Latest / The Tarot Card Catalogue / The Moon & Little Red Riding Hood

Transcript

The Moon & Little Red Riding Hood · The Tarot Card Catalogue

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Hi and welcome back to the tarot card catalog, the show where we take one tarot card and one story from somewhere in human history and let them mess with each other's meaning for a while.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Today's card is in the moon, and the story is Little Red Riding Hood.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now I know what you might be thinking, that one feels almost too obvious, right?
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: The moon, the forest, the wolf, but I want to go somewhere more specific than the atmosphere, because what I think this pairing actually gives us is a way of understanding the moon card that goes beyond things are unclear or you're confused.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: What little Red Riding Hood knows, what she's living inside of, is something sharper and stranger than confusion.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: And by the end of this, I think that's going to change the card for you a little.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: So let's start with the card itself.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: The moon is the 18th major arcana, or the 19th, depending on how your deck counts, whether it includes a fool at zero or not.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Small detail.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: What matters is that it sits deep in the major arcana, deep into the sequence after the star and before the sun, which is itself a kind of message.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: You're not at the beginning of something, you're in the middle of a crossing.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Most tarot guidebooks will give you a fairly consistent cluster of meanings for the moon upright.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Illusion, confusion, the unconscious, dreams, fear, hidden things, the inability to see clearly.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: And if you look at the writer Waite Smith image, you get all of that laid out pretty literally.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's a moon with a face and it's shedding light, but it's uncertain light, reflected light, not its own.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Below it, a dog and a wolf howl up at it, domesticated and wild side by side.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: A crayfish or a lobster or a monster creeps out of a pool of water.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: Two towers stand in the distance, framing a path that winds between them and disappears into the dark.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: Everything about that image is liminal.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're between things, between waking and sleeping, between the known and the unknown, between the tame and the wild.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the pool at the bottom, that's the unconscious in most readings.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Deep water, the thing that the crayfish is crawling out of slowly, which is either an emergence or haunting, depending on how you're feeling about it that day.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the thing about the moon that I find most interesting in its traditional meanings.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a card of being lost exactly.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's a card of being in a landscape where the light you have is insufficient and you're having to navigate anyway.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: The path in the Ryder Waite Smith image doesn't disappear.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: It keeps going.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can still see it more or less, but you can't trust what you see.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: What looks familiar might not be.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: What looks safe might not be.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Your own perception is part of the problem.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Most readings will tell you that in a moon-card moment, you should slow down, trust your intuition, be careful of deception, your own or someone else's.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: And all of that is genuinely useful, but I think it stays a little abstract, a little floaty, until you put someone in that landscape who has somewhere to be.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: Someone like a girl in a red hood carrying a basket, walking a path through a forest.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, little Red Riding Hood.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: The short version of the long history here is that this story exists in many versions across many centuries and cultures, and there's no single original text.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: The version most people in the English-speaking world grew up with is filtered through Charles Perot's 17th century French literary telling, and then the Brothers Grimm's 19th century German collection.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And those two versions are already pretty different from each other in terms of what happens at the end and what the story seems to be about.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: There are also older folk narratives from China, Japan, Korea, and parts of Africa that involve similar dynamics.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: A child, a predator, a deceptive encounter that predate the European literary version.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: So when we talk about this story, we're really talking about a cluster of related tellings, not one fixed thing.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to name that because the story is richer for being plural, not poorer.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: But here's what most of those versions share in what we're working with today.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: A young girl, she has a red hood or a cloak, which is conspicuous and marks her, is sent through the forest to bring food to her sick grandmother.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: She's given instructions, she has a path to follow.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: She's not supposed to dawdle or stray.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then she enters the forest.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And in the forest, she meets the wolf.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now the wolf is not simply a predator who attacks.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's what makes this story so unnerving.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: The wolf talks.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: The wolf is curious and charming and conversational.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: He asks her where she's going, and she tells him.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: She tells him about her grandmother and the house and how to get there.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't know she's done something dangerous.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: From her position, she's just answered a question from someone who asked politely.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: The wolf takes that information, takes the direct route to the grandmother's house, and gets there first.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: He deals with the grandmother and the grim version she swallowed, and the pro version she's also consumed by the detail shift.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And then he gets into the bed and he waits.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Red arrives.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: She's done nothing wrong exactly.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: She's followed the path or mostly followed it.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Some versions have her dawdling in the flowers, which the story frames as a fault, though I'd argue picking flowers is just what a child does in a forest.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: She knocks on the door, she comes in, she approaches the bed.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And here is the scene that haunts the story.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: She looks at her grandmother and something is wrong.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: The hands are too large, the ears are too large, the eyes, the teeth.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: She can see it kind of.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: She knows something is off, but she's in her grandmother's house in her grandmother's bed, looking at what presents itself as her grandmother.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: The familiar has been colonized by danger and the cues she would normally rely on, the house, the bed, the voice calling her in, all of those have been co-opted.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: The context is lying to her.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's the moon.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's exactly the moon.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because what's happening to Red in that moment is not that she's stupid, and it's not that she's simply been tricked.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's that she's in a landscape where the available information can't be trusted, where the light she has, the familiar house, the familiar voice, is reflected and distorted, not real.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: She's navigating by moonlight in a wolf's house and she doesn't quite know it yet.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: And here's where the story and the card start to do something genuinely interesting to each other.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Because the moon card is often read as a kind of warning about your own perception.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Be careful, don't trust appearances, your fears might be distorting things.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: Which is true.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: But what little Red Riding Hood gives us is the other side of that.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the distortion is not internal.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the landscape itself has been manipulated.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: The wolf created the conditions for her misperception.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: He engineered the uncanny.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: He put himself in the bed, he mimicked the grandmother's voice, he created the scene that would make the familiar seem sufficient.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Red's perception failed her partly because someone worked very hard to make it fail.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: So the moon isn't just about her own confusion.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's about navigating a terrain where confusion has been arranged for you by something that understands your expectations and knows how to wear them.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then, and this is the part I keep coming back to, she asks the questions anyway.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: The hands, the ears, the eyes, the teeth.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: She names what she sees.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: She can't fully trust what she's seeing, but she is still looking, still cataloging, still paying attention to the wrongness even as she's inside it.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's not nothing.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's actually the thing the moon card is asking you to do.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Not to see clearly, you can't, it's nighttime, it's wolf light, but to stay awake to your own unease, to not override the instinct that says something here is too large.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Whether she gets out depends on which version you're reading.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: In Perot, she doesn't, and the story ends there, a cautionary tale with a moral attached.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: In the Grim version, a huntsman arrives and cuts the wolf open and everyone survives.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: In some older folk versions, the girl outwits the wolf herself using her own cunning to escape.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: The story can't decide what it wants to say about whether instinct is enough, which I think is honest actually.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: The moon doesn't promise you'll make it through safely, it just tells you that you're in the crossing.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: So here's where I land with this card after spending time in the forest with Red.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: The received meanings, illusion and confusion and the unconscious fear, hidden things, those are all still there.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not arguing with them.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: But they describe the landscape without describing what it asks of you.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: What little Red Riding Hood adds is a quality that I'd call alert unease, not panic or paralysis.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: This specific embodied experience of moving forward when you can't fully trust what you're seeing and staying awake to the wrongness even when everything around you is arranged to make you comfortable.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: New phrases I'd reach for after this, the manipulated familiar, wolf light, the questions you ask even when you already suspect the answer, the path that keeps going even after the light changes.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: The moon isn't asking you to see clearly, it's asking you to keep asking the questions anyway.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Whose voice is that really?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: And why are those hands so large?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the reflection I'd leave you with is this Where in your life right now are you in a familiar-looking room that might have someone else's furniture in it?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to answer that out loud.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Just sit with it.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Just look at the hands.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: That's it for this one.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for spending time with me, under the moon, and with Red and the Wolf and all that uncertain insufficient like.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to go deeper with any of this, readings, courses, or mentorship, that's exactly what I do.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Danielle, and you can find ways to contact me in the description.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And until next time, the path through the forest doesn't stop at nightfall.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: It just asks you to pay closer attention.