Observations placeholder
Crowley - 18 The Moon
Identifier
010353
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Completely different from the other tarot cards for the Moon. He also adds a symbolism entirely his own. It matters little whether it is right or wrong because right or wrong are meaningless in this context, but the symbolism and meaning are entirely Crowley's.
"The Eighteenth Trump is attributed to the letter Qoph, which represents Pisces in the Zodiac. It is called the Moon. Pisces is the last of the Signs; it represents the last stage of winter. It might be called the Gateway of Resurrection (the letter Qoph means the back of the head, and is connected with the potencies of the cerebellum). In the system of the old Aeon, the resurrection of the Sun was not only from winter, but from night; and this card represents midnight.
“There is a budding morrow in midnight”, wrote Keats. For this reason there appears at the bottom of the card, underneath the water which is tinged with graphs of abomination, the sacred Beetle, the Egyptian Khephra, bearing in his mandibles the Solar Disk. It is this Beetle that bears the Sun in his Silence through the darkness of Night and the bitterness of Winter.
Above the surface of the water is a sinister and forbidding landscape. We see a path or stream, serum tinged with blood, which flows from a gap between two barren mountains; nine drops of impure blood, drop-shaped like Yods, fall upon it from the Moon
Crowley associates this card with rebirth - not birth but rebirth. Practically all the older cards simply show the symbolism of the Moon as the source of souls and birth. Crowley is different, and tries to link the card to the spiritual path with jackals - the midnight hour, the dark night of the soul!!
"This is the threshold of life; this is the threshold of death. All is doubtful, all is mysterious, all is intoxicating. Not the benign, solar intoxication of Dionysus, but the dreadful madness of pernicious drugs; this is a drunkenness of sense, after the mind has been abolished by the venom of this Moon. This is that which is written of Abraham in the Book of the Beginning: “An horror of great darkness came upon him.” One is reminded of the mental echo of subconscious realization, of that supreme iniquity which mystics have constantly celebrated in their accounts of the Dark Night of the Soul. But the best men, the true men, do not consider the matter in such terms at all. Whatever horrors may afflict the soul, whatever abominations may excite the loathing of the heart, whatever terrors may assail the mind, the answer is the same at every stage: “How splendid is the Adventure!"
A description of the experience
The source of the experience
Tarot, theConcepts, symbols and science items
Symbols
BloodEarth
Four seasons and the hours
MOON
Moon
New moon or quarter moon
Phases of the moon
Red and Blue
Resurrection
Rivers and streams
Sun and Moon
Twin pillars
Water