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When director Guillermo del Toro was a young boy in Guadalajara, Mexico, television changed him forever.
But first, it terrified him.
Despite being the tender age of four, he stayed up late for an episode of The Outer Limits called “The Mutant.” In it, an astronaut gets doused with radioactive rain on an alien planet. As he removes his goggles, his eyes swell into bulbous orbs with piercing pupils.
Young Guillermo screamed at the bug-like monstrosity and retreated to bed. At one point his older brother did what many older brothers do and popped out of the darkness wearing plastic eggs on his eyes. Guillermo immediately wet the bed.
For nights after, all young sweet baby Guillermo could see were monsters, in the closet, in the corner. He kept wetting the bed, too scared to get up to pee.
This feeling is The Moon card.
Bumps in the night. Monsters under the bed. The sleep paralysis demon levitating in the corner after your sixth Benadryl (don’t do this).
In pop culture terms, it’s Matthew Rhys’s character having to sleep in a haunted inn in Widow’s Bay or the poor souls flailing about the woods in The Blair Witch Project. That spooky vulnerability. It’s the moment where you, the audience member, feel a big “Nope!” zip up your spine.
The Moon in the tarot speaks to the illusions our minds concoct in the vulnerable darkness and the potent fear that bathes them.
Many of us have experiences similar to young Guillermo’s, where scary cinema viewed too young stoked subsequent night terrors. For my brother, it was Gollum’s lambent eyeballs as they flickered from a crevasse in Moria (in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, for those uninitiated).
We must note that The Moon isn’t actual monsters.
It’s just your projection.
As Biddy Tarot puts it, “The Moon represents your fears and illusions and often comes out when you are projecting fear onto your present and your future, based on your past experiences. You may have a painful memory that caused emotional distress, and rather than dealing with the emotions you pushed them down deep into your subconscious.”
Take a look at the lobster in the card below, scuttling up from the nethers of the subconscious. Here it is not a celebrated thing, bedewed with butter and served on silver. It writhes upward toward the moon’s revealing glow, almost gnashing its primordial pincers in declaration: Look at me.
Many cards show a lobster or crayfish rising from the depths.
This one is by Cathy McClelland and is part of The Star Tarot.
The notion of fear and illusion complexifies when we elevate it from the space of not-appropriate-for-children cinema. It can represent a fear of loss, not being enough, or experiencing trauma.
There is a whole universe of essays we can explore about The Moon. (Let me know if you want more!) But for now, let’s stick to Guillermo.
You might know that, despite young Guillermo’s strife with monsters, he is now the monster guy. How did this happen?
Monster one of many. From an article in Gata Magazine exploring del Toro’s affinity for monsters in his filmmaking
As Biddy Tarot says about working with the intense energies of The Moon: “To remedy this, connect with your subconscious mind and release any fears or anxieties holding you back.” (Easier said than done.)
But this just happened to be what young Guillermo did.
One night he decided he and his bladder had had enough: “I got up and I said to the monsters that I saw in the closet, ‘If you let me go pee, I’ll be your friend forever.’ This was said in earnest. Immediately something magical happened — what my therapist said was a reverse phobia,” del Toro explained. “Basically I bonded with them. I adored them. And I adore them to this day.”
This is the invitation.
One of the questions The Moon asks us is, How can we adore the monsters of our subconscious? How can we befriend something we find terrifying? How can we invite our lobsters — however grotesque, macabre, and bereft of butter — to tea?
To listen to the podcast episode that inspired this dispatch, see What Went Wrong.
Facts I Don’t Know Where Else to Put
Since launching this newsletter this summer, I’ve become a humble fact receptacle. A tidbit garage.
Many simply have no strong connection to a tarot card (although if you see one below, lmk!). I think you’d find them interesting just the same.
Despite their renown as a go-to comfort food, potatoes when first introduced to Europe were viewed as lusty little aphrodisiacs that boosted sex drive. References to potatoes’ ability to boost horniness even found their way into Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Many, many years later, potatoes were the first vegetable to be grown in space. Presumably for reasons unrelated to the above.
Andy Warhol made an 8-hour movie that was just a static shot of the Empire State Building. He said the reason for it was “to see time go by.”
Abraham Lincoln was almost part of the ill-fated Donner Party.
Dog food traces back to Roman times. One of the earliest surviving written accounts of a specialized diet for dogs appears in Marcus Terentius Varro’s De re rustica (c. 37 BCE, Late Roman Republic). Varro recommends barley bread soaked in milk, along with meat scraps, bone soup, and broken bones, and stresses that adequate feeding helps keep dogs from straying.
Thanks for reading and happy spooky season,
Cristina
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