The Moon Card of the Tarot Deck May Reprise an Ancient Amuletic Design Against the Evil Eye

. This paper proposes a novel source for – or at least influence on – the iconography of the Moon trump in the Rider- Waite Tarot deck, which preserves the design from the Tarot de Marseille. In fact, the Moon template appears to date back to the earliest days of the Tarot. The proposed source or prototype is a Greco-Roman talismanic design against the Evil Eye known as the “all-suffering eye”, which frequently occupies the reverse face of Byzantine copper/bronze “Holy Rider” amulets. The paper identifies compositional elements that correspond in the Evil Eye and Moon card designs, presents reasons why the moon and the Evil Eye might have been thought of as cognates, and considers other likely inputs into the Moon card’s visual program.


Introduction
The power of the esoteric imagery in the Tarot cards has long been recognised, with Carl Jung claiming that the trump cards may represent archetypes of the human unconscious mind. 2 The most influential Tarot pack of recent times is the Rider-Waite deck, which first appeared in London in 1909. For many years this was the only Tarot readily available, and it now enjoys near-canonical status among modern decks 3 .
The origin of the iconography on Tarot cards is a matter of interest to people from many walks of life, ranging from art historians to Jungian psychologists and from students of alchemical emblems to practising occultists. The present paper examines the iconography of the Moon card, one of the more enigmatic trumps in the Rider-Waite deck, and proposes for it a source -or at least an influence -that has not hitherto been suggested.
The argument of the paper is as follows. Visual similarities of structure and form are noted between the imagery of the Moon card (Section 2) and that of an ancient amulet against the Evil Eye (Section 3). Other potential inputs into the iconography of the Moon card are also acknowledged in passing (Section 4). The image-based similarities noted in Sections 2 and 3 suggest that the Evil Eye design inspired -or at least contributed to -the iconography of the Moon card (Section 5). Having recognised the image-based similarities, the meanings of the Evil Eye amulet and Moon card are compared to see if there are any overlaps that would support the proposed historical influence of the former on the latter. The finding is that there are in fact deep-seated and widespread cultural connections between the moon and the Evil Eye (Section 5). The paper concludes by noting that the proposed correspondence between the moon in the card's iconography and the Evil Eye in the amuletic design is consistent with the negative interpretation of the Moon card in Tarot cartomancy (Section 6).

The Moon Card
The imagery on the Moon card of the Rider-Waite deck -trump no. 18 in the Major Arcana -is shown in Fig. 1a. In this scene, "a full moon hangs in the sky over a surreal dream-like landscape. Two dogs tip back their heads and howl, while a crab crawls out of a pool. Two mysterious and slightly sinister towers rise in the distance" 4 .
In terms of cartomancy, A.E. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot asserts that the Moon card represents the "life of the imagination apart from life of the spirit" 5 . Waite took a negative view of the canines that are engaged in "baying at the moon", observing that "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" 6 . In this scenario, the canine duo are not barking in excitement but rather howling in fear. Consistent with this, the Moon card "has often been interpreted as a card of evil omen, whether upright or reversed" 7 . The instructions that accompany the modern Rider-Waite deck say that the card signifies "Hidden enemies, danger, calumny, darkness, terror, deception, error" 8 .
The visual template under consideration long predates the Rider-Waite Tarot 9 ; it is, for example, present in the Marseille deck ( Fig. 1b)  in the Cary sheet from early 16 th -century Milan, which suggests that the template "dates back to the very earliest days of the tarot" 12 . However, little is known of the origins of the design. The water-body presumably alludes to the influence of the moon on the ocean in the form of the tides, but the almost heraldic flanking of the moon by two quadrupeds who face each other and the central position of the vertical -and somewhat scorpion-like -crustacean require explanation.

The "All-suffering Eye" Template
One possible source of Moon card imagery lies in an ancient talismanic design against the Evil Eye 13 , which frequently occupies the reverse face of Byzantine copper/bronze Holy Rider amulets. The design is often referred to as the "all-suffering eye" because it shows the lineage.htm. Little, "History of the Moon Card", notes that "The old Italian decks, outside the influence of the Tarot de Marseille, show completely different scenes on the card". Typically these show either astronomers or allegorical moon-maidens, and do not concern us here. 12 Little, "History of the Moon Card"; Tarot  Evil Eye being attacked by a variety of animals 14 ; the complete medallion/pendant is sometimes called "Solomon's seal" as it may bear this name in its Greek captions 15 . Such amulets were particularly popular in the 5-7 th centuries CE (Fig. 2) 16 . In the words of Christopher Faraone: "The most familiar ancient amulet against the evil eye was an image of the 'all-suffering eye' (ho polupathês ophthalmos), which appears, for example, on the early Byzantine medallion in Fig. 6 [here Fig.  3a]. A stylized eye sits at the centre of the composition surrounded by attackers: heraldic lions from the sides, an ibis, a snake and a scorpion from below, and three daggers from above.
[…] Some of these amulets show a trident […] above the eye instead of knives" 17 , and sometimes both appear 18 . At the bottom of the design may lie a supine figure (Fig. 3a); this is usually taken to be the demoness Abyzou, an emanation from or personification of the primeval ocean -now located in the netherworld and associated with death -whose name is cognate with the English word "Abyss" 19 . Her identification with the ocean is reinforced by her fish-like lower body 20 .
The apotropaic template dates back at least to early Roman imperial times and was widely diffused. Even by the 3 rd century CE, the motif was known as far afield as Britain, where it features as a relief on a building façade 21 ; it also appears in a wall-painting in the Monastery of St. Apollo in Bawit, Egypt 22 , which has many Coptic frescoes from the 6-7 th centuries. The Byzantine amulets probably originate in Syria 20 Barb, "Antaura", 6-7 and 9. 21 Faraone, "Amuletic Design", 105-106 (incl. Figure 8). 22 Barb, "Antaura", 6-7 and Pl. 5a. 23 Spier, "Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets", 62. design abound 24 . On some amulets of this type, the lion is taken by commentators to be "a trained quadruped that looks like a dog or a wolf" 25 . In the version on a Roman domestic mosaic found in modern-day Turkey, the rearing quadruped on the right is unambiguously a dog (Fig. 4a) 26 , while the motif on an engraved carnelian gem has three dogs, two of which rear up (from left and right) toward the central eye 27 . As Faraone observes, the "scorpion and other non-mammals are usually placed below [the eye], the dog on the right side and the lion on the left" 28 . If both of the quadrupeds are taken to be canines 29 , and Abyzou at bottom centre is allowed to transform back into the ocean, and the scorpion is replaced by a similar-looking crustacean which emerges from that ocean, then we have the exact constellation found on the Tarot Moon card, with the moon taking the place of the eye. Waite's description of the card's iconography even recapitulates the dreaded Abyzou by referring to the water-body as "the deeps, the nameless and hideous tendency[,…] the abyss of water" 30 . As solar creatures, lions would not be appropriate in a design associated with the Moon, such as the Tarot Moon card. In any case, the replacement of lions by wolves and then dogs might be expected to occur over the centuries as the world became increasingly domesticated and urbanised (as witnessed by the presence of the two towers in the Moon card design). 30 Waite, Pictorial Key, 140-143. 31 Permission via Atalya Fadida, Visual Archives, June 2021. In a roof-tile from the synagogue at Dura Europa 32 , the heraldic creatures flanking the central eye have transformed into two snakes whose outlines could easily morph into the two towers flanking the moon on the Tarot card (Fig. 4b). Equally, in Fig. 2b one can see the bird and snake that usually flank the scorpion losing clarity relative to their depictions in Fig. 2a; it would take little to reimagine their outlines as the edges of a water-body from which the segmented creature -now a crustacean -crawls upwards. The 32 Stern, "Mapping Devotion", 487-488 (incl. Figure 8, left). loss of definition in the bird/snake pair is even further advanced in Fig. 3b.
In both the Marseille and Rider-Waite cards (Fig. 1), the orb of the Moon is shown stellate, i.e. surrounded by sharp spiked emanations that indicate the radiation of light. This attribute is unusual, normally being the prerogative of the sun and the stars, but the sharp spikes would accord well with the knives and trident prongs that surround the central feature in "the all-suffering eye" talisman.
On medallions, the "all-suffering eye" design is often surmounted by explicit lunar and solar emblems, with lunar ones predominating 33 . If the design's central symbol were to be identified with the moon, then the replacement of the scorpion with a visually similar crustacean would be especially understandable because the moon rules the Zodiacal sign of Cancer, whose animal is a crab, lobster or crayfish 34 . Some magical gems depict this pairing (Fig. 5). Cancer is also the cardinal sign of the Water trigon, of which Scorpio -the scorpion -is the fixed sign 35 , so a scorpion/crustacean equivalence seems to be intrinsic to astrological iconography.

Other Influences
The Moon card design (Fig. 1) is an entity of manifold meaning that undoubtedly draws upon multiple sources 36 , not just on a single template. Vignettes of Cancer in late 15 th -century French "Books of Hours", which feature elongated crustaceans in landscapes and riverine settings, constitute one likely influence, even though the shellfish are usually set horizontally and the moon is absent 37 . Sometimes these images show buildings on distant hills, a possible inspiration for the Moon card's towers. Beyond their obvious role as an architectural echo of the two canines, the card's two towers may also owe something to the two hills in forerunners of the alchemical frontispiece to The Hermetical Triumph (Fig. 6) 38 . The emblem presents the "mutual Correspondence betwixt the Heavens and the Earth, by means of the Sun and Moon" 39 , so it contains at least some lunar symbolism. As a Triumph, the image is already a trump (in the sense of "trump card") since these two words are etymological cognates. The visual influence could equally run in the opposite direction, i.e. from the Tarot card to the alchemical emblem. 33 Schlumberger, "Amulettes Byzantins Anciens", 76-78.

The Evil Eye and the Moon
Byzantine magical amulets, including those that feature the "all-suffering eye" template against the Evil Eye, have "periodically attracted the attention of scholars from Renaissance times to the present" 40 . Specimens are likely to have been present in the curiosity cabinets of the 15 th -17 th century Italian and 40 Spier, "Medieval Byzantine Magical Amulets", 25.
French nobility, the milieu in which the current Moon card design first arose. Moreover, talismanic devices to deflect the Evil Eye have long-standing links with the moon 41 , making the "all-suffering eye" a natural inspiration for Moon card iconography. Referring to Judges 8:21, which reads "Gideon […] took the crescents that were on the necks of their camels", Frederick Ellworthy -author of The Evil Eye -wrote: "Who can doubt that those ornaments were the exact prototypes of the identical half-moons we now put upon our harness? We shall see later that these have ever been among the most potent amulets against the evil eye" 42 . Similarly, W.L. Hildburgh observed that "Lunar crescents, as amulets, have in Spain two major intentions: they may be worn as preservative from the effects of "evil eye" (mal de ojo, aojo), 'fascination,' and the like, as caused by persons; or as similarly preservative from a kind of lunar influence which, in the popular mind, seems to be closely associated with mal de ojo" 43 . One root of the apotropaic moon/eye nexus may lie in the ancient Egyptian Wedjat (Eye of Horus) amulet 44 , which "represented the waxing and waning of the moon, and served as a metaphor for protection, strength and perfection" 45 . In the modern-day Middle East, Balkans, Turkey and North Africa, the Evil Eye is thought to be effectively repelled by the nazar, an eye-like amulet typically made from concentric circles of blue and white glass. This is an instance of "like curing like" or -more accurately -"fighting fire with fire", for the glass ornament itself represents the Evil Eye 46 . If the same logic applies to the lunar emblems discussed in the previous paragraph, as seems almost certain 47 , then moon emblems are protective against the Evil Eye because the moon is identified with the Evil Eye 48 .

Conclusions
Given a deep-seated and widespread connection between the moon and the Evil Eye, it should not be too surprising if the origin of the Tarot Moon card were found, in part, to lie in a motif focused on this destructive force. Of course, if the moon in the Tarot card design is in fact identified with the Evil Eye, as it would be if it stands in 41 Dasen,"Probaskania",[189][190] Frederick T. Elworthy "Arab amulets at the present day bear the figure of the thing against which they exert their virtue, and all oriental practices in this line come down from immemorial antiquity". Elworthy, Evil Eye, 133. 48 Hildburgh, "Lunar Crescents", 80-82. moon -is too benign and too distant to pose any real threat. As the surrogate Eye is now free to cast its baleful influence on the sublunar scene without inhibition, its "envenomed exhalations" fall to earth like a rain of poison ( Fig. 1) 49 . It is little wonder that the Moon card of the Tarot deck has long been regarded as a card of evil omen. 49 Heliodorus of Emesa (3 rd or 4 th century CE) referred to the projections of the Evil Eye as "envenomed exhalations"; Hargitai, "Strange Power". Other dystopian influences behind the falling objects may include imagery from the opening of the sixth seal in Revelation 6:12-13, in which "the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to earth as the fig tree drops its winter fruit when shaken by a gale".
for the "all-suffering eye" of the ancient template, then it is easy to see how the card as a whole might from the outset have carried strongly negative connotations. The surviving animals of the talismanic design -now just two quadrupeds and a crustacean -no longer attack the central orb; on the contrary, the canines howl in fear of it, and the crustacean -even were it not ruled by the