(The Moon card was the first card I created for the Gaian Tarot, back in 2001. After I finished it, I wrote this essay, which turned out to be too long for the Gaian Tarot companion book. But it's a pretty juicy article about moon lore, and I think you'll like it. It was first published in Issue 57 of SageWoman as “Our Sister Moon,” Spring 2002.)
La Luna Bella! Who among us does not catch our breath in awe and pleasure at our first sight of the moon in an indigo night sky? We may see her as a new, thin crescent setting in the west just after sunset, or in all her glorious fullness as she rises over eastern mountains, or as a waning thumbnail glimpsed in the early hours before dawn.
For the Moon is constantly changing, and She is utterly faithful in Her changes.
She stirs even the uninitiated. “What a wonderful night for a moondance!” we sing, or “I’m being followed by a moonshadow . . .” We say someone is moonstruck when they behave wildly under a full moon. It's the fault of “that old devil moon,” some may say with a shake of the head. But for those of us who have loved her and studied her ways, she embodies profound mysteries of life, death and regeneration.
In this card, we see a priestess invoking the energies of the full moon, while all around her spiral the eight lunar phases. As the moon waxes, it moves from the seed of the Dark/New Moon (invisible to the eye) to the sprout of the waxing Crescent to the rooted growth of the First Quarter to the budding of the Gibbous Moon. It climaxes in the flowering of the Full, then begins its waning. It cycles through the fruit of the Disseminating Moon to the harvest of the Last Quarter to the compost of the Balsamic Moon, where the seed is planted and nurtured in the darkness. We ride the tides of growth, fullness and release as the cycle begins again.1
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