Total eclipse of the Moon

This evening I just happened to be out and about at the right time to witness a total lunar eclipse, not knowing in advance that there was going to be one. I saw it exactly at the moment of totality and stayed and watched it until the end.

If the panic police had not shut down my school for a few weeks, I would have been in my classroom at that time and would have missed the whole thing -- so yes, good can come out of evil.

About a month ago, someone sent me a scan from a Tintin book (sending it, by chance, on the exact anniversary of its original publication) showing a total solar eclipse, and this set off a chain of synchronicities.

This is how I received it. Not sure who added the face on the Sun!

The lunar eclipse ("blood moon") made me think of this solar eclipse, and the combination of the two made me think of the second chapter of Joel: "The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come" (Joel 2:31).

A few days ago, I was looking through this blog's drafts folder, found an old unfinished post called "Do the locusts have a king?" and started working on it again. It begins by quoting the bit about the locusts in Revelation 9, mentioning parenthetically that John had pinched his imagery from Joel 2.

I see that the emergence of the Great Eastern Brood of 17-year cicadas is in the news these days. I witnessed this event once, 34 years ago, when my family was living in Maryland. Back in those less entomologically literate days, the locals all referred to the insects as "locusts," and news programs would have Bug Experts on to explain how cicadas differed from "true locusts." The most important difference from the human perspective is that locusts devour everything in sight (as so poetically described by Joel), whereas cicadas just make a lot of noise (a lot of noise!), mate, and die.

In his Meditations on the Tarot, Valentin Tomberg interprets the Moon card of the Tarot de Marseille as depicting a total eclipse of the Moon.

Claude Burdel, 1751

Tomberg explains this symbol thus:

Just as man's will to master Nature sets "materialistic intellectuality" in motion and prescribes it the "rules of the game" for its work, so is the moon of the eighteenth Arcanum on eclipse, i.e. it is only fringed by rays of reflected sunlight, whilst the surface of the moon itself reflects only the image of a human face in profile.

The crayfish, which can go only backward, represents the human mind stymied by this materialistic intellectuality, and the only way forward is for this crayfish to transform itself into an eagle.

The eighteenth Arcanum of the Tarot asks us: Do you want to choose the way of the eagle which rises above antinomies or the way of the crayfish which retreats before them until arriving at complete absurdity, i.e. at the scorpionic suicide of inteligence? This is the point -- i.e. the message to the human will -- of the eighteenth Major Arcanum of the Tarot.

Tomberg connects the crayfish with the scorpion, and it is from there but a short jump to connecting it with the scorpion-like apocalyptic "locusts" (inspired by Joel 2) that rise from the Abyss in Revelation 9. But further discussion of this will have to wait until I have completed my locust post.