By Gary Meister, CTM
Tarot is an excellent tool for meditation to enhance spiritual growth. With Tarot, in our readings, we each have subtly different meanings for the different cards, meanings which work well for ourselves - better than anyone else’s meanings. In Spiritual Tarot it works the same way. We each have our own path and we each see subtly different things in the Major Arcana to help us along that path.
With this series, I’m sharing my journey, in hopes that it might help to shine a little light on yours. I’m using the Rider/Waite/Smith Tarot on this spiritual journey.
The Moon
The illustration on The Moon is quite interesting. The Moon, itself, is shown shining above a dark scene, illustrated in three different aspects, full, half and crescent. A face is shown looking down at the earth below on the half-moon aspect. At the bottom of the picture is a body of water; a crayfish or lobster is crawling out of the water and onto a path on shore. Back a little way are two canine figures, a wolf and a dog. They stand on either side of the path looking up at the moon. The path winds off through the hills, between two gray stone towers and up to a mountain far in the distance.
The figures in the front of the picture symbolize our spiritual evolution by showing a water creature rising up to the wolf and, through another step in evolution, into a dog. It’s interesting to see that this last piece of evolution was brought about by man, as is his own spiritual growth.
The Tower gave us the flash of understanding which started our higher growth process. Then, The Star gave us enough illumination to show us that the light is available. Now, with The Moon, we see more light. Our meditation is beginning to pay off for us and the light becomes brighter. But, it must be remembered that moonlight leaves many shadows. Within these shadows are places where we can easily be misled, deluded.
We are aware, now, of our spiritual nature but, this early in our development, it is very easy to slip back into our old belief pattern that we, our true identity, are mere physical beings. As long as things are going good in our material world, it is relatively easy to accept ourselves as spiritual beings but, when things start to go a little wrong, oops, back to the old beliefs again! We are deluding ourselves at this point and, because of the limited light it’s easy to fall back into old patterns.
Now it’s time to really put our Soul-Growth to the test. If we can get it through our old thought patterns, the shadows in the light, that we are truly spirit-beings, this material stuff just can’t hurt us. We need to keep working toward the light, despite the shadows in our thinking.
When I meditate on The Moon, it reminds me that, even though I am likely to regress in my belief from time to time, I will be able to overcome this. More light is coming! I just have to keep on with my spiritual work and it will come!
That’s what The Moon means to me.
The Moon card is from the Universal Waite Tarot published by U.S. Games Systems, Inc. The Universal Waite Tarot copyrighted by U.S. Games Systems, Inc and is used with permission.