Few images in tarot are as immediately strange as The Moon, XVIII. A great yellow moon hangs over an empty landscape. A dog and a wolf raise their heads toward it. A crayfish crawls from dark water. Two towers stand in the distance, while a narrow road disappears between them toward mountains that cannot quite be reached.
This particular image is The Moon from the Rider–Waite–Smith Tarot, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite and first published in 1909. Although its imagery has become so familiar that it can seem timeless, the card is actually the product of centuries of changing tarot imagery.
Before the Dog, the Wolf and the Crayfish
Tarot originated in northern Italy during the fifteenth century as a card game. The earliest surviving Moon cards looked considerably different from the image we recognize today.
In the Visconti-Sforza tradition, for example, the Moon could be represented through a female figure associated with the lunar goddess Diana. Other early Italian versions experimented with entirely different lunar scenes. The now-familiar combination of two animals, two towers and a crayfish beneath the Moon developed later, becoming particularly associated with the French Tarot de Marseille tradition of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
That distinction matters. The symbols on the Rider–Waite–Smith Moon are not an unchanged secret language handed down from antiquity. They accumulated over generations as artists, card makers and eventually occult writers reinterpreted the image.
By the eighteenth century, one surviving written interpretation gave the card the wonderfully simple meaning of “Night.” From darkness naturally followed associations with uncertainty, hidden dangers and the difficulty of seeing clearly.
Pamela Colman Smith's Moon
When Pamela Colman Smith created her Moon in 1909, she inherited much of the older imagery but transformed it into a coherent landscape.
At the bottom is water, from which the crayfish emerges. Above it stand the dog and wolf. Beyond them is a long path passing between two towers before disappearing into the mountains.
And above everything is the Moon.
Smith's composition creates movement from bottom to top and foreground to horizon. Something comes out of the water. The animals react. The road continues onward. Yet unlike the clear daylight of The Sun, the destination cannot be seen.
That uncertainty was central to Waite's own explanation.
In The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, published shortly after the deck, Waite described the road between the towers as an entrance into the unknown. Most importantly, he emphasized that the traveler has only “reflected light” by which to navigate.
That may be the most useful key to the entire card.
Moonlight illuminates, but imperfectly.
You can see the road.
You cannot see everything on it.
The Dog and the Wolf
Modern tarot writing often describes the two animals as opposites: the domesticated dog and the wild wolf, civilization and instinct responding to the same mysterious light.
That interpretation has a historical foundation, although it should not be projected backward onto every earlier Moon card. Waite himself specifically identified the animals as a dog and wolf and associated both with the instinctive or “animal” nature of the mind confronted by the unknown. Earlier Marseille cards often depict two more symmetrical canine creatures rather than Smith's deliberately differentiated pair.
Smith therefore gives us an intriguing visual tension.
One creature belongs beside the hearth.
The other belongs beyond it.
Under the Moon, both howl.
The Crayfish Rising from the Water
Then there is the strangest figure in the card.
A crayfish climbs from the pool toward land.
Waite's interpretation was considerably darker than many modern explanations. He associated the creature with something primitive rising from the depths—an instinctive force attempting to emerge into consciousness. Contemporary tarot traditions often soften that idea into the unconscious surfacing into awareness.
Either way, the direction of movement matters.
The creature begins beneath the surface.
The Moon draws our attention toward things that ordinarily remain there: fears, dreams, intuitions, memories and impressions that are felt before they are fully understood.
The Road into the Unknown
Perhaps the quietest symbol on the card is also its most important: the road.
It begins near the water, passes between the animals, continues through the towers and eventually disappears.
There is no traveler pictured on it.
The viewer effectively occupies that position.
The historical imagery and Waite's writing support associations with uncertainty, imagination, fear and incomplete perception. Later psychological interpretations have expanded those ideas into the language of the subconscious and intuition. Those later interpretations can be useful, but they are interpretations—not proof that every element of the card possessed one fixed meaning from the beginning.
That ambiguity is precisely what makes The Moon endure.
The card does not necessarily tell us that what we see is false. It reminds us that what we see may be incomplete.
A shadow can conceal danger.
It can also make an ordinary object appear dangerous.
The problem is that under moonlight, we may not immediately know which is which.
The Moon therefore occupies a peculiar symbolic territory between illusion and intuition, imagination and fear, perception and uncertainty.
The road is still there.
The towers are still there.
There is enough light to continue.
Just not enough to know everything that waits ahead.
Some things can only be understood in the dark.
Tarot The Moon - Catalog No. 2119
Tarot Collection - Within Symbolism
Symbols Worth Wearing.