Moon Qoph

Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 20 May 2002, and now archived in the Forum Library.

mehrdad	20 May 2002
I am so fascinated by the card XVIII, the moon card. The darkly illuminating moon, the emerging crayfish from the polluted water, the shadowy path between the two beasts, the mystifying structures in the background, and the raining on the path, they are all so intriguing to me. This scenery moves me to a gloomy night on a bare beach when once I felt as though in the threshold of my life. The moon’s light was gloomier than any darkness, and I could hear the weird howling of some unseen dogs and the eerie moaning of lonely cats wounding the silent night. The moon appeared as if was sinking helplessly into the deep sea and every where that I looked there was nothing but stillness of dark echoes This landscape in the aura of the moon suppressed my senses and I went beyond the boundaries of time and space within myself, and I sensed that the whole universe was nothing but a production of my imagination. As I am gazing at this card, it seems to me that the waning moon is in distress, in a deep thought, or sleep. This moon could be all that is I, and who is trapped inside of what is called body. The crayfish looks as if it is the terrifying consciousness that is intoxicated by the contaminated irrigate of its existence. And the beasts possibly representing the duality of the psych, dreadfully howling toward the moon, perhaps to stir her up, or they are just awed by the dimness of the moon in the twilight of the night sky. How about the murky castle like structures standing opposite one another in the background, what are they symbolizing. Are these isolated marking of structural sanity within these entire insane cryptograms representing the fragmented self? Do these buildings are what has left from the destruction of once a well-ordered mentality? Finally, how about the winding road, which is extending itself far into the horizon and toward the perpetuation of the infinite nowhere, is this road just the memory of the non-ending cycle of traveling lost souls? Is this road the only open path left for the crayfish to go free? I have been wondering about this card since I first saw it over six months ago and still anytime I look at it, I become spellbound by its panorama. What a beautiful card!

MystiqueMoonlight	21 May 2002
er which deck is this card from?

Umbrae	21 May 2002
Waning?

Marion	21 May 2002
Quote: Originally posted by Umbrae Waning? A waning moon is in the phase between full and new. That is, it appears to get smaller every night. That is an impressive take on that card. Very intuitive, you have a poetic soul.

Zhritza	21 May 2002
Welcome back, mehrdad! I missed you. :)

Umbrae	21 May 2002
My point...On Tarot cards, the moon is waxing. Becoming full. It is one of the reasons that the interpretations suggest that illusions are of a short term.

Mermaid	21 May 2002
Depends which hemisphere you're in, Umbrae! In the northern, the phases go waxing to waning: )O( But down here they go (O)! I guess my point is that it's important to know where the designer of your deck lived before interpreting the moon on their cards! :D

mehrdad	21 May 2002
MystiqueMoonlight The cards that I have seen so far are all standards, like Marseilles deck, golden dawn, the Rider-Waite deck, and of course the Crowley Tarot card. They all have the same scenery, that is why I did not see any need to mention the deck name. However there are some small differences with symbolism used to tell the same story. For example, the Yods or foliages raining down on the path, in Rider-Waite the yods number is fifteen, which is probably referring to the card number 15, the Devil. In the golden dawn card, the number of foliages are four, perhaps the four corner of world. Crowley uses nine, a reference to the cycle of menstruation or the nine month of pregnancy. In Crowley moon card, the stream is the serum tinged with blood which I imagine results from the path of childbirth In Crowley card, the crayfish changes to a scarab beetle. The two beasts in the Waiter card changes to jackal god, the two gods that stands upon the threshold between this word and the next. And in Crowley moon card, the background towers are the two poles that a soul must pass through into consciousness.

MystiqueMoonlight	21 May 2002
Thanks for that Mehrdad.

MeeWah	21 May 2002
Mehrdad: I agree with Marion. Your descriptions evoke the dawn of mankind; of life emerging from the sea & gradually evolving into different life forms. It is a favorite card, one that triggers the inner senses. I like both the Smith-Waite & the Ancient Egyptian versions of The Moon. Umbrae: Good point about the transitory, illusory & elusive qualities. Mermaid: That has not occurred to me. Would make for an interesting examination as the seasons likewise flip-flop depending on the hemisphere.

mehrdad	21 May 2002
Umbrae as Marion mentioned the waning moon is a phase that moon goes through. According to what I have read and seen, at the end of each month the moon changes to crescent in the East. then for three nights sky is without a moon and after these three moonless nights, the 'new' crescent moon appears again in the west. in another word, the moon dies in the east, and remains three days underworld, before it is again resurrected in the west, new.

mehrdad	21 May 2002
Dear Qolus Thank you for your kind words, I appreciate it very much. The fact is that even though I do not post as often as I like to but I always follow other peoples' posts in this forum, especially yours that are very interesting to me. I am studying to get an Oracle DBA certification, which might help me to get a Job, and at the same time have to take care of my old and ill mother, so unfortunately I do not have enough time to do what I really want to do, which is research and exchange of information with friends.

mehrdad	21 May 2002
Dear MeeWah I think you hit what I am looking for in tarot cards with that ‘triggers the inner senses’ statement. In Tarots I am searching for much more than a divinatory tool. For me Tarot and study about Tarot is a journey into unknown territory of my unconscious word (this is probably because of my nature and my experiences in life).

slinky_jo	22 May 2002
mehrdad - I thought that was a beautiful desciption - I feel the same way about the Star card as you do about the Moon. Thanks for sharing!

Umbrae	22 May 2002
Indeed Merdad, you are correct. The moon wanes, and leaves us for three days, before reappearing…refreshed from her stay, waxing. She governs her hours, She lets mysteries bleed into shadows and leaves us to wonder whether they originated from other worlds, or our own imaginations. The tarot displays her journey waxing, moving from the underworld toward full beauty…Mysteries being more illuminated, our souls stirred.

Zhritza	22 May 2002
Quote: Originally posted by mehrdad For me Tarot and study about Tarot is a journey into unknown territory of my unconscious word (this is probably because of my nature and my experiences in life). At this point tarot's main function for me is as a brain stimulant, both to increase awareness of my own subconscious and to exercise the more creative aspects of my mind, because I'm a vastly concrete person and I need more abstract, basically. It's great that there are so many of us here using it this way, sometimes in tandem with its divinatory use. mehrdad, your inclusion of the Moon's kabbalistic corresponding letter has reminded me that I have a question about it, and you may be the one to answer it. Like most people raised with Judaism, I took Hebrew school for a few years as a child in preparation for my bat mitzvah (this is the feminine of "bar mitzvah," it means "daughter of the commandments" rather than "son"). When we learned the 18th letter of the alphabet, we were taught that it was merely a second K (the first being Kaf or Kav, the 1Oth letter), just as there are two T's, two V's, and two silent letters in Hebrew. The pronunciation of this letter's name in tarot Kabbalah references is spelled "Qoph" (we pronounce it "Koof"). I know that Arabic has a consonant that is rendered "Q" in transliteration, and that this letter has a different sound than the Arabic "K;" the "Q" is softer. Does the spelling of "Koof" as "Qoph" mean that this letter originally (or maybe at some middle period in the history of Hebrew) had a different pronunciation? If so, how do we know that, considering that Hebrew only became a spoken language when Jews began settling Palestine in the 1920s and '30s and decided to make it the national language?

slinky_jo	22 May 2002
Hey - another Kiwi on here perhaps?! Yes, the moon down here waxes from ( to full O and wanes to ) ( O ) Like a big giant boobie in the sky :D

mehrdad	23 May 2002
Qolus Vow, this is a very difficult question. My understanding is that in modern Jewish community, the question that you asked is an unresolved issue. However, I believe your suspicion that there has to be a difference between the pronunciation of K and Q is justified. At the time that early man started to write, the writing materials were very expensive, so people had this tendency to write in abbreviation. For example, in English today, people write Central Intelligent Agency as CIA. This is of course an acronym and it is well known around the word, but how about a thousands year from today. Can people extract the meaning or how it was pronounced by just looking at this short form of the word CIA? I think that in the modern Jewish language, all the 22 letters of Hebrew are considered to be consonant (silent) so they have invented the system of points to create vowels (by placing points over or below a letter to create different sounds). But if we consider them as such then anyone can interpret the words in any way they want to and this is not a trustworthy process. It is obvious that that Greeks have borrowed their alphabet from the Hebrews. For example, “aleph”, the first letter of Hebrew is what the Greeks called “alpha” or the second letter “beth” in Hebrew is what Greeks called “beta” and so on. In Greek language “alpha” is a vowel so it is only logical to believe that its counterpart, “aleph” in Hebrew should also be a vowel and not a consonants as some believe to be. Another example that might help me to make my point is the repeated sounds in Hebrew and how today Jews pronounce them. They say that a Hebrew letter such as “taw” can be pronounced as T or Th depending where one places the points. However, we have another letter ‘teth’, which is also pronounced like T. this seems to be against all logic that the early Jews, used two letters in order to pronounce the same sound. common sense dictates that these letters must originally have had its own unique pronunciation, without any confusion for the early people (since they did not use the system of points) The other problem is what you mentioned, the two letters of ‘Qoph” and “Kav”, in modern Jewish language, “Q” is pronounced “K”, but let me explain why this is not right. It is getting too late, let me write the rest of this tomorrow.

mehrdad	23 May 2002
slinky_jo Thank you for your earlier post and I wonder if you have seen the Crowley's star card, it is definitely a work of art. I like vegetarians and I regard them very highly, I am a vegetarian too. but the problem is that Hitler was also a vegetarian.

Diana	23 May 2002
edited

Mermaid	23 May 2002
Slinky - that was me, & you already know I'm a kiwi I think! :) Mehrdad - I don't really understand what Hitler has to do with Slinky being vegetarian. I mean, if you find that Hitler liked keeping goldfish, you wouldn't go get rid of your fish tank! (edited to say - sorry Mehrdad, that's not a very good analogy now that I read it! I was just wondering what you meant by comparing vegetarians to Hitler? :confused:)

mehrdad	23 May 2002
Hi Diana Thank you for still remembering me. What you said about the upward movement is very interesting, I did not notice that. Could you please explain more? Why they are going up and not down? The importance of this card is a profound underling meaning that is embedded in it so eloquently. I think this card describes the philosophy of tarot, in which life is dynamically is rippling up and down like a wave. This philosophy tells us that upward is really the beginning of downward and downward is where the upward begins. In a simpler analogy, one goes up in order to comes down and when the limit of downwardness reaches to an end then one starts to go up (of course if it can survive the low). The dramatic dying of the moon and coming back to life after a period of rest and rejuvenation to start a new life, is what really happening in all aspect of our daily life. We are happy for some time, go to a period of rest, and then we are suddenly unhappy once more. Economy is good for some time and then things never get better until it gets worse. There is no other way around it, you have to go down in order to come up. This is the duality that Qabala, Taoism and others are referring to. Opposites of things is what create the illusion of wholeness in our reality. Good is meaningless without bad, cold and hot, up and down… they all need their own counterparts in order to exist and have sense.

mehrdad	23 May 2002
Mermaid, Thank you for clarifying my point. My point was that if Einstein was a vegetarian, that by itself cannot be used as a standard to follow, since there were others like Hitler who were also vegetarian but with bad reputation. As I stated, I am also a vegetarian and I think that eating meat is morally wrong. My philosophy is that just because animals are less ‘intelligent’ than we are, why we have given ourselves this right to eat them. Let’s say if very intelligent being come to earth and with comparison see us as a lower life form, do they have the right to eat us? Of course the answer is no. however, this is exactly what we are doing with our animals on this Earth. By the way I did not know that Slinky was a vegetarian

Mermaid	23 May 2002
She is - and so am I! :D Thanks for clarifying that Merhdad - it makes sense to me now, and I agree with you.

mehrdad	23 May 2002
Qolus Obviously it is difficult if not impossible to know how the ancient people pronounced a world such as Qoph. However, language and its development is a universal phenomena and it is possible to extract information about a particular language by studying other languages. It is known that all the languages in the world have been extracted from a common idiom and with time, people in different societies changed it according to their environment and their unique problems to deal with their surroundings. According to an article that I once read about phonetics, speeches fall into two major division, called: Fast speech and slow speech As we go back in time, people were speaking slower and slower, and as we move toward the present, tongues are becoming faster and faster. Fast speech has pauses that is blurred with stream of quiet parts and the rhythm of accents is related to the heartbeat. However, slow speech is structured differently. Slow speech is slow and instead of heartbeat, it uses natural rhythm of breathing. Slow speech does not have blurred pauses but it pauses in the moment of air intake. According to Alexander Liss “Slow speech uses special markers - hard and short breaks of the stream of air. These breaks can be produced by lips, a tongue, a throat and muscles closing nasal cavity. This kind of interrupter was denoted in writing in ancient Hebrew with a light(dagesh)” We know that, for example, old English pronunciation was slower than current one. It affected phonetics. We can see the difference between old and current phonetics in the difference between written and oral forms of the English language. It is reasonable to assume that ancient Hebrew was adjusted to slow speech. To make the long story short if our analogy is correct and ancient Jews where speaking slow than this is how they use to pronounce “K” and “Q”. “K” was pronounced with the very back of tongue (cannot be used in fast speech) and “Q” was pronounced with tongue, without voice support. We might hypothesis that “Q” sounded like “k” but a soft and open form of “K”. I hope I understood your question and was able to give you some ideas about what I know about it.

Zhritza	02 Jun 2002
mehrdad, I'm sorry I didn't get back to this thread sooner; I don't know how I overlooked your newest post in it. thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my minute-detail questions. I have a great deal of interest in linguistics (especially etymology) and phonetics, but haven't had any real education in these areas, except for the scraps of information I picked up while taking college Russian. Your willingness to spend time on this is profoundly helpful to me. Again, thank you!! :) :)

DeLani	05 Jun 2002
Hi, What a great thread. I'm also enchanted by the Moon. I read somewhere that the two towers represent the "city gate," through which the hero/ine must pass to go outside of civilization (and by extension, ordinary consciousness) to begin his/her journey (which is represented by the path). I think the three animals represent the conscious, subconscious, and the "unknowable self." The card is dark & frightening, as any journey into the depth of the soul is. But there is a guiding light, as strange and otherworldly as it seems. By paying attention to our intuition, we can complete our journey, to be led into the healing light of the star, and into illumination of the sun, then into spiritual rebirth, to union with the Goddess/Universe. My take on it, anyway. DeLani

The Moon Qoph thread was originally posted on 20 May 2002 in the Talking Tarot board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Talking Tarot, or read more archived threads.