The vesica piscis and the blue moon

I ended my July 23 post "Break on through to the other side" with a one-card Tarot reading in which I expected to draw the Eight of Wands but in fact got the Eight of Cups. I didn't post much by way of interpretation, except to note that the mirror image of the card bore a certain resemblance to the Flammarion engraving.

In my own later notes on this reading, I wrote:

My impression was that there’s some other group of associates I need to open myself up to, without leaving the Romantic Christian circle behind. The mental image that accompanied this thought was the overlapping circles of a Venn diagram (forming the vesica piscis where Christ sits enthroned in the Maiestas Domini icon), and I associated this with the strange object in the sky of the Eight of Cups (a combined crescent moon and full moon?).

The "moon" on the Eight of Cups is really quite strange. At first it looks like a crescent moon with the dark side illuminated by earthshine, but if you look closely, it's actually two objects: a crescent and a disc, or perhaps one disc partially eclipsing another.

In mirror image, the waxing crescent corresponds to the moon in the Flammarion engraving and the disc to the sun. Even the proportions look roughly the same, with the solar disc only large enough to fit the inner curve of the crescent.

I sent my comments on the vesica piscis to the anonymous email correspondent mentioned in "The Green Door" but did not discuss them with anyone else or publish them on my blog. It was therefore something of a surprise when the first comment on that post, by Debbie, was all about yoni symbolism and its relevance to the idea of a door. One of the forms yoni symbolism takes is, of course, the vesica piscis.

After reading Debbie's comment, I received another email from my anonymous correspondent. Referring to the Eight of Cups, she wrote, "having the moon there (even in a strange form) feels like a good omen, although it would suit better were it blue." She did not elaborate on why blue would have been better.

I then received a follow-up comment from Debbie. The Eight of Cups had reminded her of a dream and sent her looking through her old dream journals. In the comment she also mentioned a dream she had just had on July 23 of this year -- the same day I posted the Eight of Cups (or maybe not quite, given the time difference between America and Taiwan).

In my recent dream, my father gave me a silver half-moon shape pendant necklace. I recall the pendant had a beautiful blue inlay. I recall looking at the necklace and I saw a price tag of $132.00

When I woke from the dream, I googled 132, and found it interesting that in Strongs the number 132 in Hebrew means : Red , Ruddy. Also I found (just this morning July 25) this very intriguing website (2nd link below) of the Nebra Sun Desk which looks VERY similar to the pendant my father gave me.

A moon pendant with a blue inlay! Looking up the Nebra sky disc, I find that it looks like this:

The full disc on the left and waxing crescent on the right matches the mirror-image Eight of Cups I posted. According to Wikipedia, "These symbols are interpreted generally as the Sun or full moon, a lunar crescent, and stars." I had noted this same ambiguity -- Sun or full moon? -- in my thoughts on the Eight.

The disc also suggests a smiling face with the Sun and Moon as eyes. Actually, what it reminds me of is a symbol used by the late Roger Anthony: a lion with a plus-sign in its right eye and a minus-sign in its right. The lion's mouth was a smile with an arrow head at one end, so that it was an arcking arrow pointing from the minus to the plus. When Roger shared these and a few other symbols with me, in or around 1999, he said, "Once you've learned these symbols, they'll be in your memory forever, and when you need them, they'll come back."