The Moon
Trump XVIII of the tarot: the moon above two towers, with a dog and a wolf howling and a crayfish crawling from the water. A. E. Waite read it as hidden enemies and deception.
Meaning
The card shows the moon shedding drops of dew, two towers with a path winding between them, a dog and a wolf baying, and a crayfish moving from the water towards the land. Waite read it as "life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit".
Waite's meanings
Waite gave the Moon "hidden enemies, danger, calumny, darkness, terror, deception, occult forces, error"; reversed, "instability, inconstancy, silence, lesser degrees of deception and error".
In older decks
A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card La Luna. Papus joined it to the eighteenth Hebrew letter, Tzaddi.
See also
The Sun, The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
Last reviewed September 27, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research