Divinatory meaning
- Upright
- Hidden enemies, danger, calumny, darkness, terror, deception, occult forces, error.
- Reversed
- Instability, inconstancy, silence, lesser degrees of deception and error.
major arcana
18
The Moon
Suit: Trumps Major Arcana
Core interpretation
The Moon lights a road that cannot yet be seen clearly. Instinct, fear and imagination move through its half-light, where the traveller must notice projections without claiming to know everything hidden ahead.
A card carries more than one history. Its place in the tarot pack, Golden Dawn path, Rider–Waite–Smith reading and later variants are kept beside their own sources, since the same name can do different work in different decks.
7 sourced claims: 4 traditional , 3 modern
In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck
The meanings are Waite's own words from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. They belong to one influential school of reading and do not exhaust what the cards have meant in other hands.
A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, Rider–Waite–Smith — Part III, §3, The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings.
The same card in the Thoth deck
The Moon · XVIII · The Ruler of Flux and Reflux; the Child of the Sons of the Mighty
What the card shows
ModernA path passes between towers beneath a waxing moon; dog, wolf, and a creature rising from water embody the natural mind facing an unknown threshold.
A concise paraphrase of Waite's published explanation of the Pamela Colman Smith design, not a universal description of all historical decks.
Divinatory meaning
ModernUpright, Waite associates The Moon with hidden opposition, danger, darkness, fear, deception and error under uncertain conditions. Reversed, the card points to instability or to subtler forms of deception that may be beginning to lose their hold.
Waite himself warns that many fortune-telling allocations are artificial and arbitrary; these are historical Rider–Waite–Smith meanings, not assertions of fact.
Tree of Life association
Hermetic Qabalah
Path 29 · ק Qoph · Netzach to Malkuth
- Letter
- Qoph — Back of the head
- Zodiac
- Pisces
Book T establishes this Tarot-to-letter attribution. The path number and endpoints belong to this tradition's canonical Kircher arrangement.
Sources (2)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Twenty-Two Keys of the Book, pp. 5–7
Golden Dawn correspondences 4 sourced claims
Book T's formal title, Tree or elemental place, astrological attribution, and characteristic reading. This is the system used by the Hermetic Tree.
The Ruler of Flux and Reflux; the Child of the Sons of the Mighty
The formal esoteric title printed in Book T.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Titles of the Symbols, pp. 5–7
ק · Qoph
A Golden Dawn correspondence, not a claim about the historical origin of the card or a universal Jewish letter-to-card system.
Sources (2)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Twenty-Two Keys of the Book, pp. 5–7
Pisces
Book T's attribution carried by the Hebrew letter and therefore by this path.
Sources (2)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — The Twenty-Two Keys of the Book, pp. 5–7
Dissatisfaction, voluntary change, error, falsehood, and deception, highly dependent on surrounding cards.
Paraphrased from Book T's brief meanings; its dignity method reads a card in relation to neighbouring cards rather than as a fixed keyword.
Sources (1)
- Book T , Mathers, c. 1888 (Golden Dawn internal) — Brief Meanings of Twenty-Two Keys, pp. 46–47
History and variants 1 sourced claim
Historical context and places where influential decks or occult systems differ.
One of the twenty-one figured trumps plus the Fool found beside the four ordinary suits in historical tarot packs.
Museum history dates the earliest documentary references to the 1440s–1450s in northern Italy and identifies tarot's original use as a trick-taking game. The occult-Qabalistic reading is later.
Sources (1)
- Before Fortune-Telling: The History and Structure of Tarot Cards , Metropolitan Museum of Art online article, 2016 — paragraphs 1–4
Correspondences 3 sourced correspondences
| Relation | To | First attested |
|---|---|---|
| Tarot trump of | Path 29 · Qoph | 1888 CE |
| Hebrew-letter attribution | Qoph | 1888 CE |
| Astrological attribution | Pisces | 1888 CE |