Parting the Mists

“Face your fears and dive deep!” That’s what this card is telling us – dive deep into our intuition and ourselves. The Moon illuminates our world, but it is an illumination void of color – it makes our familiar world unfamiliar and leaves us to color things with our own intuition and creativity.

However, this is much more than a Moon card. The path of moonlight across the marsh waters speaks volumes to those with an Avalonian inclination. It is a time for reflection and inner journeying to the Isle. Also depicted is an auroch, an extinct kind of wild cattle and ancestor of modern cattle, which were known to stand as tall as elephants. This would have been a beast to be wary of, even for skilled hunters. Indeed, cave walls depict the auroch in a way that suggests respect. So some care needs to be taken – like a lifeline to the water’s silvery surface. Blessings!

Moon on the Water

Meaning: In the image of the Moon on Water, there is no visible pathway for the traveler, and yet its reflective light illuminates the whole landscape. We stand at the edge of the watery marsh, reprinting the primordial emotional state that holds all potential a creative energy with the human psyche, and are drawn to the horizon where Moon meets Earth beyond the barren trees. Beyond the flight of the sacred heron lies the fusion of our ancestral should with the soul of the Earth.

Before us is the primal egg, submerged in the amniotic fluid of the world, waiting for the creative impulse that beings the process of life. The aurochs’ horns represents fertility as well as the horns of the waxing and awning moon. The shape of the horns and head resemble the womb and Fallopian tubes. In Mithraic and Druidic traditions, the bull or ox also had a sacrificial role at midwinter, presenting the coming of new life from the “death” of twitter. The heron is a sacred totem bird of fertility and is also known in Ireland as siothlagh a bhoga, meaning “sheelagh of the boglands,” a euphemism for a promiscuous woman, although in the form of a stork the bird takes over the mysteries or reincarnation, offering powerful insights into the mystery of life itself.

The Moon on Water signifies the first steps beyond earthy awareness across the primal emotional void of creation. She also encompasses the dark-moon aspects of fertility, sexuality, and initiation as well as the irrational fear of the creatures that are associated with the night such as faeries and demons and other hidden or unseen shapes of ancestral memory. 

The Wildwood Tarot by Mark Ryan and John Matthews, art by Will Worthington