TEMPLE artefact #002

Rian Hughes does it again! Another beautiful image, the second in our ongoing series, here accompanied by my notes to the artist!

The Moon #18 - Final Version

18. MOON

KEY WORDS – FANTASY, ILLUSION, INTOXICATION, MADNESS, INSPIRATION, WITCHCRAFT

The Moon card is Trump 18 of the Major Arcana.

The Moon stands for dreams and fantasies, erotic reverie, intoxication, lunacy and poetic inspiration.

It can also suggest delusions, nightmares, post-mortem bardo visions, illusions, drug trips, and initiations.

This is the sinister path of The Dark Night of the Soul. This is the path of St. John that skirts madness and delirium but ultimately yields the rewards in understanding signified by the crayfish, scarab, or crustacean that traditionally appears carrying the sun through the seemingly endless illusory night of this image.

The Moon has no light of its own but reflects the Suns light - showing solar Rationality, Self-Knowledge, and Integration back to itself as in a weird mirror of shifting, ambiguous uncertainties.

So, in the Moon we see ourselves reflected in a funhouse mirror, we see our subconscious drives, fantasies and fears presented back to us and although they may assume eerie, fantastic, even frightening forms, by acknowledging them we illuminate them and raise them into the solar light of self-understanding.

The master image is well known – a large lunar disc fills the sky. Two towers or pylons stand before the face of the Moon, representing the gateway between what is material and what is imaginary.

The towers, flanked by jackals, rise from a forbidding wasteland, where, at the bottom of the card, we find a toxic pool with a crayfish or scarab carrying the sun through the depths.

Our Moon has an ecstatic expression – like those ‘60s solarized posters that depicted a low angle shot of a hot girl’s face reduced to eyelashes, two nostrils and pouting luscious-lipped mouth, usually open in a gasp of release.

The features of our Moon suggest orgasm, narcotic delirium, and inspiration all at once.

The top curve or horizon of the moon shows a sliver of silver representing both the shape of the waning moon and also the silver bow of the lunar huntress Diana. Perhaps we can even include some suggestion of a drawn bowstring and upwards pointing arrow, although that might obscure the face on the moon too much.

The three faces of the triple Moon goddess are represented here the waning moon is the Crone, the bow is that of the Maiden, while references to the Mother abound.

To either side of the moon, lined up with the eyes we see the distinctive WAVE PATTERN of REM sleep – recently discovered!

Dripping from its lower curve, the Moon is shedding, or more accurately bleeding, SIXTEEN tear-shaped ‘droplets’ of various sizes. Equating to raw inspiration, these drops are the sweat and moon-milk that nourishes dreamers and fantasists but poisons the minds of madmen and materialists.

Here they are red like menstrual blood with the central mass dripping onto a BABY’S HEAD which partially rises from the source of the red river that snakes through the lower half of the image…

These drops are “yod” shaped in that they resemble the Hebrew letter Yod which represents a nail and is used in the name of God Y(od)H(eh)V(au)H(eh) Yahweh or Jehovah. The drops also signify the 16 specific varieties of “kalas – magically-potent vaginal secretions - as classified by Tantric adepts.

There is speculation of course that the Moon was once a part of Earth before separation (cosmologists hypothesize we may have been struck by Mars or some other planetary body in the early snooker-inspired years of the solar system) and the notion that there can and will come some kind of conceptual reconciliation brings us to the idea of the Qabalistic apocalypse known as the ‘collapse’ or the ‘descent’ of the 32nd Path.

On the Tree of Life structure, the 32nd path connects the lowest material sphere of MALKUTH with the “astral plane” - or imagination as you and I know it - represented by YESOD, the Moon.

In our own real world, this collapse expressed itself in the material world when the twin towers of the WTC were reduced to dust by determined extremists.

When this event occurred, reality and fiction began their slow collapse into one another, exactly as predicted by the occultists a century before. After the fall of the towers, “reality” became more fictional and “fiction” became more “realistic” – think ‘plausible’ superhero movies, Fake News, Deep Fakes, VR, AR, the rise of magical thinking etc. So let’s allude to all of that in no uncertain terms by including drawings of the WTC in this card.

Our towers appear as insubstantial, ghostly versions of the WTC buildings. Phantoms in the Moon’s deceptive light. Smoke pours from the centre of the tower on the left, becoming the smoke of cannabis or opium drifting past the intoxicated face of the Moon.

The tower on the right has a SYRINGE spire.

Two dogs/jackals/werewolves wearing black NEGATIVE Apollo spacesuits stand on plinths which resemble the LUNAR LANDING MODULES left by various US expeditions.

They carry three triangles to represent three triangular musical instruments – the OO, the TIMBRA and the HÜS - created by the influential musician, inventor and eccentric MOONDOG, the original of that name, born in 1916.

The river wends towards us from background, where it emerges from the mouth of the baby whose head we see lifting from the water and flows towards us, widening at the bottom of the card. The shape of the river and the surrounding terrain of grey moon-dusted hills and inlets recalls the Firth of Clyde where I live and where the UK’s Trident nuclear defence capability is housed.

Thus, at the mouth of the river, in place of the usual crayfish we have a TRIDENT SUBMARINE. The conning tower rises out of the red water, but we can see the rest of the sub below the surface in a kind of end elevation view but seen from above.

This water stands for the subconscious, the sleep of dreams, the night-voyage; the crayfish for the ancient inhabitants of our mysterious inner depths. It carries the sun through the airless darkness of Night towards rebirth in the morning. Here the circular solar burst that ripples like a halo around the sub suggests the nuclear fire contained within.

The background, of silvery moon mountains suggests a view of a woman’s legs bent to give birth, with the baby’s head and river emerging from where the birth canal would open out if the mountains were legs.

In this card the greatest and most hideous darkness is that in the moment before the radiant dawn of self-knowledge rises from the pool of reflection!

Xanaduum

8/4 The Moon #18