Major Arcana · XVIII
♓︎ Pisces · ק Qoph · Thoth: The Moon
Things are not what they seem. Move carefully through the uncertainty and trust your instincts more than appearances.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Card image: Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite tarot, 1909 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).