The Moon arcanum: history and iconography of the eighteenth trump
The Moon card in the tarot: from the Visconti-Sforza trumps to the Marseille decks of Noblet and Conver, to Court de Gébelin, Lévi and the Waite-Smith deck.
In tarot decks the Moon arcanum, numbered eighteen in the most common sequence, stands between the Star and the Sun, in the group of celestial cards preceding Judgement and the World. Born in fifteenth-century Italy as a card in a game, the Moon trump changed its appearance over the centuries and took on, especially from the late eighteenth century, esoteric meanings. Its iconographic history is a small mirror of the European lunar tradition.
The cards of the Italian courts
Tarot cards were born in the courts of northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century, under the name of «trionfi», or trumps, as cards added to the ordinary pack for a trick-taking game. Among the oldest surviving decks are those painted for the Visconti and Sforza of Milan, partly attributed to Bonifacio Bembo and now divided among various collections, including the Morgan Library in New York, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and the collection of the Colleoni family.
On the Moon card of the Visconti-Sforza deck a female figure appears holding a lunar crescent, in an elegant image free of unsettling elements. In other fifteenth-century Italian decks the Moon is depicted with different figures, including astronomers intent on measuring the sky with a compass, evidence of a link with the scientific and astrological culture of the time. The variants show that no fixed iconography yet existed.
The Moon of the Tarot of Marseille
The image most familiar today took shape in France, in decks of the so-called Marseille type, produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by card-makers such as Jean Noblet, active in Paris around the middle of the seventeenth century, and Nicolas Conver, who in 1760 published in Marseille a deck destined for great success. The Moon appears at the top with a face in profile, while coloured drops seem to rise towards her or fall from the sky.
Beneath the Moon are two dogs, or a dog and a wolf according to some readings, which seem to bark upwards, two towers at the sides of the scene and a pool of water from which a crayfish emerges. Each element has received different interpretations over the centuries. The crayfish recalls the sign of Cancer, domicile of the Moon in classical astrology; the dogs evoke the ancient bond between the Moon and the goddess Hecate, accompanied in myth by nocturnal dogs.
The esoteric reading
The transformation of the tarot into an esoteric tool began in 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, in the eighth volume of Le Monde primitif, claimed that the cards preserved the ancient wisdom of Egypt. The hypothesis, without historical foundation, was enormously successful and was developed by Etteilla and then, in the nineteenth century, by Éliphas Lévi, who linked the arcana to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Moon thus became a symbol of illusion, dreams and hidden dangers.
In 1909 the deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith following the directions of Arthur Edward Waite took up the Marseille iconography with some changes: a path winding between the towers towards the mountains, a dog and a wolf clearly distinguished, and a Moon combining crescent and full disc with a face. This version, very widespread in the English-speaking world, helped establish the reading of the Moon as the card of mystery and of the journey through darkness.
The Moon arcanum spans six centuries of history, from the Milanese courts to the workshops of the Marseille card-makers and the occultist circles of the nineteenth century. In each phase it gathered elements of the lunar tradition, from the astrologers' crescent to the crayfish of Cancer, from Hecate's dogs to the night of dreams, becoming a visual synthesis of all that European culture has imagined about our satellite.