Moon & Judgement
I bought
Legend just before Christmas and I am currently working through a study/dream discipline with the deck. Each night the last thing I do is to look at a specific card, read the appropriate text from
A Keeper of Words and then go to sleep. This is somewhat like guided dreaming: if the unconscious wishes to comment on the card during dream time it does so. I am not concerned if there is no remembered dream, in this case I feel that it is simply that there is no need for a commentary to emerge, not that the card has been somehow "wasted". I am using the card order as it came to me, which is the same as the order in the book, starting with the Fool and ending at the King of Shields.
I had thought I was drawn to this deck for an expression of masculine energy, but I find the card images very ethereal, the colours subdued and the people's complexions spectral, as if the scenes were viewed under the light of the full moon. So in fact this deck seems to serve the needs of the internal expression of the High Priestess, the entity I call Sophie. The discipline of using the cards to stimulate archetypal dreams was not consciously planned but just "seemed to happen" - but how appropriate for a deck which seems so lunar!
I have been enjoying your profound and poetic commentary on the Fives and Pages from the
Legend deck - Lyones, RedMaple and WalesWoman - but since I literally "am not there yet" I haven't felt able to comment. But when I discovered today that Lyones was introducing Judgement, which is my card for tonight, well then I couldn't resist.
In the Moon card, I personally identified with the web symbolism in the card, the trees, the reflection of the trees, and the web tracery on the moon, all focused in Morgan, her hands reaching into the web of the trees, her dress dipping into the web reflection in the pool. I see this web as extending from the pool of the unconscious, to the consciousness of the land, to the super-conscious or divine of the moon. This is a web of integration, a matrix of feminine connectness and relatedness conjured up by Morgan. All things in the three realms are accessed by her, or as the book says (page 101) "the combined energies of intuition, imagination, and intellect".
In the Judgement card, I would like to add that figurehead on the front of the boat seems to be raising her arms in exultation, a prayerful ecstasy, and the goldwork at the bow is like an extension of the figurehead, expressing golden mystic and spiritual flames emerging in transfiguration. Together the flames and the figurehead lead the boat forward to meet Morgan, also dressed in gold: transformative, pure and touched by the divine. In the Fool's Journey there are many deaths and rebirths, but this one represents the last and most exalted in the cycle, the gateway to The Universe.