The Moon:
Selene, shown here, was the original moon goddess, being on the job long before pushy sorts like Artemis, Pasiphae and Bendis got into the act. Like a lot of goddesses, she fell in love with a handsome human, a king named Endymion. Of course, a lot of gods did the same kind of thing, but most of the guys were the love-em-and-leave-em types, which usually worked out better for everybody in the end. The goddesses, other than Aphrodite, tended to be more faithful, which is where the trouble started.
The ladies wanted to keep their lovers beside them forever, eternally young and handsome. And that meant a lot of begging, pleading and crying before Zeus, who was the only one who was supposed to grant immortality. But in Zeus’s opinion, there were already too many good-looking humans monopolizing the limited number of hot goddesses without his helping them along by making the toy boys immortal. This left the goddesses with an uphill battle.
Selene was one of the few who convinced Zeus to grant her wish. She did so by agreeing to a condition: Endymion could live forever—and remain handsome and youthful—as long as he did so asleep. It might not seem like an ideal arrangement from most people’s perspective, but Selene was happy to visit her lover eternally in his dreams. Some versions of the story have Endymion himself suggesting the compromise, perhaps preferring an unending dream-like existence to a mortal life and a quick death.
The Moon card governs dreams, artistic endeavors, creativity and romance. It indicates that a long-held dream can come true—if the querent is willing to get a little ingenious in his or her methods. Thanks to someone’s creative argument, Endymion still sleeps, as handsome, dashing and oblivious as ever, somewhere in Greece.
The Moon reversed:
Selene, goddess of the moon, and Endymion, her human lover, had a son famous for his beauty. That would seem like a good thing, except that this is an ancient Greek myth. And they liked them pretty and tormented and doomed, did the ancient Greeks. So handsome in a storyline almost always equals trouble, and nowhere was that more true than in the life of Narcissus.
Narcissus flashed his blindingly white smile and bared his cute little dimples to one too many nymphs, who he then left to waste away (as nymphs had a habit of doing) from unrequited love. One of these was Echo, who was a favorite of the goddess Artemis. She was so crazy in love with the heartless Narcissus that, after he laughed in her face, she stumbled off into the wilderness where now only her voice remains. So, when a less wimpy nymph wished that Narcissus could know what unrequited love felt like, Artemis was only too happy to help her out.
Narcissus was lounging by the river one day when he saw the most incredibly attractive face in the water just below him. The fact that it was a male face might have had something to do with why all those nymphs kept striking out, but we digress. Narcissus called out to the young man, but was ignored. He tried to touch him, but every time he did so, the youth disappeared in a ripple of water. Some stories say that, eventually, Narcissus realized that he’d fallen in love with his own reflection, while others keep him clueless to the last. Either way, he couldn’t tear himself away from the water’s edge even long enough to eat, and so eventually, like the nymphs, he wasted away.
Like Narcissus, the moon reversed warns of chasing an impossible dream without knowing when to call it quits. Sometimes giving up can be a good thing, by freeing your attention to focus elsewhere. And if the ancient Greek legends teach anything, it’s that there’s always another fish in the sea.
Or nymph in the river.
Or something like that.