Qoph · XVIII The Moon

Correspondences

Letter

ק Qoph (קוף), “Back of the head”

Value

100

Kind

Single letter (one of the twelve Singles, given to the signs of the zodiac)

Attribution

♓︎ Pisces

Joins

Netzach (7) and Malkuth (10)

Tarot trump

XVIII · Waite: The Moon · Thoth: The Moon · Marseille: La Lune

Golden Dawn title (Book T)

The Ruler of Flux and Reflux; the Child of the Sons of the Mighty

Lévi’s attribution (1855)

XIX Le Soleil

Case’s key word

Organization

Colours

King: Crimson (ultra-violet) · Queen: Buff, flecked silver-white

Gods (777)

Egyptian: Khephra (as the scarab in the trump) · Greek: Poseidon · Roman: Neptune · Hindu: Vishnu (Matsya-avatar, the fish)

Animals

Fish; dolphin; crayfish; beetle; jackal

Plants

Unicellular organisms; opium

Precious stones

Pearl

Perfumes

Ambergris

Magical weapon

The magic mirror

The letter

Qoph, the back of the head (also the eye of a needle, and an ape), is the seat of the old brain: the cerebellum and medulla that run the body while we sleep. Its value is 100. Case gives it the faculty of sleep. The Moon is the card of the body’s own consciousness, the evolutionary path out of the sea.

On the Tree

The 29th path rises from Malkuth to Netzach: the body to the feelings. Its 32 Paths name, the Corporeal Intelligence, says it “forms every body which is formed in all the worlds”. It begins the Philosophus grade.

The Moon in the Waite deck

A path winds from a pool, where a crayfish crawls out of the water, between a dog and a wolf howling at the moon, past two towers, into distant hills. The moon has a sun inside it and a profile face; Yods fall from it like dew. Case’s key word is organization: the slow building of the body through the stages of evolution, which the path between the beasts represents.

The Moon in the Thoth deck

Crowley’s Moon is a night of horror and enchantment: two black towers, two jackal-headed figures of Anubis with two jackals at their feet, a path of blood between them, and the sacred scarab Khephra in the waters below pushing the sun through the underworld, as the sun is carried through the night. Crowley calls this “the threshold of life” and “the gateway of resurrection”: it is the dark night through which the soul must pass to the Sun.

Where this path leads

• נצח Netzach (7)
• מלכות Malkuth (10)

Read further

• The Moon on Wikipediahistory and iconography of the card
• Sepher Yetzirah and the 32 Paths of WisdomW. Wynn Westcott, trans., 1887
• The Kabbalah UnveiledS. L. MacGregor Mathers, from Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata, 1887
• Liber 777 RevisedAleister Crowley, 1909/1955
• The Book of ThothAleister Crowley, 1944
• The Golden DawnIsrael Regardie, ed., 1937–40
• A Garden of PomegranatesIsrael Regardie, 1932
• The Mystical QabalahDion Fortune, 1935
• The Pictorial Key to the TarotA. E. Waite, 1910
• The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the AgesPaul Foster Case, 1947
• A Practical Guide to Qabalistic SymbolismGareth Knight, 1965

Also in the background throughout: Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (1974) and Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), for the Jewish tradition as historians understand it; Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah (1990); Kenneth Grant, Nightside of Eden (1977), for the Qliphoth; Robert Wang, The Qabalistic Tarot (1983).