The moon (which we honour on Mondays/“moondays”) is associated with intuition, a source of knowledge that has little to do with assembling facts or calculating data. It’s often mistaken for imagination, and in school we get it hammered into us that deductions from fact-based information is knowledge and everything else is fantasy. But the unseen world—made of realms without measurables of time, space or proportion—can only be described by relationships, or what magicians once called “correspondence”. Gold is associated with the sun not just because of colour, but because they share intrinsic properties and, therefore, are linked spiritually. The owl is associated with wisdom because it’s a nocturnal animal with excellent night vision, able to detect things usually invisible in the dark—making the owl a close friend of the moon and a symbol of esoteric or occult knowledge.
The study of correspondences is the foundation of intuitive interpretation. Traditions that seem very different—for example tarot, hermetic qabbalah and astrology—are actually various modes of exploring the same subject: the transformation of human consciousness from a state that contends only with the material world, to one of awareness expanded to include the whole complement of What Is. “Deep Knowing” requires trust that knowledge actually can come from outside our ken, through seemingly tenuous links of words or concepts that hold far more meaning that we could possibly imagine. The value of intuitive practice comes from repeated experiences, no matter how small, of coming to know things without knowing how or why, and trusting that knowing before having it validated externally.
(Deck: Wisdom of the Oracle by Colette Baron-Reid)
