The Moon

Luna, the crescent, the borrowed light

The borrowed light, the mother of the work, and the crescent a woman stands on. The one body here that every source explains against another.

Ten works in this archive carry the moon, and in almost all of them it arrives beside something else: next to the sun, under a woman's feet, on a shoulder plate, at the head of a glyph. That is not a shortage of pictures. Every source held here explains the moon against another light, and the one work where it stands alone spends its whole text on what its light cannot reach.

A. E. Waite is the most explicit about it. Of the High Priestess, with the crescent at her feet and a horned diadem on her head, he writes that she “is, in fine, the Queen of the borrowed light, but this is the light of all. She is the Moon nourished by the milk of the Supernal Mother.” Borrowed is not an insult in that sentence; it is an account of how the light travels. On the Moon card, the one place in the deck where the moon is the subject, he draws the limit: “The intellectual light is a reflection and beyond it is the unknown mystery which it cannot shew forth.” He opens that card by correcting the older decks on a point of direction, “the moon is increasing on what is called the side of mercy, to the right of the observer”, and of the face Pamela Colman Smith set inside the crescent he says only that “The face of the mind directs a calm gaze upon the unrest below”.

Lévi had already split the moon in two along that same axis of mercy. His Baphomet of 1856, which he drew himself and signed at the foot, makes one sign with both hands: “He makes the sign of occultism with both hands, pointing upward to the white moon of Chesed, and downward to the black moon of Geburah. This sign expresses the perfect harmony of mercy with justice.” Two moons, one white and one black, and the whole gesture of the figure is the balance held between them.

For the alchemists the moon is not a light at all but one of two substances, and it is the one that speaks first. Maier's thirtieth emblem of 1618 sets a man with the sun for a head and a woman with the moon for hers facing each other on a shore, with a cock and a hen between their feet, and gives her the lines: “O SOL, solus agis nil, si non viribus adsim, / Ut sine gallina est gallus inanis ope.”, O Sun, alone you do nothing unless I am there with my powers, as a cock without a hen is empty of help. In his eleventh emblem she and her brother are whitened together in their mother Latona. In the forty-second she has no part in the argument at all and is only the reason it is night, so that the reader's lamp has a dark to be bright in.

Khunrath and Dee give her a part rather than a voice, and it is the same part in both. The sentence of Hermes that Khunrath cut into the rock of his Tablet, “Pater eius est Sol, mater eius Luna; portavit illud ventus in ventre suo; nutrix eius Terra est.”, makes the sun the father and the moon the mother, with the wind to carry and the earth to nurse. Dee's fourteenth theorem of 1564 cites the same authority for the same division, “Ex Sole et Luna, totum hoc pendere Magisterium iam clare confirmatum est.”, that this whole mastery hangs from the Sun and the Moon. And Dee's glyph puts her on top: a crescent whose horns hold the sun's circle, with the parts lettered in his own order, “Luna. Sol. Elementa. Ignis.” The moon is second in the sentence and first on the page.

Fludd in 1617 puts the two lights on a body and separates them by height. On his mirror of nature the sun is the heart and breast of the virgin, “vera Solis coelestis sedes matrixque”, the true seat and womb of the heavenly Sun, and the moon is lower: “venter ejus corpore lunari repletur”, her belly is filled with the lunar body. J. B. Craven, describing the same plate in 1902, records the pair and loses the distinction: “She has a starry nimbus, and is adorned with the sun and moon on her breasts.” Two readers of one picture, three centuries apart, who do not agree about where the moon is.

In the Apocalypse she is neither parent nor light but a floor. “And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” Albrecht Dürer cut that into wood in 1511 and Denis Molinier painted it again in 1772, and in both the moon is the thing she stands on. Trismosin's fourth picture does it to a queen, who “stands upon a dark full Moon with both feet”. In the seventh of the Flamel figures both lights go into the blood itself, “wherein the Sunne and the Moone came to bathe themselues.” Cross's Master's Carpet of 1826 keeps them in the sky and puts something above them, the eye “whom the Sun, Moon, and Stars obey”.

A reflection, a mother, a substance that asks outright for help, a white one and a black one, a floor, and a thing that obeys. The single work in this archive where the moon is the whole subject is the card Pamela Colman Smith drew in 1909, and the paragraph Waite wrote under it is about what her light cannot show.

Contested

One thing this entry does not say is what the moon meant to a chemist. The Encyclopédie's table of 1763 writes gold with the sun's sign, “Or. Or calciné. Or de Chimie. Or de Mine. Or en Feuille.”, under the plate's own rule that “Le nom de la chose est à côté du caractere qui la désigne”, the name of the thing is beside the character that denotes it. The mark this archive holds on that plate covers the gold. Nothing beside it has been read, so the obvious companion claim is not made here.

A second silence is on the Chariot. Two crescent moons with faces sit on the shoulder pieces of Smith's hero, and Waite does not call them moons: “On the shoulders of the victorious hero are supposed to be the Urim and Thummim.” The archive records what is drawn and what he called it, and leaves the two standing apart.

Six works quoted above are not pictured here, and the reason is a box. Khunrath's Tablet, the seventh Flamel figure, Trismosin's fourth picture, Maier's thirtieth and eleventh emblems and Cross's Master's Carpet each carry one mark over both lights, and in every one of them the box is led by the sun. Rather than cut a new crop to make a claim nobody has measured, the archive leaves their pictures on the sun's page and keeps their words here. Two of them would have argued against the archive as well: the record of Trismosin's fourth picture is where this archive says the museum is wrong and both discs in that sky are suns, and the seventh Flamel figure is marked on a gold sun with a face. Five of the ten shown are the moon's alone: the Moon and the High Priestess and the Chariot of 1909, Lévi's Baphomet, and Maier's forty-second emblem.

Fludd's Latin and Khunrath's and Dee's are put into English by the archive, with the originals on the records. Lévi is quoted in Waite's translation of 1896, checked against the 1861 French printing. The Flamel figures are quoted from the English of 1624, and the record says who the museum does and does not attribute them to. Trismosin is quoted from J. K.'s English of 1920.

Sources

A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911: Part II, on the Moon, the High Priestess and the Chariot of the 1909 deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith.
Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie: The two moons of the Baphomet, described in the fifteenth chapter of the Ritual, quoted in Waite's translation of 1896 and checked against the 1861 French printing.
Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, 1618: The mottoes and epigrams of the thirtieth, eleventh and forty-second emblems, Oppenheim 1618, read against the page images of the Getty Research Institute copy; the English is the archive's own and is marked as such on every record.
John Dee, Monas Hieroglyphica, 1564: The lettering of the figures and the theorems beside them in the Frankfurt printing of 1591, read off the page images of the Getty Research Institute copy; the English is the archive's.
Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae, 1609: The Tablet of the pyramids, Hanau 1609, read off the page images at the size of the archive's own images; the English is the archive's.
Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi historia, 1617: The explanation of the mirror of nature in the first tractate, Oppenheim 1617, read in the Latin of the Getty Research Institute copy with the archive's English beside it.
J. B. Craven, Doctor Robert Fludd, the English Rosicrucian, 1902: An Orkney clergyman's account of the mirror of nature plate in English. A reader of 1902 looking at the page, not Fludd explaining himself.
The Apocalypse of Saint John, Douay-Rheims, Challoner revision: Chapter 12, verse 1, the woman with the moon under her feet. Quoted from the Challoner text, checked verse by verse against the printed edition.
Nicolas Flamel, His Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures, 1624: The seventh figure, quoted from the English of the London printing of 1624, read against the page images of the Wellcome copy. What the museum attributes and does not attribute is on each record.
Salomon Trismosin, Splendor Solis, 1920: The description of the fourth picture in J. K.'s English of 1920, read against the page images of the Cornell University Library copy.
The Encyclopédie, Recueil de planches, volume III, Chimie, 1763: The second plate of chemical characters and the sentence from its explanation that says how the table is to be read.
Jeremy L. Cross, The True Masonic Chart, or Hieroglyphic Monitor, 1826: The printed lecture to the Master's Carpet, New Haven 1826, read against the page images of the Library of Congress copy.