The Moon is a card of psychic power. Like the moon of our Earth, the Moon card brings ebbs and flows of watery intuition. The Moon is the card associated with the zodiac sign Pisces, the constellation of two fishes, and this also brings us back to the element of water.

The Moon is not a particularly good card and nor is it a particularly bad card. It can signify changes, dreams, and latent intuition. Like the Star card, it is somewhat vague if you haven’t done a lot of intuitive readings for folks. Even now I struggle to really put my finger on it out of the context of a reading. It is elusive and fleeting, sort of like the experience of intuition itself.

When we look at the card we see that it is full of imagery ripe for interpretation. In the Smith-Waite deck, there is the Moon itself, scowling down on the scene, there are the two towers in the distance (seem familiar?), a dog, a wolf, a body of water, a road, and a crustacean!?

The Moon can be a beautiful dream or a nightmare. Either way, it indicates a state of mind that is very different from that of wakefulness. It is the realm of imagination, poetry, myth, and madness. When we enter this realm, we allow ourselves to see things differently, to feel and express with less inhibition, and to enter our role as the hero/Fool of our own mytho-poetic story.

Look again at the Moon card and you will see that there are no human figures in the card. It is a dreamscape waiting for your entry onto the scene. What will you do? Will you journey down the road with your new doggie friend to the portal between the two towers? Will you attempt to remove the crustacean from its primordial pond? Will you drop to all fours and howl with the wolf at the cranky moon? Is this a pleasant dream or your worst nightmare?

As Rachel Pollack puts it in her book Seventy Eight Degrees of Wisdom, “If, through preparation and simple courage, we accept the wild things brought out by the deepest imagination, then the Moon brings peace, the terrors subside and the imagination leads us back, enriched with its wonders.”

Thus, the moon is a card of agitation, anxiety, hallucination but also of instinct, deepest knowing, and inner peace. These opposing experiences brought together in the half-light of the moon, the mirror of the night.

For the Moon card pendant I wanted to really focus on the moon’s face and simplify the imagery. I wanted the moon to look more benign and less pained than it does in the Smith-Waite deck. I chose a crab instead of a lobster/crayfish because the crab references the zodiac sign of Cancer which is under the rulership of the moon and is also a water sign like Pisces. (I also removed the lobster as an F you to Jordan Peterson. ;P )

The sigil for the reverse of the pendant includes the astrological glyph for the sign of Pisces, two slender crescent moons tied together by a line. I also included a triple moon to indicate the changeable nature of this card’s energy and it connection to cycles, dreams, and the sea of the subconscious.