No subject is prone to more mass confusion across various systems of divination than that of the Moon.

In astrology it’s the archetypal Mother, nurturing and emotionally effusive, connected with memory and the subconscious mind as well as psychic awareness. As one of the three main building-blocks of the personality, it has much to do with habitual behaviors and automatic – or “conditioned” – responses to stimuli.

In tarot it’s more cautionary: unreliable and illusory in the sense that moonlight is deceptive; what you see isn’t always what it seems to be. In short, it isn’t typically an indicator of emotional fulfillment in a romance reading.

In Lenormand it can mean a number of things depending on which regional set of meanings you’re using. For me, it’s reputation, honors, recognition; it can also mean “work” as what the public sees you doing on a regular basis.

The point is that there are clear distinctions in each case; there is no “one size fits all” core meaning that serves every method. Regardless, the more intuitively-inclined readers who use all three seem to have a compulsion for wrapping the astrological sense of the Moon around every instance of its appearance. So it’s always about emotional  sensitivity (and vulnerability) no matter where and when it shows up.

This rather faceless homogenizing doesn’t do justice to the tradition behind each of these systems, and strikes me as either intellectual laziness or ignorance of the fundamental differences in meaning. There is also more than a hint about it of the New Age “psychologizing” of all branches of divination that has supplanted older, more literal  approaches to reading. Everything is processed through a Jungian lens that leaves little room for a more matter-of-fact view of the Universe, even though situations often arise and evolve independent of our own mental/emotional inclinations and expectations in the matter. As the saying goes, “Shit happens!”

Since I’m a Full-Moon personality type, one might think I would be more sympathetic to the “wallpapering” of every room in the diviners’ mansion with salutary lunar symbolism. However, that Moon sits in Capricorn, giving me a more hard-headed analytical perspective. If you haven’t noticed that by now, you haven’t been paying attention.