A Gothic Moon

It was quite appropriate to get this card today, as we have just had the full moon, she being blown around in a stormy sky. First thought on studying this card was that the moon lady with her crescent headdress makes me think of  Cerridwen, Celtic goddess of the moon, who had a wolf as a companion, just like this lady in the card.

The Moon - Bohemian Gothic

The Wolf rules winter from Samhain to Imbolc and the Celtic word for February (when Imbolc is celebrated in the Northern Hemisphere), is Faoilleach, which translates as Wolf Month. Imbolc is also known as St Brides Day which is another name for Brighid the Celtic triple Goddess of healing, poetry and blacksmiths. Brighid, like Cerridwen also had a wolf friend. In St Johns church in Glastonbury there is a beautiful stained glass window which features St Bride and her wolf companion, they are shown minding sheep, which are pictured in the next adjacent pain of glass. Sheep and wolves!

The Moon is a a card with a nature as slippery as her watery element, she can enchant and confuse. The woman's face here looks confused to me and a little worried, unsettled I felt a little like this today, but that is what the full moon does to me, she being my ruling planet. Of course her mood could be in tune with the melancholy sound of the howling wolf, or the pipes of the Pan God who sits on a rock by the water. She has turned away from the town in the distance and looks into the dark, as a mirror, seeing what is on the inside, or maybe the past and the future, trying to work  them out.  Moon's ability to create illusion makes one wonder just what is real and what isn't, and even if it really matters.

The wolf howls freely in the night, by day he is shy and hides away, at nighttime enchanted by the Pan Pipes we can follow a path very different to the one we tread by day. Night changes our mood and behaviour, like the werewolves I believe our characters change in the dark hours. We are wilder, free to be more of who we are, to explore our deeper darker nature.

I have always been a creature of the dark.... and the cold months... I can really relate to the image on this card, what a fabulous Moon she is!