For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The Moon ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of the Moon portrays a mysterious feminine figure with three faces, crowned by a diadem of the moon in its three phases. Her hair is silvery, and she is clothed in white robes which flow into a pool at her feet. Beside her stands a three-headed dog, while from the depths of the pool a crab attempts to crawl from the water. The sky behind her is dark, lit only by the luminescence of her crown.

The three faces of Hecate, like the three faces of the Moirai, reflect the inevitable changing faces of life.

White and silver, the colours of Hecate's robes and hair, are associated with the moon because they were believed to contain all colours within them in a nascent state.

The crab is a creature which belongs wholly to neither the watery nor the earthy realm, but makes its abode in between. Thus the crab is an image of the dream-world, which arises from the unknown depths but intrudes upon the day-world in the form of powerful images and feelings which cannot be ignored.

Major Arcana ~ The Moon

Here we meet the ancient underworld goddess Hecate, ruler of the moon, magic and enchantment In myth Hecate was sometimes interchangeable with Artemis the moon- goddess, although a much older deity, and was powerful both in the sky and beneath the earth. The child of Zeus and Hera, she incurred her mother’s wrath by stealing a pot of rouge. She fled to earth and hid in the house of a woman who had just been brought to bed with a child. Contact with childbirth rendered her impure, and she was thus taken to the underworld to be washed of her stain. Instead she became one of the underworld rulers, and was called the Invincible Queen, presiding over puri ications and expiations. As a goddess of enchantment, she sent demons to earth who tormented men through their dreams. She was accompanied by Cerberus, the three-headed guardian of the underworld’s gate, who was her animal form and familiar spirit. The places she most frequently haunted were crossroads, tombs and the scenes of crimes, and three-headed images sacred to her were erected at crossroads and worshipped on the eve of the full moon.

Zeus himself honoured Hecate so greatly that he never denied her the ancient power which she had always enjoyed: that of bestowing or withholding from mortals any desired gift. Her companions in the underworld were the three Erinyes or Furies, who punished offenses against nature and represented in a more threatening form the three Moirai or Fates. Thus Hecate is one of the most archaic images in myth, presiding over magic, childbirth, death, the underworld and fate. On an inner level, Hecate, the moon-goddess, is an image of the mysterious watery depths of the unconscious.

We have already encountered this strange and elusive realm in two other cards in the Major Arcana: the High Priestess and the Wheel of Fortune. These three cards are linked in meaning and represent a progression in deepening understanding and experience of the world of the unconscious.

Through Persephone, the High Priestess, the Fool became aware of an intuition of his own personal depths, a secret self which lay beneath ordinary mundane life. Through the Moirai who preside over the Wheel of Fortune, he experienced the power which we call Fate, through sudden changes of fortune that reveal an invisible law or purposeful pattern within. Here, in the card of the Moon, we find in the image of Hecate an experience of the great collective sea of the unconscious from which not only the individual but the whole of life has emerged. Hecate is more than a portrayal of personal depths. She embodies the feminine principle in life itself, and the three faces and three lunar phases reflect her multifaceted power over heaven, earth and underworld. In psychological terms, it is from this oceanic realm of the human imagination that the great myths and religious symbols and works of art are bom over the centuries. It is a chaotic, confusing, unbounded world of which the individual with his personal journey and search for self are only a tiny part.

The meeting with Hecate, the moon-goddess, is a confrontation with a transpersonal world, where individual boundaries dissolve and the sense of direction and ego are lost. It is as though we must wait submerged in the waters of this world while the new potentials arise which will eventually become our future. But the dark waters of the collective unconscious contain both negative and positive, and it is sometimes hard to distinguish its shifting movements from madness and delusion. It can be a frightening, anxiety-provoking world, for living in the realm over which Hecate presides means living without knowledge and clarity. Something has washed over us which cleanses the past and prepares the way for the future, but we must wait as the foetus waits in the womb. The only road to Hecate’s world is the ‘royal road’ of dreams, which like the crab tantalizes us with a glimpse and then slips back into the water again. The card of the Moon is a card of gestation, full of confusion, anxiety and bewilderment.

We have nothing but the dream-world and the Star of Hope to guide us, for this image of the feminine is not a personal one like that of the High Priestess. It is vague and elusive and impersonal, embodying itself as shifting moods and confusion. Hecate is never really graspable, for she is a goddess of magic, and initiates the Fool into a world greater than himself, that primal water out of which all life comes.

On a divinatory level, the card of Hecate, the moon-goddess, augurs a period of confusion, fluctuation and uncertainty. We are in the grip of the unconscious and can do nothing but wait and cling to the elusive images of dreams and the vague sense of hope and faith. Thus the Fool awaits his rebirth in the waters of a greater womb, dimly aware that his journey of personal development is only a small fragment of a vast, unknowable life which spans millennia and which remains eternally fertile yet eternally unformed.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]