Moon

This post was originally finished December 2018, then expanded in December 2022.

1. Early Moon cards 

The earliest surviving version of this subject is in the so-called "Charles VI" (center below) named for its earliest once-supposed owner, a 14th century king of France, but actually Italian, probably done for the Medici (based on their emblem on the Chariot card) of Florence in around 1460. It shows two astronomers or astrologers (one word sufficed for both then), one with compasses, one of the two instruments allowed in Euclidean geometry, held up to the moon. The other is using the same instrument on a piece of paper, perhaps a star map. Exactly what they are doing is not clear. Above them is what I take to be a crescent moon, where the dark part is actually visible on a clear night. It may be an illustration of the hermetic principle of "as above, so below". In that case they may be casting a horoscope.

A similar motif is seen in several of its early versions of this card. In one probably done in conjunction with a 1483 ducal wedding in Ferrara (above left), it is just one astronomer, with an armillary sphere (a sphere showing the positions of all the stars visible at his latitude) above him. In the Bolognese card, c. 1500 (above right), it is again two, one of them holding the sphere. In the "Rosenwald Sheet," a sheet stuffed in the binding of a book published in 1507 Perugia (near right), it is just a face in a circle, inside two larger circles.

The moon card is the middle card of the three so-called "celestials," the others being the Star and the Sun. As a sphere above the earth, that of the moon should have been next after fire, as opposed to the Sun. On the other hand, it is second in order of brightness, more than a star but less than the sun. That, for card players unschooled in Ptolemaic astronomy, would have been easier to remember. What the three have in common, besides their celestial nature, is their use in measuring time. The moon, with its phases, gives the week and an approximation of the month (assuming 12 of them in a year), while the sun gives the hour, day, quarter (by equinoxes and solstices), and year. This relationship to time is made explicit in the Minchiate version of the card, with its clock face, or sun dial (far right above).  In Petrarch's I Trionfi, the Triumph of Time has the sun as its opening image.

Another motif of the early Moon card is even more mysterious, but probably based on Greco-Roman mythology. From sometime in the late 15th century, there survives a Moon card which has been part of the Visconti-Sforza deck for as long as anyone knows, by an artist in a later style than all but six of the other cards in that deck (center below). Whether it was done for a Lombard commissioner or one from the area controlled by Venice is not clear; the style is closest to that of Franco de' Russi, who spent most of his time in the Veneto; but his whereabouts in the early 1470s are unknown. Likewise the Visconti-Sforza deck itself may be one of various copies made, this one for a Venetian family, because the Lion of St. Mark is featured on the shield of the King of Swords.

The figure on the card (center above) is most likely the moon goddess Diana, who somehow governs the moon while also being a goddess of the hunt and the forests. A somewhat similar image (at right above) is that of a Ferrarese 16th century sheet, where the trees indicate the forest.

In the latter capacity the object held in the center figure's left hand might be a bowstring, which without its bow is just a rope. The bow and arrow is an attribute of Diana. There is a poem by Boccaccio, "Diana's Hunt," in which her virgin devotees in the forest join her in killing various beasts, but then desert her and sacrifice their kill to Venus, which somehow transforms them into handsome bachelors. Such desertion could explain the sad expression on her face, while her holding a detached bowstring might suggest her loss of power. On the other hand, the object might be a bridle, a traditional symbol of Temperance, which a maiden's devotion to Diana might help her to maintain. In that case, however, why the sad face? Is she a devotee of Diana who regrets her oath of virginity?

Given that Diana was, despite her virginity, also the goddess of childbirth, the figure's expression might also be that of sadness for those who lost their lives in that act. An example close to the Sforza, who may have commissioned this card, is their sister Elisabeta, who married at her brother's command at the early age of 13 and later died in childbirth. There is a certain resemblance between her, as thought to be depicted in certain religious paintings, and the maiden who appears here, not only on this card but the Star and Temperance as well, done by the same artist later than the original cards for the deck.

Another association between this card and other tarot-related imagery could be to the virtue of Faith. In representations of that virtue, the communion wafer and cup held aloft would take the place of the moon, and her cross-staff replace the rope or leather strap in her other card. This is especially evident for the Visconti-Sforza image, comparing it to the earlier Visconti Faith card (above left), now at Yale. We should recall that while the previous hand-painted deck for the ruling family of Milan had Hope, Faith, and Charity, they do not appear in the next deck, the PMB, where instead we have the celestials.

There is a painting by Heronymous Bosch (at right) reminiscent of both cards, of Faith and of the Moon, namely that of St. John alone on the island of Patmos, writing his Apocalypse with visions of the demons like the one behind him controlling the show.

2. The "Marseille" style Moon card

The Marseille-style card is first seen in around 1500, in a sheet of uncut cards probably used as part of a book binding, later extracted, and now called the Cary Sheet, for the family that donated it to Yale (at left below). It is either from Milan or eastern France (at left below). The lobster or crayfish is the dominant feature. It is the animal associated with the month governed by the Moon, June 21-July 21, which is when the sun is in Cancer. While Cancer means "crab," in the era of the card this sign was usually represented with a lobster or large crayfish. 

Otherwise, there is a large body of water, two towers, and a path between them. Conspicuous by their absence are the dogs, or dog and wolf, seen on similar-looking cards later. But I seem to see, on the banks of the lake, a pair of crocodiles. One of them even seems to hold something in its jaws. Oddly enough, there also seems to be something in the two claws of the crayfish in the 1760 Conver Tarot of Marseille (right above, and middle detail), as though holding something valuable, which will require a great overcoming of natural fear of the beast, whether crocodile or giant crayfish, to retrieve. It is like the treasure of a dragon. The earliest version with dogs, the Noblet of c.1650 Paris, has only white space between the pincers on each side (top detail); whether something is meant to be there is hard to tell. (For the full Noblet card, see second series of images below, on the left.)

The details on the Cary Sheet image are enough to make one dizzy. Alongside the towers are large plants - or are they obelisks, with a temple in the middle, reinforcing the idea of crocodiles, with the lake typically put in front of temples, or perhaps one of the resevoirs that the Egyptians built? If the Star card is Sothis, announcing the Flood, we are now in the month later known as July, ruled by the Moon and the zodiacal sign of Cancer, a term in Latin ambiguous between crayfish and crab, also a water sign.

But this is in Greek astrology. There was no special connection between either a crayfish or a crab in a lake, pond, or river in Egypt. It was not an Egyptian symbol, nor, that I can find, was it ever thought to be one.

On the other hand there is another creature that is very much appropriate in an Egyptian setting, namely the scarab, which resembled the crab enough that the Greeks, in their syncretic version of Egyptian religiousity, sometimes put the sacred beetle, in Greek scarabeo, as the equivalent of Cancer in the Greco-Egyptian temples they built after conquering the country. In one case. in a circular zodiac they put in a small chapel on the roof of the Temple of Hathor at Denderah, they put a crab-like beetle in the space between Gemini and Leo. Whether this curious hybrid was associated with the sign of Cancer in the place and time of the Cary Sheet is unknown.

In the 17th and 18th centuries the two dogs, or dogs and wolf, finally appear (at left, Noblet, 1650s Paris; middle, Chosson, ca. 1735). Dogs and wolves howling at the moon were as familiar then as now. The gray color suggests a wolf and the red a dog, even though the two animals look very similar.  

With its ominous appearance in the lower part of the card, the lobster/crayfish corresponds somewhat to the devil behind St. John in Bosch's painting (end of previous section). There is a also certain parallel with Durer's depiction of the "woman clothed with the sun" of Rev. 32, who, standing on the moon, has to flee from the great serpent. The Chosson (middle above) is another of those where it is hard to tell if there is something in its claws. There appear to be lines extending upward beyond the end of the claws, two on the left but only one on the right. The yellow color (suggestive of gold?) also goes beyond the claws.

In all of these cards, even that of the Cary Sheet, there is a possible connection to Isis as god of sailors, as we saw in the case of the Star card. On the left below are two priestesses, from Vincenzo Cartari's 16th century Images of the gods of the Ancients. The priestess on the right has a crescent on her head, identifying her with Diana or Luna, while the one on the left holds a ship, with pyramids and obelisks behind. Apuleius had described the Isaiac spring rite of blessing a new ship in his famous Latin novel, The Metamorphoses, Book XI. The moon illuminates the darkness and gives an orientation to the traveler who lacks other landmarks. In later days the goddess was Venus, and then the Virgin Mary.

Another image from Cartari shows Diana with her dogs (2nd above). Since Diana was the goddess of the hunt, dogs were her constant companions. Close by is Hecate, the triple goddess who combined Selene, the moon goddess, Diana, the goddess of the hunt and forests, and Persephone, the goddess of the underworld. An amulet shows some of her attributes (below right). Besides the dogs, we see snakes, in Latin draco, the same word as for dragon. The torch is another of her attributes of relevance to the card, and in some depictions she is shown with rays emanating from her head (below middle). For me it brings to mind a certain statue in New York harbor (below right). Let us say only that true symbols live forever. Hecate, too, was a goddess of liberation (of the spirit), even if she was demonized throughout history.  

Plutarch in his On the Face that Appears in the Moon, a late 1st or early 2nd century Greek text that came to Italy in a couple of manuscripts by around 1425, advanced the hypothesis that what looks like a face on the moon is really the outline of mountains, in the midst of which were great basins. In his hands the moon became the setting for an allegory. After passing through the storms between the earth and the moon and resting at a place he called "The Meads of Hades," souls of the dead that had not been swept back to earth landed in a place called "Hecate's Recess" for further trials. He relates (Loeb translation, pp. 210-211, online):

just as our earth contains gulfs that are deep and extensive, one here pouring in towards us through the Pillars of Heracles and outside the Caspian and the Red Sea with its gulfs, so those features are depths and hollows of the moon. The largest of them is called "Hecatê's Recess," where the souls suffer and exact penalties for whatever they have endured or committed after having already become Spirits; and the two long ones are called "the Gates," for through them pass the souls now to the side of the moon that faces heaven and now back to the side that faces earth. The side of the moon towards heaven is named "Elysian plain," the hither side "House of counter-terrestrial Persephonê."

Persephone is one of the aspects of Hecate. At the end of a certain time souls would pass between mountains through one of two passes, one eventually leading back to earth and the other to the other side of the moon, after which the next stage of the journey would be the Sun. In that sense the two towers would be the "Gates," to see that none went through the wrong gate, and the dogs the guardians of these gates. Even the colors can be fit into this interpretation, one dog colored red for the gate to the side facing the sun and the other gray/silver, for the gate leading back to the side facing the earth, which confines souls to the moon.  Correspondingly, the next card in the sequence is the Sun. In this case the transition is rather like that in the frontispiece of an 18th century book on alchemy, below (going right to left). 

In alchemy the Albedo was a major accomplishment in the work, in many cases portrayed as near the end. It represented the stage corresponding to silver among metals and the Queen among allegorical figures (at left, from John Milius, Anatomy of Alchemy, 1620s). What followed would be gold and the King. 

The Neoplatonic interpretation in terms of the journey of the soul after death does not preclude other interpretations: towers were necessary to monitor and guide ships coming in and out of a harbor, and in that way associated with the tides and so the moon. All the elements of the Cary Sheet image (and many other associations to the Moon) are in fact contained in one German "Children of the Moon" sequence of ca. 1470, part of a set called Wirkungen der Planeten (effects of the planets) viewable on various websites. But there is no sense in such an image of how the moon, and the cards immediately before and after it, contribute to the progress of the soul through the heavens. (It even includes a conjurer as one of the "children.") Plutarch's allegory, which focuses on the t journey to the Moon and  the Sun, fits the bill, as does a similar sequence in alchemy. That is my reason for including them.

Other meanings have been proposed for the dogs. In the Templo Malatesta in Rimini, the insides of which were chosen by Sigismundo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, in the late 15th century, there are two dogs sitting at the feet of his likeness praying to his patron saint St. Sigismund (detail below left; the dogs are at its lower right). According to Andrea Vitali in his iconological essay on the Moon (http://www.letarot.it/page.aspx?id=130#), these dogs are his protectors, one by day and the other by night. That Vitali's interpretation is correct, at least for the Malatesta Temple, can be seen by looking at a "Triumph of Time" from the same milieu, on a wedding chest by the Florentine artist Jacopo Sellaio. On the platform below the figure of Time (holding an hourglass) can be these same two dogs, again facing in opposite directions, just as they are on the card. The only question is whether black and white really apply to the dogs of the Tarot of Marseille, which are invariably red and silver, more appropriate to sun and moon.

Malatesta was a great follower of the Greek scholar, some said a neo-Pagan, Plethon, who is in fact buried in the templo. Malatesta had braved the dangers of the Turkish occupation to dig up his body and put it where it could be appreciated, in a church filled with pagan symbols where Christian saints would normally be seen. Plethon's main gift to Italy had been his edition of the Chaldean Oracles, not all of them by far but enough for humanist scholars to recognize that they constituted a coherent body of sayings, and that more were embedded in the works of the Greek Neoplatonists. Since Hecate was seen as a deity governing the moon, as in Plutarch, and much else, then these "Oracles" may have come into play, because Hecate is the main deity in its system. Below, I have put what we read about dogs in that work between two Marseille versions of the card (Noblet 1650s as restored by Flornoy, and Conver 1760, online in Gallica).

 

The "shamelessness" of the dogs is that they are dogs of illusion, not to be trusted. Only those who in body, the Oracle says, can gaze at them and thereby know the way to the sun as opposed the return to illusion. Such an interpretation is close to that we will see later, starting with Etteilla, for whom the card signified "harmful talk."

Court de Gebelin in his essay on the tarot of 1781 had another interpretation of the dogs. The early Church Father Clement of Alexandria had reported that the Egyptians likened the Tropics to two dogs as gatekeepers or guardians. He says, in his Stromata, (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ante-Nicene_Fathers/Volume_II/CLEMENT_OF_ALEXANDRIA/The_Stromata,_or_Miscellanies/Book_V/Chapter_VII):

And some will have it that by the dogs are meant the tropics, which guard and watch the sun’s passage to the south and north.

That is to say, they keep the sun from straying too far north in the summer - above the Tropic of Cancer - and south in the winter - below the Tropic of Capricorn. Since the moon follows the same course as the sun, the same would apply to the moon. One dog may have kept an eye on the sun, and the other the moon. Then, too, what we see on the card might well be a solar eclipse, when the moon hides the sun. Such events generated fear, in both people and animals.

Gebelin also had an Egyptian interpretation of the drops below the moon; the Greek travel writer Pausanias had reported that what made the Nile rise was the "tears of Isis." Here is Pausanias, Description of Greece 10.32.18, Loeb trans., at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0160:book=10:chapter=32:

I have heard a similar story from a man of Phoenicia, that the Egyptians hold the feast for Isis at a time when they say she is mourning for Osiris. At this time the Nile begins to rise, and it is a saying among many of the natives that what makes the river rise and water their fields is the tears of Isis.

To the Greeks, as Plutarch related in his Isis and Osiris (sect. 39), these "tears" were simply the summer rains in Ethiopia, which caused the Nile flood in Egypt.. The river's rising, as Plutarch related it, was also symbolically the "rising" of Osiris, with Isis as the land (Ibid., sect. 38). People have ridiculed Gebelin on the grounds that the tarot did not exist before 1400; others have continued to see the features he pointed to as evidence of Egyptian origin. However, these features, the dogs and the drops, appeared in the 17th century, when the Greek writers that Gebelin bases himself on were widely known in Europe; so I do not see why they are necessarily invalid. whenever the tarot was invented. 

One unusual version of the card, but not without imitators, is the Vieville of c. 1650 Paris, which shows a woman holding a distaff (Vieville is third from left above, followed by Vandenborn, Flanders 18th century). This design can be traced back to cards in 15th century Italy where, however, the scene is on the Sun card (far left, Charles VI of c. 1460, probably Florence,  followed by ca. 1500, probably Bologna.

Who is she, and why is she on both cards? The answer to the first question is not hard: she is Clotho, one of the three fates, who was depicted with a distaff, making the thread of an individual's soul on earth. An example is in a tapestry on the theme of "The Triumph of Death," one of six illustrating Petrarch's Trionfi. In the myth, Clotho (the spinner) spins the thread of a person's life, Lachesis (the allotter) measures it, and Atropos (the inflexible) cuts it, signifying the person's fated death

In On the face that appears in the orb of the moon, Plutarch says "Clotho in motion on the moon mingles and binds together", while the other two have to do with the earth and the sun (Loeb translation p. 221, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/The_Face_in_the_Moon*/D.html). What she does is bind together spirit-stuff from the sun and soul-stuff from the moon, the combination of which will then enter a body at birth. In another essay, De Genio Socratis, at  591b, he situates Clotho at the sun (see note 391 at the site just given). Hence her association with the Sun card in the earlier decks.

Again, this is not the only possible interpretation. The image was also used in the illustrations of the Bible of Borso d'Este, in1460s Ferrara, to represent the lot of Eve (below, from the online scans of that work), and so of all women, after the expulsion from Paradise: Eve spins and Adam digs, as the tradition had it. Cloth-making then from wool was a major industry in Florence then. And as William Blake later wrote, drawing on that tradition, "When Adam delved, and Eve span, / Who was then the gentleman?"

2. The Esotericists after de Gebelin

For Etteilla, building on de Gebelin, the card corresponding to the Moon is his card 3, which had the upright meaning "Propos" - a generic term meaning proposal, discussion, gossip, news, etc - and reversed, appropriately, Water. It is the upright meaning that is of interest: in the 3rd Cahier he makes it clear that "harmful talk" is what he means (see my blog translating this work). However,  the surrounding cards help determine the card's precise meaning. In his card, the gray/silver animal is clearly a wolf. As one would expect of a wild animal, it is alert, and the reddish one, typical of dogs, appropriately asleep at night. There was a French saying that the time before dawn was "between the dog and the wolf."

Before long, actual Egyptian images came to Paris, both in the form of drawings and the actual objects. Since there was nothing in them corresponding to Etteilla's cards, a pair of enterprising individuals, an actor named Falconnier and an artist named Wegener, did their own, published in 1896. The Moon card does not have much in it recognizably Egyptian except the pyramids, although if the Egyptians had drawn jackals in the way they drew cats, they might have looked like the ones we see. We would expect a scarab at the bottom, as there was one, rather crab-looking, in the Dendera circular zodiac, which had been carried to the Louvre from Egypt, right between Gemini and Leo. It was the Greeks' way of combining Greek teachings with the native Egyptian imagery. But the tarot designers instead seemed to have been looking for something more like what is on the Tarot of Marseille, with an elongated body. So they took the image for Scorpio. Various occultists have associated the Moon card with Scorpio ever since.

The odd letter at the bottom right of the Egyptian-style card is more silliness, an Egyptian letter as imagined by another writer on the tarot, Paul Christian, who was a follower of Eliphas Levi. It is the imagined Egyptian original of 18th Hebrew letter, Tzadi. On no basis whatever he assumed that the Hebrews got their alphabet from an Egyptian one, also of 22 letters. Levi had assigned Tzadi to the card, as the 18th triumph.

Levi's comments on the card are very short. He gives it the 18th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Tzadi, and then adds "The elements the visible world, the reflected light, the material forms, symbolism." Of the particular images he says (part 2, p. 353 of original, p. 369 of translation, both in archive.org; my correction of Waite in brackets)

Hieroglyph, the moon, dew, a crab rising in the water towards land, a dog and wolf barking at the moon and chained to the [arrêté au = stopping at the] base of two towers, a path lost in the horizon and sprinkled with blood.

The occultists followed this slight modification of the card, making the crab head toward land, clearly specifying a wolf. The drops of blood are a nice touch. Normally Levi said something about the card in the chapter of the same number, in Part One or Part Two or both. Each Chapter 18 is about "Potions and Spells," which seems appropriate (for Hecate, at least), but he says nothing about the card.

Paul Christian has a bit more. Assigning to it the Hebrew letter Tsadi, with the numerical value of 90, hee gives it the keyword "Deceptions" and a meaning in each of the three worlds (original p. 126, trans. p. 108 of 1969 ed., both in archive.org):

Tsadi = 90 expresses in the divine world the abysses of the Infinite: in the intellectual world the darkness that cloaks the Spirit when it submits itself to the power of the instincts: in the physical world, deceptions and hidden enemies.

About the towers he says that they "symbolise the false security which does not foresee hidden perils."
As for the dogs (p. 109 of trans.)

The hostile spirits, symbolised by one dog, wait in ambush; the servile spirits, symbolised by the other, conceal their treacheries with base flattery; and the idle spirits, symbolised by the crab, will pass by without the slightest concern for disaster. Observe, listen----and learn to keep your own counsel. 

Rather grim tidings. Etteilla's "harmful talk" has been turned into "deceptions" in three forms: "ambush," "servile," an "treacheries."

Papus in Tarot des Bohemiens in 1889 saw the card as the fall of spirit into matter, represented by the drops, which he imagined as being of blood. The animals are then to hold it there. 

A.E. Waite in 1911 said of his version (https://www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/pkt/pktar18.htm):

The card represents life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit. The dog and wolf are the fears of the natural mind in the presence of that place of exit, when there is only reflected light to guide it.

The last reference is a key to another form of symbolism.The intellectual light is a reflection and beyond it is the unknown mystery which it cannot shew forth. It illuminates our animal nature, types of which are represented below--the dog, the wolf and that which comes up out of the deeps, the nameless and hideous tendency which is lower than the savage beast. It strives to attain manifestation, symbolized by crawling from the abyss of water to the land, but as a rule it sinks back whence it came. The face of the mind directs a calm gaze upon the unrest below; the dew of thought falls; the message is: Peace, be still; and it may be that there shall come a calm upon the animal nature, while the abyss beneath shall cease from giving up a form.

This demonization of the unconscious is all very Christian. Before Etteilla, the card spoke more ambiguously.

Oswald Wirth had a surprisingly different take on the card from his former collaborator Papus. For him, as with Waite, the Moon was an enchantress that represents the power of fantasy and imagination to lead us down false paths and idle dreams and speculation. He finds its meaning captured in what we now call the Anonymous Parisian Tarot of the early 17th century, in which a harpist gazes upon a half-naked woman in the upper window, with a firmly locked door below.

Where truth lies, he says (here very different from Waite), is with the crustacean, which, like his real-life counterpart, "devours everything that is rotten" (1985 trans., p. 138). He keeps the foul swamp from emitting foul odors. If it walks backwards, that is because its domain is the past. It is red to denote the inner fire within, which gives it the energy "to fulfill its mission of making things salubrious." He compares the animal to the Egyptian scarab, "a symbol of moral and spiritual regeneration," which by Wirth's time was confirmed by modern Egyptology, although such symbolism had already been suggested by Horapollo, already known in the 15th century. 

Horapollo's Hieroglyphica was brought to Florence in around 1419 and not only became copied by dozens of travelera and scholars before its publication in Latin translation in 1507, but also engendered countless imitations in Italy and elsewhere for the next three centuries. The fifth century Greek author, writing about the Egyptian symbol of the scarab (I-10, 1950 Boas translation p. 62, in archive.org), says:

when the male wishes to have offspring, he takes some cow-dung and makes a round ball of it, very much in the shape of the world. Rolling it with its hind legs from east to west, he faces the east, so that he gives it the shape of the world, which is borne from east to west. then, burying this ball, it leaves it in the ground for twenty-eight days, during which time the moon traverses the twelve signs of the zodiac. Remaining here, the beetle is brought to birth. And on the twenty-ninth day when it breaks the ball open, it rolls it into the water. For it considers that this day is the conjunction of the moon and the sun, as well as the birth of the world. When it is opened in the water, animals emerge which are beetles.

Horapollo goes on to describe three types of this beetle: one has rays emanating sun-like from its body, thus sacred to the sun, another is two-horned and bull-shaped, thus sacred to the Moon; and the third is one-horned, like an Ibis's beak, and so sacred to Hermes/Thoth. The creature in the zodiacs (an example is at right above) has two "horns" - in the sense of front legs, and ray-like legs on the side, so apparently sacred to the moon. 

In the early Tarot of Marseille of the 17th century (e.g. Noblet, 1650s, far left), these "horns" are merely the creature's front feelers. The same is true of Waite's card. In the later Marseille version of the 18th century (Conver, 1760 near left), the feelers are more substantial, more like horns.  Wirth's card has long feelers that go backwards over its body, and some small ones in front, which could possibly be seen as the harmless equivalent of a longhorn steer's wide horns.

For Wirth, the dogs and towers are  helpful. He partially endorses de Gebelin's analysis of their job: but instead of keeping the sun on course it is only the moon that needs watching. He adds a psychological interpretation, saying that they are to keep our fancies from going to far one way or another. The white dog represents dogma and received opinion, while the black dog, lying on the earth, represents the positivism that refuses to go any further than empirical observation. The pilgrim walks between them, "and they do not bite." The towers give similar warnings: the one on the left warning that curiosity can lead to the loss of salvation, the one on the right warning that succumbing to Hecate's lures can cause one to luse one's reason.

To ignore these warnings is indeed a risk, for "summoned to submit to the fearful trials of initiation, he will go into athe darkness of a thick forest where ghosts will brush past him." Then, climbing a precipice, he will fall, become dirty, purify himself in the water, and wander the arid desert at the bottom of the card. The result is to "give objective form to his thought" via imagination, but still without understanding. "Although Hecate is deceiving we must pass through her school not to be the dupe of her."

For Paul Foster case in Tarot Fundamentals the essence of the card is the emergence of consciousness out of subconsciousness, in a journey of return to the cosmic source. The moon symbolizes reflection and the turning of energy back to its source (Lesson 40, p. 1). Little by little consciousness evolves, first from the mineral and the vegetable, then crawling out of the subconscious like the crustacean, then evolving to the wolf, symbolizing nature, and the dog, bred and trained by man, Art (p. 2). Further down the path are the two giant towers, human structures indicating the limits of ordinary experience. He says they are not really towers but walls, to indicate the vastness of experience and sensation beyond the ordinary limits (p. 3)

Case associates the crayfish with the scorpion because Scorpio is the type of "purpose, determination, and pertinacity" (p. 2) needed to follow the path. There are 32 rays emanating from the Moon, representing "the sum-total of the cosmic forces at work in the human personality" (p. 3). The 18 little yods with specks of red, he says, indicates the combination of solar energy with the vital force in the blood, a force which in the human body is controlled by the subconscious (p. 4). It is also the "white work" of alchemy (p. 4).

The path to be followed goes in a succession of ascents and descents: "we cannot climb all the time" (p. 2); but the descents, too, gradually are less than the ascents. It is the narrow path of many traditions, balanced between "the conditions of nature and such modifications of these conditions as are possible to art" (p. 5). The goal is a return to the source, but with "true Self-recognition, correct perception of the universal I AM, and mental identification with that ONE REALITY" (p. 5).

4. Jungian interpretations

Sallie Nichols, in Jung and Tarot, takes Paul Marteau's 1930 Tarot of Marseille card (at left, very close in design to the Conver) as her exemplar. She says it shows a great aloneness in a vast wasteland shrouded in darkness. The crab represents the hero reduced to the level of a primeval animal, crawling out of the water of the unconscious.The drops seem to be pulling his energy toward the Moon, like a great "devouring mother, sucking up all creative energy from the earth, leaving it desolate and barren" (Nichols 1980, p. 314). it is the "dark night of the soul," as the mystics called it (Ibid.). The "rapacious hounds" (Ibid.) also deflect the hero from purposive action. It can result in lunacy, his succumbing to the spell of the black witch Hecate.

Yet it is part of the Jungian approach to look for ambiguity and differences in perspective. Yelping dogs as representative of instinctual responses can also be heard as pleas for help. At the same time, they can "sniff out" the essence of those who approach them. Here I would add that in the specific context of barking at the moon, we may also think of the interpretation of that image made by Andrea Alciato in the 16th century Emblemata, for which he writes (http://www.mun.ca/alciato/e165.html):

A dog gazes at the moon by night, as if at a mirror. And seeing himself, he believes another dog is in the moon. So he barks; but his ineffectual voice is carried away in vain by the winds, and Diana pursues her course without hearing.

The dogs, or dog and wolf, do not know that the moon is so far away that their barking can have no effect. Also they do not realize that this object is too far away to do them harm. Instinctively we fear that which we do not understand. In that case it may be better to try to understand better before lashing out, while at the same time keeping our distance.

To return to Nichols: the crayfish, with its hard shell, may be offering us something to stand on as we cross the "moat," as she calls it (Ibid.), which at first leaves one "terrified, hypnotized, and immobilized" (p. 318). But "Lady Moon gathers within herself all the discarded memories and forgotten dreams of mankind" (p. 317) to be returned in the morning as "the nourishment that refreshes all life on earth" (p. 317). 

In this regard she finds the card of Manley Hall (at left) less threatening-looking than that of the Marseille. There is a well trodden path, and the two beasts seem more relaxed. The crustacean is not threatening, but simply trying to get on land. The path between wolf and dog suggests the finding of a middle say between instinctual wildness and domesticated adaptation. There is a even a human-appearing figure on the path. The drops, moreover, are clearly in the shape of falling tears, as opposed to the upward direction and pull of most Moon cards. It represents the situation, she decides, once one has overcome one's fear and reached the path.

Yet it is the Marseille version (better with Marteau's dark colors) that provides the numinosity, the sacredness, as well as "hopeless depression" (p. 320). But "terror dissolves in awe. The Moon goddess of the Terrible Night is also the giver of dreams, the revealer of hidden mysteries." She quotes Jung, "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious" (Nichols p. 321; the quotation is from Jung's Collected Works, vol. 13, para. 335, pp. 265-6 in archive.org. She leaves off the next sentence, which ends the paragraph: "The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.")

Once made conscious, Nichols says, the figures brought forth from the unconscious are not just dark, but hold the beginnings of the light. Here Nichols invokes the image of the scarab. She holds it to be a symbol of immortality, whereas, it may be recalled, Wirth considered it to be one of regeneration; he perhaps had seen drawings of them floating next to the mouths of the deceased in tomb paintings. They are probably both right, and we should not discount that symbol's influence on how the crayfish or lobster would have been viewed, based on the scarab in the place of Cancer in the Greco-Egyptian zodiacs at Dendera. I have already given one example, from a temple on the roof; another is on a "long" zodiac in the same complex, at the beginning of the sequence, which starts on the summer solstice, the beginning of the Egyptian year. While that information might not have been available, Horapollo's comments would have been enough.

But let us turn to Jung himself. In Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious (originally 1934, revised  ed. 1954,paragraph 34, p. 17, in Google Books), he refers to the dream of a Protestant theologian:

he stood on a mountain slope and looked down onto a dark lake. He knew  in the dream that something had always prevented him from approaching the lake, and this time he resolved to go to the water. As he approached the shore everything became dark and uncanny, and a gust of wind rushed over the face of the water. He was seized by a panic fear and awoke.

Jung comments that the descent into the depths evokes the healing spirit, the pneuma, expressed as the wind (Ibid., para. 35):

But the breath of the spirit rushing over the dark water is uncanny, like everything whose cause we do not know—since it is not ourselves. It hints at an unseen presence, a numen to which neither human expectations nor the machinations of the will have given life.

Yet (para. 37, p. 18):

We must surely go the way of the waters, which always tend downward, if we are to raise up the treasure, the precious heritage of the father. In the Gnostic hymn to the soul, the son is sent forth by the parents to seek the pearl that fell from his father's crown. It lies at the bottom of a deep well, guarded by a dragon, in the land of the Egyptians--that land of fleshpots and drunkenness with all its spiritual and material riches. The son and heir sets out to fetch the jewel, but forgets himself and his task in the orgies of Egyptian worldliness, until a letter from his father reminds him what his duty is. He then sets out for the water and plunges into the dark depths of the well, where he finds the pearl on the bottom, and in the end offers it to the highest divinity. 

I must interrupt here to quote some of the poem, where it is clear that it is not a well but more like the card, the sea, where the pearl lies with the dragon. It is from the apocryphal work The Acts of Thomas. I do not know if this text was known in 1500, but the story is not much different from many others that were (Mercury and Argus, or Psyche's journey to Hades to retrieve Venus's beauty box, on the way distracting the three-headed guard-dog Cerberus with some food). The main distinctive feature is the hero's forgetting of his task, a touch reminiscent of souls' drinking of the water of Lethe (forgetting) and then experiencing something that reminds them of what they had forgotten, the Platonic anamnesis. Its relevance to the Moon card is of course in relation to the mysterious object in the Conver crayfish's claws. Below right I post a mid-19th century printing of the card, reprinted by Lo Scarabeo in its Anima Antiqua series; it used Conver's woodblocks but better ink.

First, here is the father's admonition to the son, stating also the son's promised reward (http://gnosis.org/library/hymnpearl.htm#wright):

"If thou goest down into Egypt,
and bringest the one pearl,
which is in the midst of the sea
around the loud-breathing serpent,

thou shalt put on thy glittering robe
and thy toga, with which (thou art) contented,

and with thy brother, who is next to us in authority,
thou shalt be heir in our kingdom."

He goes into Egypt, but forgets his task. After getting a reminder letter from above, he finally responds:

I remembered the pearl,
for which I had been sent to Egypt,

and I began to charm him,
the terrible loud breathing serpent.

I hushed him asleep and lulled him into slumber,
for my father's name I named over him,

and the name of our second (in power),
and the of my mother, the queen of the East.

And I snatched away the pearl,

and turned to go back to my father's house.

And their filthy and unclean dress I stripped off,

and left it in their country;

Naturally he will encounter his robe on the way back, but that is getting ahead of ourselves. His method of conquering the serpent is similar to that of Mercury with Argus, the hundred-eyed Giant, whose treasure had been the maiden Io. Zeus, caught by Hera in the act of seducing her, had turned her into a young heifer, but he was forced to give it to Hera, who puts Argus in charge of guarding her.  Zeus delegates Mercury with the task of rescuing her, and after many hours playing on his pipes he manages to put Argus to sleep. Io was a Naiad, i.e. a water nymph, like the Star-lady. If we think of Io as a special part of the soul, close to the source, the two stories have a similar resolution, although of course Mercury is not distracted by all the things of Egypt. When all the eyes close and Mercury cuts off Argus's head, she is free of Argus but not of Hera, who sends a gadfly to torment her. She eventually ends up in Egypt, where she is the founder of kings, and so merged with Isis.

Here is what Jung says about this Hymn, among other things (Jung of previous quote, para. 38):

Mankind looked and waited, and it was a fish - "levatus de profundo" (drawn from the deep [footnote: Augustine, Confessions Lib. XIII, cap. XXI]) - that became the the symbol of the saviour, the bringer of healing.

Christ's symbol was the fish. One could perhaps imagine the crayfish's tail as that of a fish. In Noblet's card, it is so wide that it could be the bottom of a pole, and the crayfish's outstretched arms and upright posture the crucified Christ. However, I doubt if this association would have been made.

 

Jung then quotes from an unknown correspondent who writes that he is continually dreaming of water, either he is taking a bath and the tub is about to overflow, or a water-pipe bursts and his house slides to the edge of a body of water, or the toilet is overflowing, etc. Jung comments (para. 40, same page):

Water is the commonest symbol of the unconscious. The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath  Water is the valley spirit, the water-dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water, a yang embraced in a yin. Psychologically therefore water means spirit that has become unconscious.

This analysis of course relates well to the card, which not only has the water, but also the dragon-like crayfish within. Jung comments about the first dream (para. 40, p. 19):

The dream of the theologian is therefore quite right in telling him that down by the water he could experience the working of the living spirit like a miracle of healing at the pool of Bethesda. The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent.

Jung relates yet another dream by another Protestant theologian, who saw on a mountain a kind of Grail Castle. He followed a road that seemed to lead right to the foot of the mountain. But then he saw "that a chasm separated him from the mountain, a deep, darksome gorge with underworldly water rushing along the bottom," after which he could see the path rising again. "But the prospect looked uninviting, and the dreamer awoke." Jung comments (Ibid.):

The prudent man avoids the danger lurking in these depths, but he also throws away the good which a bold but imprudent venture might bring.

Going down into the depths involves going inside oneself, away from all the information coming to the senses and the sense-organs themselves, away from the intellect that built the towers, away from the instinctual responses of the dogs, to the sympathetic nervous system, which (para. 41, pp. 19-20)

maintains the balance of life and, through the mysterious paths of sympathetic excitation, not only gives us the knowledge of the innermost life of other beings but also has an inner effect on them.

It is the experience of life beyond the shadow, that is to say the disowned parts of oneself,. The shadow is merely a door, and inside (para. 45, in archive.org, omitted from Google Books):

It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension, the realm of the sympathetic nervous system, where the soul of everything begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me. 

If we didn't hear him right the first time, he has repeated himself. The unconscious is by nature collective, with the unconscious of one being affecting all the others, in sympathetic connection. It is like the "astral fluid" of Papus, but one produced by all that is and has been (and will be?), not formless, and changeable accordingly.

Finally Jung returns to the treasure (para. 51, p. 24 in Google Books): 

Our concern with the unconscious has become a vital question for us— a question of spiritual being or non-being. All those who have had an experience like that mentioned in the dream know that the treasure lies in the depths of the water and will try to salvage it. As they must never forget who they are, they must on no account imperil their consciousness. They will keep their standpoint firmly anchored to the earth, and will thus— to preserve the metaphor— become fishers who catch with hook and net what swims in the water.

In other words, it is not a matter of surrendering the ego, but of using it to "hook" the unconscious. But is the crayfish really a fish, even one symbolizing the crucified Christ?  I am not persuaded. For the alchemists, the beast in the depths was usually a dragon, spewing sulphurous fumes. This lobster or crayfish is of great size, as though it could do some damage, like the whale that ate Jonah. If we "keep our standpoint firmly anchored on the earth," how do we cross the abyss, the lake, the bay? 

Nichols suggests making friends with it. Will it then give up its treasure of its own accord? In the Noblet, there is a yellow patch between the crayfish's two arms, as though a kind of sandbar one could kneel on while receiving the pearl. Its instinct is to protect the pearl, and its cerebral system is ruled by instinct. What then? Jung speaks of hooks and nets. But against the numinous, are such weapons effective? Perhaps it is not that numinous, compared to what it is guarding.  We can also try to feel the crayfish's own energy and with it the lunar energy that it feels, so as to navigate successfully the ebb and flow of the tides. Perhaps it will have pity on us..

There is also Mercury's method with Argus, putting it to sleep. Case's method of giving the subconscious suggestions from self-consciousness is perhaps of that form, hypnotizing it. Likewise, Jungians can perhaps train themselves to have Jungian dreams. But if the crayfish is in the unconscious, sleep is its element - that is to say, it knows how to evade our hook, so that we bring up junk, even junk that we ourselves have thrown there. 

Perhaps it is a matter of patience and discrimination. Jung looks at his dreams and finds that they do sometimes yield their treasures, in a healing way. In a letter to his friend Father Victor White, writing in English on Dec. 18, 1946,  a month after his second heart attack:

Yesterday I had a marvelous dream. One bluish diamond, like a star high in heaven, reflected in a quiet round pool. Heaven above, heaven below. The imago dei in the darkness of the earth, this is myself. The dream meant a great consolation. I am no more a black and endless sea of misery and suffering but a certain amount thereof contained in a sacred vessel. I am very weak. The situation dubious. Death does not seem imminent although an embolism can occur anytime again. I confess I am afraid of a long drawn out suffering. It seems to me as if I am ready to die, although as it looks to me some powerful thoughts are still flickering like lightnings in a summer night. Yet they are not mine, they belong to God, as everything else which bears mentioning. (Letters, vol. 2, p. 450, in archive.org.)

The star of the Star card is now reflected in the pool of the Moon card. Jung of course wrote some of his greatest works after he recovered.

Since the Grail is one form of the pearl, we might recall also what form the Grail takes in von Eschenbach's version of the story (c. 1300), that of a stone that fell from heaven, with healing powers for those who approach it in the right way. In his first encounter with it, Parzival is simply quiet, as he has been taught to be. Two things were needed, if he was to succeed: first, a humbling, so that he could listen to the Hermit in the forest instead of the estate-owning noble who had taught the way of silence. The hermit tells Parzival that he should have asked the Fisher King, "What ails thee?" - an exercise of the "sympathetic nervous system," in one sense. For healing, one must know the sickness, as even Oedipus knew. 

Some sicknesses are themselves a product of inflation. How are they to be healed, if the one who is sick does not acknowledge the sickness? We could also tell ourselves that there never was a pearl, that what we seek has really been on top of the mountain all along, and that any suggestion otherwise is simply an error in the design of the card. In that sense, Marteau's version would be even more erroneous than Conver's of two centuries earlier.