XVIII · The Moon

The Moon is sleep. We are never more honest than in our dreams. What dreams may come is a question we can ask ourselves every day, and every night it's answered. Unfortunately, we too often forget the answers or dismiss them as naive fancy and childish wish fulfillment. If more people heeded their dreams, the world would be a more honest place. What dreams have you had lately? Who are the regulars in your inner world? If you know what your dreams are saying, heed their advice. If you can't remember a single one, consider what's keeping you from your true self.

On the Moon card a dog and a wolf howl at a moon with a sleeping face. A crayfish crawls out of a pool onto a path that runs between two towers and off into the hills. Nothing on this card is quite what it seems. The moon itself shines with light that isn't its own. It's the card of dreams, illusion, and madness, and the word "lunatic" still remembers it.

An amber snail eats a bird dropping, and with it the eggs of Leucochloridium paradoxum. The fluke grows inside the snail into long tubes packed with larvae, and the tubes push up into the snail's eyestalks, swelling them into fat, green-banded sausages that pulse. To a bird, they look like caterpillars wriggling on a leaf. The bird pecks one off, the larvae grow up inside the bird, and their eggs fall to the leaves in its droppings, where another snail is waiting for lunch.

A snail normally hides from light. An infected snail doesn't. It wanders farther than its neighbors, climbs higher, and sits in open, brightly lit places, holding up its pulsing eyes to the sky. It's a lunatic in the old sense, a sleepwalker who has wandered into the light because something else is doing the dreaming.

That's the riddle of this card, and the Gospel has already written it down. "The light of the body is the eye," says Matthew 6:22: "if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." The snail's eyes are full of light, and the light is a worm. The crayfish climbing out of the pool on the Rider-Waite card is the oldest part of us crawling up toward the moon. Here it's a snail, and it isn't crawling up for its own reasons.

Franky loved the real moon. It's bigger than Pluto, and it most likely formed when another body crashed into the young Earth. Its gravity pulls the tides, and some scientists have argued that the rhythm of tide pools helped life move onto land. If so, you owe your legs, in part, to the moon. Whether or not that's true, it's the most hauntingly beautiful thing most of us see on a regular basis. The sun is the father of the solar system, and the moon is the mother of the Earth. But mothers, as the motto says, can be harsh mistresses, and this is the card for what you don't see about yourself.

The 2022 draft paired the Moon with Judgement, and the parasites keep the pairing. Here a worm dressed as a caterpillar drives a snail into the light. In Judgement a caterpillar dressed as an ant is opened by a wasp. Both are lies. Both end in daylight, and in someone else.

When the Moon appears, consider your unconscious, your dreams, and your deceptions, especially the ones you tell yourself. Ask where you've been going lately that you'd normally avoid, and whose idea it was. If you find yourself climbing toward the light in a way that feels thrilling and slightly unlike you, check your eyestalks.