Misfortune Teller: The Moon

"The Moon"

Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot

US Games Systems, Inc.

"There's something rotten in Denmark." That sentence from Shakespeare should be going your mind whenever you draw this major arcana card. 

I'm not going to say there's nothing good about this card, but I'll say there's very little to like when you turn this one over, folks, and the watchword for it is BEWARE. Nothing here is as it seems.

Some of the standard meanings for this card for me include:

• Deception and self-deception (including "wishful thinking")
• Confusion
• Bewilderment and/or illusion
• Uncertainty and doubt
• "Spin" of any kind
• CAVEAT EMPTOR [Let the buyer beware!]

Some of us are good at lying to others. While I'm not one of those--I truly SUCK at falsehoods!--I'll bet I'm as good as anyone else in lying to myself. That's where we as human beings truly excel. When the Moon comes up, it's imperative to take a hard, honest look at a situation and start asking questions.Whatever the Moon's light hits should be called into question. 

The Moon can often alert us to a potentially dangerous situation. You know exactly what I mean. You're in a new relationship and you're on your best behavior and your date starts going off on his/her ex. You do your best to be polite and listen, but as you do so you hear some things that make you want to run in the other direction. Your gut is agreeing, and you find yourself making excuses why you can't go out again. Or you go in to sign what was supposed to be a sweet job contract, only the salary isn't as high as they said it would be and the percentage of time you will be traveling is much higher than what you discussed. 

I had a boss who epitomizes the Moon for me, a real scumbag whose didn't care what anyone's agenda was except his own. He asked me to lie for him to customers, which I hated. He held me to a standard that was totally unreachable, but he didn't tell me what that was, either. When you had a conversation with him, you had to be careful because he was an excellent wordsmith; try to hold him to a promise and inevitably he would say, "Well, that's not exactly what we discussed." When I transferred out of his department after a year or so, he continued to expect me to perform duties that weren't a part of my job description anymore. It took my new boss to instruct him to re-assign those duties to one of his own people. I think you get the idea. 

The Moon represents the entire idea of spinning any event or story to show what you wanted it to rather than the actual facts. We used to joke in the software industry that when problems with the software were reported--"bugs"--they were actually "unintended features". Any euphemism falls into this category, those words we use to soften the blow. Ever notice how the term "problem" has disappeared in favor of the term "issue"? I HATE that word because it's spinning something to be better than it is.

If a situation is confusing, the Moon will often appear. At that point, take everything that you see or hear with a grain of salt. It might not be what's really going on. You know sometimes how you hear noises at night and they sound like someone may be in your home when there's no one there? That's one of the few good points of the Moon: When something looks better than it was at first glance. But the opposite could just as equally be true when you "ding" your car door and brush it off, only to realize that it's going to need some body work when you look at it in the light of day the next morning.

One other example: When this card comes up in love, there is a lot that you don't know about that person you're with, OR you've decided to settle for this person and not see their flaws. Either way, it's a problem. What about that guy you met online who neglected to mention that he's in prison, married, or in serious financial difficulty?

With this card, nothing is as it seems. So blindly rush ahead at your own peril. Make sure that you're telling any client this as well if you're reading for others. You might not know exactly what's wrong, but there is definitely something off. This one may be easier for you to tell people about, simply because you can say, "Something in this situation doesn't feel right to me."

The Moon can also represent Pisces or Neptune-ruled people. It won't surprise you to know that Neptune is known as "The Great Deceiver".