Soundwaves, soul frequency and the Thoth Moon Tarot Card
Hello reader, I'm going to get a bit trippy with this one. I'll be discussing the Moon archetype in the tarot with a focus on intuition, soundwaves and soul/ancestor frequency.
Lunar Libration 10333324, date unknown, Clement Lindley Wragge
“Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be changed from one form to another.”
a quote often ascribed to Albert Einstein
March has been a weird month. At the beginning of the month, my intuition tuned in to energy that can only be described as noise. Like that fuzzy static energy that would appear on TV screens back in the day when the channel had nothing to air late at night, often accompanied by white noise. This chaotic energy was making me feel completely out of sorts; the psychic load was sending my mind spinning.
I knew where the energy was coming from. I spoke about the level of f*ckery being turned up a notch to my newsletter subscribers as the strikes on Iran were made, and the world was pulled into an illegal war. There is no way to spiritually bypass this energy if you’re coming from a conscious place. The majority of us feel the pain of the world right now. The dissonance caused by the chaos of war on top of the multitude of other odious acts on the world stage, I sense, feeling out of sorts, is the energy that many of us feel.
And with all this chaotic, and dare I say, evil energy, there is at times a floaty energy in the air that feels less heavy. It is creative, dreamy, deeply spiritual, intuitive and hopeful.
All the energy whirling around coincided with multiple planets being in the sign of Pisces, as well as a lunar eclipse during Pisces season and the Neptune-Saturn conjunction that began at the end of February. As someone with a Pisces moon, it has felt intense, to say the least. I mention this as Pisces is known to be the mystic of the zodiac, like a little fish in the water, they feel the slightest vibrational energy shifts. Vibrations are also intricately linked to the Moon archetype in the tarot, which is astrologically associated with Pisces.
Thoth Moon Tarot Card
And probably because the vibes have been so high this month, I’ve been intensely drawn to the Moon card, particularly the one from the Thoth deck, created by artist Marguerite Frieda Harris, aka Lady Frieda Harris, for Aleister Crowley. The Thoth Moon has depictions of vibrations in a series of wave patterns that echo through the composition. This is most apparent at the bottom of the card, three intertwined wave shapes of red, blue and grey. These patterns got me thinking about sound, but more specifically, sine waves, frequency, and sound waves, i.e. mechanical waves.
To see what I’m talking about, look at this image here.
Wave shapes (cropped), 1922, Clement Lindley Wragge
Science tells us that vibration is energy and that energy never dies. So I began to ask myself a series of questions about where the source of the waves on the Thoth Moon originated. I wondered whether the source began at card number 16 in the Major Arcana, when the Tower crashed to the ground? Or perhaps the energy was caused by the flow of water from the maiden’s cup on card 17, the Star, the card before the Moon. I also wondered whether the energy could have come from the other direction, from the cosmic mandala of the Sun, the card after the Moon archetype.
I reckon the energy source of the waves more likely began at card 13, Death. I see the wave shapes as the soul’s frequency. The energy floating across the bottom of the Moon card has travelled through the previous cards and has reached the towers of the Moon, sitting on a precipice between being reborn or remaining in the underworld.
The Soul Hovering Over the Body Reluctantly Parting with Life, 1813, After William Blake, Engraver Luigi Schiavonetti
Our Earth’s moon has long been associated with death and the underworld. We see the connection to the underworld and death with a mirrored image of the ancient Egyptian god, Anubis, protector of the dead and guardian of souls, at the top of the card. The two Anubis stand opposite one another on the edge of a clearing that goes beyond the towers, into a wide open, light space. This is a reminder that the Moon is thought to be a liminal space, a space between life and death.
In the dark watery depths of the moon, the energy of the soul is in a period of gestation, sitting on a threshold. In ancient Greek society, the moon was seen as a place where the soul takes a pause, a resting place before continuing its journey to Hades in the underworld. This conjures up images in my mind of the ancestors coming together to decide who should travel next to Earth. I’ve also been thinking that perhaps the wave patterns could be the energetic frequencies not just of a single soul, but multiple souls, or even perhaps the different layers of the soul. There are, after all, six or seven wave patterns on the card.
Another take on the giant wave shapes on the Thoth Moon card is that they are “the drawn up knees of a woman giving birth”. The idea that the Moon is associated with the “feminine” principle is also found in the cosmologies of cultures across the world. Our Moon’s phases are tied to the cyclical nature of a woman’s menstrual cycle. We witness our Earth’s moon transform every month. From the new moon, it waxes, growing bigger, gently transforming in the night sky to a beautiful full moon, before it wanes, slowly growing smaller before it disappears, dying in the west during the dark of the moon to be reborn three days later in the east.
Moon Phases, Raw Pixel
The changes in the moon cycles are also connected to the tides. The gravitational pull caused by the changing faces of the moon affects our oceans’ tides; a full moon and a new moon, for example, create strong high tides or what is known as spring tides.
And with this, I realised why I have been so consumed by the Moon archetype and its connection to the static fuzz of my intuition; the interference has been highlighting the importance of energy. One of Earth’s natural and renewable energy sources is tidal and wave energy. Given the war situation and the pressing energy crisis, governments will need to invest more in green energy sources.
We will, as a planet, be increasingly focusing on the subject of energy over the next few years. Our current methods of producing energy will be transformed, moving towards a greener, energy-conscious/ solar way of living, one that does not destroy the planet.
Random static, Wikimedia Commons
This article has taken me quite a long time to write. It feels like a luxury to write and discuss mysticism and tarot in the midst of all that we are witnessing in the world. I know what a place of privilege I'm coming from to be able to do so without bombs raining down from the sky or being systematically starved to death. For a while, I questioned whether to post the article, especially as it discusses the soul and death, and so many innocent souls have been slain in the name of greed and imperialism.
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So what is this energy that I've been feeling? On one level, I feel it is the collective energy of the imbalance of negative and positive forces, just like science tells us static is. A dear friend of mine, Martin, also pointed out that 1% of the static interference on analogue TVs is a remnant from the cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang. This felt potent, especially as it feels like we are on the cusp of a new period in the evolution of humanity.
And on the other hand, I feel the energy could be the soul of our earth and the collective cry of the land and the people who are suffering.
The Moon card sums up the chaotic energy that we are living through as a collective at the moment. The level of deception, madness and delusional behaviour by some of the most odious people in the world has gone into overdrive. The masks are off, and they are no longer hiding the other side of their face.
Yet, there is a current of hope. We as humanity are on the threshold of something new. A new cycle is beginning. The old world is dying. At the moment, we are living through the in-between period. We are moving from one state to another. All I know is that the best way to navigate through this time of uncertainty is to listen to your intuition.
Bibliography
Akron & Hajo Banzhaf (1995,2014) The Crowley Tarot
Arewa, Caroline Shola (1998) Opening to Spirit
Ronnberg, Martin, (2010) The Book of Symbols, Reflections of Archetypal Images
Websites
Soundwaves and Their Sources, 1933, Internet Archive
https://archive.org/details/SoundWavesAn
National Ocean Service
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/tutorial_tides/tides06_variations.html
Wikipedia, Lady Freida Harris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Frieda_Harris
