of the Bohemians, the Moon card illustrates the lowest point of spiritual development. Spirit is completely enmeshed in the material world, symbolized by blood falling from the moon. The dog is servile, the wolf is savage, and the crayfish represents all creeping creatures of a lower order. These creatures are perfectly content with their degraded situation. There is nowhere to go from here but upward.
Oswald Wirth, a French occultist who still wields a great deal of influence on European tarot, seems to be repulsed by the Moon and what he believes it stands for. He sees a dangerous, marshy landscape riddled with hidden traps that could suck you in. This primal landscape is inhabited by a lower order of animal that represents our lizard brain, our primal instincts, and our irrational fears. The path toward the horizon has no goal or end point. In the deceptive moonlight, we inevitably lose our mental balance and stray from the path. The dogs bark to keep us where we belong, on the narrow path of conventional thinking. Wirth pits feminine, subjective imagination against masculine, objective reason, and tells us imagination is the cause of all errors in thinking. Just as moonlight distorts how objects look, our imagination distorts mental reality. If we use our imagination, we see things under a false light, and are led to wrong conclusions and fantastic theories.
The British occultists of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn shared the French view that this card represents delusion and mental error; then they added the psychological dimension of personal demons and impulses repressed in the subconscious. According to A. E. Waite, the dog and wolf are the fears that arise when there is only reflected light to guide us on the path leading to an unknown destination. Waite shows the Moon’s face in profile, like the 18th century Tarot de Marseille Type II cards. Two sets of sixteen rays indicate that the life of the imagination is separate from the life of the spirit. Waite tells us the moon is looking down calmly and dispassionately on the drama in the landscape below. The crab wants to crawl out of the water and follow the path to higher consciousness, but it’s situation is hopeless. It will inevitably fall back into the primal waters of the unconscious.
Rather than drops of blood, according to Waite, the drops falling from the Moon are Yods, the first letter of God’s name in Hebrew. The Golden Dawn named this card the “Ruler of Flux and Reflux” and associated it with the Hebrew letter Qoph, aligning it with Pisces.
Occult Divinatory Meanings for the Moon Card
Card interpretations favored by occultists seem to reflect an intense fear of the irrational side of human nature. A sampling includes: Danger, terror, hidden enemies, occult forces; mental instability; the imagination and all its dangers; a mind that is impressionable, whimsical, and deluded by fantasies; someone who is easily deceived by flattery and outward appearances.
The Modern Moon Card
The horrors of modern warfare make it impossible to deny the human capacity for irrational behavior. In the early 20th century, Surrealist and Expressionist artists created alternate realities that gave form to primal emotions. Freud and Jung explored the depths of the subconscious, and their conclusions infiltrated popular culture by mid-century. The second wave of feminism in the 1970s and 1980s became entangled with goddess spirituality and witchcraft. It was taken for granted that women’s special relationship to the moon gave them heightened psychic sensitivity and access to intuitive wisdom. Likewise, neo-shamanism introduced into mainstream culture a greater respect for body wisdom and animal instincts.
Modern interpreters of the Moon card acknowledge that the lunar landscape is a shadowy place where one can fall into delusion, fantasy and denial. Rather than rejecting this aspect of the psyche, they seek to make friends with it. Spiritual seekers are encouraged to cultivate intuition, keep a dream journal, confront repressed memories, explore the archetypes that dwell in the collective unconscious, and use psychotropic plants to access deeper layers of the personal subconscious. The unconscious can be a source of creative inspiration and spiritual insight rather than just a storehouse of repressed urges and disturbing images. Contemporary tarot Moon cards display the full range of interpretations.
A terrifying monster emerges from the deepest part of the sea and wraps a pirate ship in its tentacles. The helpless ship is pulled down to the ocean bottom, the home of bizarre and frightening creatures that never see daylight. The Pirate’s Tarot illustrates is how it feels when the monsters lurking in one’s subconscious mind break through to the surface and create emotional chaos.
In the Alchemical Tarot, Diana Luciferous stands beside the river Styx. Her torch represents the spark of consciousness in the dark underworld of the unconscious. Diana is sometimes conflated with Hecate, since both goddesses are associated with night and the moon, and are accompanied by dogs. In this deck, the Moon embodies the albedo phase of the alchemical process, the last stage before the conjunction of the Sun and Moon and the creation of the philosopher’s stone.
A giant moon illuminates an enchanted landscape in the Spacious Tarot. The petals of night-blooming jasmine unfurl in the moonlight and fill the air with their sweet scent. Magic mushrooms glow with an ethereal light, promising visionary, Alice-in-Wonderland experiences. The landscape is altered; nothing is what it seems to be in daylight. But this isn’t the occultist’s terrifying world of primal instincts and dangerous animals. It’s a gentle invitation to explore the enchanted realm of your own creative inner landscape.
See more cards and art at TarotWheel.net
https://www.tarotwheel.net/history/the%20individual%20trump%20cards/la%20luna.html
Read the Introductory article on the Star, Moon and Sun cards here.
Trumps History Home
Next Page-The Sun
List of Illustrations
Allegory of Inconstancy. Cesare Ripa, Iconology, 1603. From Andrea Vitali & Giordano Berti, editors, Tarocchi: Arte e Magia, Edizioni Le Tarot, 1994.
Ercole d’Este Tarot. Florence/Ferrara mid-15th century. Collection of the Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
Tarocchi Charles VI. c. 1460. Collection of Bibliothèque Nationale Française, Paris.
Tarocco Bolognese Al Mondo. 1725. Facsimile by Marco Benedetti, Rome, 2020. Collection of The British Museum.
Tarot de Jacques Vieville. Paris, mid-17th century. Collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale Française. Facsimile produced by Heron Boechat, Bordeaux, c. 1980.
Tarot Flamand Vandenborre. Brussels, 1762. Restored by Pablo Robledo, Argentina, 2018.
I Tarocchi Visconti Sforza. Milan c.1450. Reproduced by Il Meneghello, Milan, 2002. Collection of the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, Italy.
Budapest Tarot, late 15th century. Recreated by Sullivan Hismans, Tarot Sheet Revival, 2017. Collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.
Tarot de Paris, c. 1650. Facsimile by André Dimanche/Grimaud, 1980. Collection of Bibliothèque Nationale Française, Paris.
Children of the Moon. Albrecht Glockendon. Woodcut, Nuremberg, early 16th century.
Crayfish. Medieval illuminated manuscripts
Tarot de Marseille. Dubesset/Valentin, 1680-1690. Restored by Shell David and Marco Benedetti, 2023. Collection of the British Museum.
Tarot Pierre Madenié, 1709, restored by Yves Reynaud, 2016
Detail of Dubesset Moon card
Detail of Madenié Moon card
Moon. Medieval Manuscript.
Oswald Wirth Tarot, 1887. Collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale Française, Paris.
The Centennial Waite Smith Tarot Deck. London, 1909. U.S. Games System, Inc., Stamford, CT, 2009.
Pirates Tarot. Bepe Vigna. Lo Scarabeo, 2007.
The Alchemical Tarot. Robert Place. Thorsons, 1995.
Spacious Tarot. Carrie Mallon and Anne Ruygt. Self-published. 2020.
Discussion of Moon card symbolism The Moon – Tarot History Forum
Tarot Heritage 