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
Papus joined the Moon to the eighteenth Hebrew letter, Tzaddi; the Milanese pack in the British Museum titles it La Luna.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsThe SunTrump XIX of the tarot: the sun shining over a child. A. E. Waite read it as material happiness and contentment.
- In Animal symbolismDog symbolismIn the Odyssey the dog is the faithful one: Odysseus's old hound Argos knows him after twenty years away. In the British folklore John Brand collected, a dog howling at night near a sick person foretold a death, and Cherokee storytellers say the Milky Way is the trail of meal a dog spilled as it ran.
See also
Wolf symbolism, 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
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
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