The Moon might seem silent now, but there’s been billions of years of activity that’s made it what it is. 4.5 billion to be more precise.
In Tarot, the Moon is represented by the High Priestess, and like the celestial body she’s associated with, she has a heart of fire and one heck of an outer armour.
She doesn’t tell you unless you ask, but it’s taken her years to attain the wisdom she presently sits with. Her silence is full.
Take a look at the NASA video below depicting the formation of Earth’s closest celestial neighbour.
These days, the Moon might spend most of its time quietly reflecting, but it wasn’t always that way.
Back in 2010, she was a guest on Beyond Worlds and we were fortunate enough to talk with her about her book. You can go to the show page to listen to that interview, or use the radio player below.
Late last month, the Moon, Venus, and Jupiter all got together in the sky for a little party. It was pretty spectacular if you were lucky enough to see it.
And though the Moon is out of the picture for a few days, Venus and Jupiter are moving even closer together.
Tomorrow and Tuesday night they’ll be within 3˚ of each other, close enough that if you put just two fingers up to the sky you could block them out of your sight. Not that you’d want to, they’re something to see.
Through the eyes of the Tarot this meeting would be like the Empress is taking a spin on the Wheel of Fortune. Or maybe she’s meeting Fortuna herself. Two lovely ladies shining above.
Creativity, compassion, new opportunities, and good luck – this could be a really nice couple of days. I hope it is for all.
If you get a chance, look up to see the goddesses for yourself. And if it’s cloudy don’t despair. Whether we see them or not, they’re sending down their magic and having a good time.
A recent study, soon to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research, has found that people who trust their feelings about future events are more likely to correctly predict outcomes for those events than people who have less trust in their feelings.
Researchers Michel Tuan Pham, Leonard Lee, Andrew Stephen, and Joseph M. Katz have called it the Emotional Oracle Effect. They say that our feelings encompass everything we know about the world around us, including things that our logical reasoning might ignore.
Put another way, our feelings might know more than our intellect, primarily because feelings don’t worry about making sense.
Eight different studies were done with participants predicting outcomes in each. They covered topics from politics, to the stock market, to American Idol. In all cases, those people who trusted their feelings were more apt to get the outcome right than those with less trust.
But feelings aren’t enough to help predict outcomes for situations we have no personal experience with.
For instance, when asked to predict future weather conditions for places they knew, participants who trusted their feelings did well. But when they tried to predict the weather for places they had no experience with, they were way off.
There’s nothing psychic in any of the predictions made by the participants in this study, but the results are still pretty interesting.
It looks like we know a lot more than we give ourselves credit for. And feelings shouldn’t be ignored.
This is interesting, a video of the dark side of the moon.
A camera on board a NASA lunar spacecraft has captured images of the moon’s north pole, something we don’t normally see from Earth.
Of course it made me think of Tarot, specifically the High Priestess, who in the Golden Dawn system is astrologically assigned the Moon.
Seeing the lunar dark side is sort of like getting a glimpse behind the Priestess’ veil. Or a look at the secrets behind the pomegranates, the answers to all our questions.
Of course the reality is a lot less mysterious than the metaphor, though it’s still incredible that we have these images.
Apparently the dark side of the moon may be craggier, but it isn’t so different than the light side. And it’s not even always dark.
While visiting SpaceWeather.com, I discovered that NASA scientists may have figured out why so many meteorites from the asteroid Vesta have been showering the Earth.
In Roman myth, Vesta was the virginal keeper of the family, the hearth and the home. She was the goddess of the sacred flame.
She was also the daughter of Saturn and sister to Ceres, Juno, Pluto, Neptune and Jupiter. And within her circle, she was an important player.
Her virgin status was self-imposed as apparently, when her brother Jupiter ascended to the throne she asked only two things of him.
Vesta
The first was that she be able to remain a virgin. And second, she asked to be the one to offer the first oblations in all sacrifices.
I know the Golden Dawn Tarot system assigns the Moon to the High Priestess, but if I were choosing, I might give her Vesta.
Both goddesses are virginal, nurturing, and keepers of the sacred truth.
They’re compassionate, wise, and modest, concerned more with the fire of the spirit than crazy drama, or sexual exploits.
NASA, of course, is not concerned with any of that. They’re just trying to determine why so many pieces of the 2nd biggest asteroid are flying to Earth.
According to the space agency, the Dawn spacecraft which entered Vesta’s orbit last July, has discovered a thirteen mile-high mountain on its surface, two and a half times the height of Mt. Everest.
Some researchers are speculating that the falling meteorites are pieces of Vesta’s landscape that splintered off during a giant collision that first created the mountain.
They’re doing tests right now to see if they can prove it.
But from my perspective, I’m more interested in the symbolic meaning of these meteorites.
Rather than simply space rocks, they might be celestial messages from the High Priestess reminding us to cultivate wisdom and compassion, and a respect for the sacred.
It’s not a very scientific view, but I enjoy thinking about it.
I might even get myself an actual piece of Vesta as a tangible relic of the goddess. At only $34.95, it’s almost a steal.
The video below with Jason Silva is about patterns. The patterns that make up the natural world and the ones we’ve been creating with our technology.
It’s called To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns. And it makes no mention of Tarot or anything related to it. But it got me thinking about what it means to understand a Tarot reading.
It’s all about patterns. The patterns as we find them in the cards, their colours, directions, shapes, suits, numbers.
Are there a lot of Queens in your spread, a lot of blue, or red, or green? How many of the images seem to face in one direction? How many Major cards are there relative to the whole?
Whether you’re looking at a spread, or an individual card, it’s when you see the commonalities and anomalies within the images that you can begin to tell the story.
Just as in life, an individual incident might be very interesting, but it’s not a main theme in a person’s experience until it happens a number of times.
In Tarot, there might be one stand out card that is well worth paying attention to. But it’s how that card, or images in it, relate to the cards around it that tell the bigger story.
Individual symbols are important, and necessary to fully decipher the language of your cards. But understanding Tarot is really like understanding everything else. It’s all about perceiving the patterns.
Archeologists in China’s Shaanxi province have unearthed more than 10,000 engraved tortoise shells at the Zhougong Temple site.
The shells date back to the Western Zhou dynasty (c. 1100 BC-771 BC) and are part of a large excavation that’s been ongoing since 2004.
It’s an amazing discovery. Nearly 2,600 recognizable characters have been identified, telling a story of life during the Shang and Zhou dynasties.
According to People Daily, in late November researchers uncovered one shell that depicts a scene of two people practicing divination together.
The report doesn’t mention how they’re divining, but whether they’re reading sticks, stones, or bones, it’s nice to think of these ancient diviners sitting around doing exactly what my friends and I do with our cards.
The divining pair seems to be an unusual specimen. Most of the shells found record information about ancestor worship, troop movements, and other matters. They also describe dream interpretation.
War, worship, dreams, and predictions. We don’t write on tortoise shells anymore, but it looks like we still write about the same things.
Symbolically, Saturn is about structure, authority, and the organization of our world. It’s the rule-maker, or task-master in astrology, sober and stern.
The Vulture Goddess Nekhbet is associated with this planet, so you can imagine it’s kind of heavy.
The World
In Tarot, Saturn is represented by #21, the World. At first glance, it might seem odd that this dancing girl is connected to such a serious planet.
But with another look, the wreath around her might remind us of the rings of Saturn, as well as the boundaries it’s so famous for enforcing.
And as might have been deduced by the Vulture Goddess reference, Saturn is symbolically connected to death, and to the changing of the old guard.
In mythology, Saturn overthrew his father Uranus, while his son Zeus (or Jupiter) overthrew him.
The World card in Tarot identifies the end of a long cycle as well, and the revolution into something brand new. It’s the card that ends the Major Arcana, and prepares us to become Fools once again.
storms on Saturn
I got to thinking about Saturn after reading reports about the massive storms that have been raging there for over 200 days, well beyond the previous record of 150 days back in 1903.
They’re gigantic storms – eight times the surface area of the Earth. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has caught pictures of them, and from far away they’re beautiful.
But what I’m interested in is the metaphor of storms on Saturn, and what it might mean to the energies associated with that planet here on Earth.
If Saturn represents authority, stability, and structure, storms there might suggest disruption in all those areas.
And looking at the world these days, it kind of makes sense.
Since the storms began there’s been the Arab spring, rioting in Europe, mass demonstrations in Wisconsin, and the birth of the Occupy Wall Street Movement.
Rupert Murdoch and News International was shaken up, Wikileaks and Anonymous broke through cyber blockades, and faith in the nuclear industry was shattered with the devastation at Fukushima.
Not to mention Osama Bin Laden, Muammar Gaddafi, and Steve Jobs, have all passed. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was scrapped, female first-borns can now inherit the crown in Great Britain, and neutrinos might travel faster than the speed of light.
What once seemed like really solid structures are collapsing. It’s kind of like the storms on Saturn are identifying the chaos we’re experiencing in our Saturn energies here on Earth. Space weather synchronicity.
If there is any connection, even metaphorically, I hope the storms calm down soon.
Change is obviously in the air, and on many fronts I support it. But transitioning to new structures is hard for everyone. Saturn doesn’t like to be messed with.
