Pisces Tarot: The Moon
It’s been roughly eleven months since I started posting about Astrology and Tarot, together at last. Next Aries season will mark the one-year anniversary of this feature, but as of this post, I will have finished an examination of all twelve astrological signs. We end the trip around the karmic wheel with Pisces, the fish, and the most emotional sign of the zodiac. The planetary rulers of Pisces are Neptune and Jupiter, but despite those associations, the Tarot card linked with this sign is #18, The Moon.
In Pamela Colman-Smith’s illustration of this card, the titular heavenly body calmly looks down on a hectic scene. A dog and a wolf howl upward, standing astride a path that winds its way towards the horizon between two towers, while a crayfish crawls from the water behind them. According to Arthur Edward Waite, “The card represents life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit. The path between the towers is the issue into the unknown. The dog and wolf are the fears of the natural mind in the presence of that place of exit.” The crayfish, or “that which comes out of the deeps,” represents “the nameless and hideous tendency which is lower than the savage beast.” Given that scathing description, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Waite had a shellfish allergy…
While the imagery itself isn’t necessarily disturbing on its face – as it is in cards such as Death, the Devil, or the Tower – the divinatory meanings are decidedly negative. Some examples given in The Pictorial Guide to the Tarot include “Hidden enemies, danger, calumny, darkness, terror, deception.” And it doesn’t get any better if the card should come up reversed in a reading: “Instability, inconstancy, silence, lesser degrees of deception and error.” As a Cancer Crab myself, a sign ruled by the Moon, it’s a little disconcerting to see such negative connotations applied to my planetary ruler. But I suppose it’s natural to be afraid of that which we can’t see clearly.
These negative connotations do not come through as clearly in this card’s analogue in the Baseball Tarot: The Catcher. Or rather, the same themes are present, but Mark Lerner and Laura Philips choose to focus on the positive response to them. “This card calls attention to the importance of staying open to the unknown, and to the extraordinary value of cultivating your intuition and a deeper understanding of yourself and those around you. The Catcher knows better than anyone else that adaptability is vital: The best defense is being prepared to handle whatever life pitches.”
This is the kind of optimism that baseball can teach us. Instead of dwelling on the fear of the unknown, why not instead focus on preparing to react to it? In contrast to the barking canines in the card’s traditional representation, the catcher calls forth an image of someone calm, poised, mitt always ready to handle whatever comes with finesse (to paraphrase Lerner & Philips). Of course, in any Tarot divination, the accepted meanings of the cards are always secondary to how the querent responds to them. But it’s nice to see a positive spin come from baseball related imagery.
In terms of current players, the connection with Pisces and catcher is a strong one: J.T. Realmuto is one of the best active catchers in the game, with Yasmani Grandal (Scorpio) and Salvador Perez (Taurus) also in the conversation. And the Fish have some strong options going back through the years - at least until 1980, the last year I’ve gotten to in my reverse-chronological trip through Astrology Baseball history. Brian McCann, Terry Steinbach, and Benito Santiago are their latest regular starters, while former catcher Bob Brenly led the 2001 Diamondbacks to a World Series title in his first year as a manager.
As labor negotiations drag on, and the team owners increasingly show their true colors as stubborn, greedy, uncompromising, whiny billionaires, I will present my analysis of my All-Time Fantasy Points Database, updated through the entirety of the 1980’s!