The Moon: Anxiety, Intuition, Tarot, and Ableism
image: a curly haired black person fretting. they’re wearing lipstick, a leather jacket, and a stripey turtleneck.
Tarot's Moon card operates like a fog.
You know there's something on the other side, even inside of it. Unfortunately, the grey mist has rendered its exact shape, size, and identity a mystery.
Any attempt to shed light on the objects in your view can actually make matters worse! The light bounces off the fog, further obscuring your target.
So you drive slow and try make it to a safe place. Even pull over on the side of the road. At least that's what driver's ed said, right?
Tarot's Moon often brings anxiety, confusion, and big dramatic trauma responses pouring out. It can also herald prophetic dreams, intuitive breakthroughs, and psychic art. This twin burden and help often beg the question "well, which is which?"
"How do I tell the difference between anxiety and intuition" is the question I'm asked most as a tarot teacher.
It's an important one, and can often trace its roots back to a societal trauma: the conflation of spiritual gifts and madness.
The Moon is a manifestation of that conflation.
It illustrates how those two aspects of living in a body/mind live side by side. It highlights how that complex truth can make us doubt reality, and ourselves.
The common idea that psychic power is impossible, and thus those of us who practice are mad makes ableism a threat to all spiritualists and spiritual folks.
The desire to make a clean line where there is “pure, good” intuition, absent from any kind of madness is rooted in ableism.
The idea that the presence of anxiety negates intuitive cues is ableist too.
This is wrongly interpreted to mean that spiritually gifted people can't have anxiety, or any other mental illness. That the presence of mental illness means the absence of The Gift (tm).
To me, it means that those with spiritual gifts are duty bound to seek out mental health care.
The assumption that it's one or the other makes it much harder for people with spiritual gifts to get care.
Health Justice Commons defines the Medical Industrial Complex as "comprised of interlocking institutions like big pharma, multi-billion dollar health insurance corporations, medical technology companies, and governmental regulatory bodies like the FDA and EPA."
It's built on the same ableist, capitalist principles as the rest of American society.
In a time where pop-psychology is the backbone of queer parlance, one can forget that the whole MIC is a fuck. It's intended to pathologize, and developed with white supremacist influences, including phrenology and racial pathology and hysteria diagnoses.
Its the reason you see white women labeled with Pathological Demand Avoidance while Black kids get Oppositional Defiant Disorder diagnoses.
As a former indigo child, psych survivor, and a person with intuitive gifts, I can hold nuance for how much psychiatry can help, and how much it can hurt. I don't need to discount one to exalt the other.
It's the same with anxiety and intuition. I don't have to pretend that anxiety is good (I have OCD so serious I've been hospitalized for it.) to be honest about how it's intertwined with my gifts.
After all, if I intuit something that's complex, or even harmful, I probably will have anxiety about it. I have an anxiety disorder!
I only have one brain, and one body. My intuition runs through the whole thing, from the SLE to the autism, and yes, to the OCD. There's never going to be a clean split between them, because I am only one person.
There's also never going to be a clean split between them because, as much as I have found psychiatry helpful at times, it does pathologize certain political and spiritual beliefs.
There's drapetomania, what white people believed was enslaved Black people's pathological desire to be free. There's hysteria, could be any problem a woman had from fibromyalgia to major depressive disorder.
The DSM is not a neutral document. The split between madness and giftedness serves only our oppressors.
But every day, I see spiritualists propping it up. When Danielle Jackson used astrology as a front to kill her family, the split was brought back up.
What was not said enough is that Danielle Jackson had gotten into Q conspiracies and C*VID denialism and vaxx skepticism. Her terrible, deadly actions were as likely to have been due to her politics as her spirituality, or her mental illness—if she had any, which no one can know.
This, too, is what we can learn from The Moon. When tensions are high, we see what we want to see. It can be hard to see the forest for the trees, the whole for its parts when The Moon's around.
When people try to vacillate between the parts that are anxiety, and the parts that are intuition, they fail to notice that it's all happening at once.
In the same way that someone can be brilliant, an asshole, a bigot, and a good parent. In the same way that someone can be very self-absorbed and manage to be nice, but fail to be kind.
Nuance is a beautiful, terrible thing, and it's a huge part of the world.
The Moon calls on us to hold that kind of nuance for ourselves, and those around us. Unfortunately, when The Moon comes up, we likely can't.
Usually, the best thing we can do when The Moon reigns is pause, and try not to make any major decisions. I feel the same way when I'm very anxious.
If you've followed me for a while, you probably noticed I take long social media breaks. That's because the absorptive quality of social media can make me very anxious. I need time to calm down before I can come back.
Disability justice means we create systems of health care that serve our whole selves. I want healthcare that doesn't erase parts of me to treat the rest, or use my gifts to deny or mandate certain kinds of treatment.
Holding the complexity of anxiety along with intuition can make us more likely to seek help when we need it. Hopefully care providers will learn from us, and improve the way they serve us.
Further Thoughts
"The way we talk about healing in spiritual spaces can be fucked up! At best, it's vague and sprawling. At worst, its just straight up ableism. No wonder it's unable to account for what cannot be healed, only accepted.
It is in these moments of radical, uncanny acceptance where we find tarot's Temperance."