Let’s take our monthly pause to reflect on where we are in our crone journey with a Crone Moon Tarot pull.
Why the Crone Moon? Well, the Crone Moon, aka last quarter moon, falls exactly halfway between the full moon and the new moon. It is half illuminated and half dark. From this liminal space, the light continues its retreat. The crone embraces this time of growing darkness. She knows this is where the real work happens.
New here? The full explainer of moon science, phases, and symbolism and of the crone moon tarot spread lives here.
The Moon in Gemini
I think the Gemini moon is the best moon. Why do you ask? Because it is my moon sign! Gemini is the sign of the twins. By its nature it holds dualities and is fond of both/and situations. Gemini is ruled by Mercury, so it is intellectually curious and wordy. When you pair Gemini with the moon, you can find yourself intellectualizing and rationalizing emotions as well as having mercurial flip-flops in feelings. Gemini moons are when you find yourself calling up your best friend about an emotionally wrought situation in your life, spewing verbal diarrhea all over them, and talking yourself in circles about what to do. Then you wake up the next morning and do the opposite.
What’s coming
New Moon in Virgo—September 10 Virgos love to be of service. This new moon is a time to pick a new goal and use the organizing practical vibes of Virgo to get you started on your way.
Full Moon in Aries—September 26 Aries is the warrior. It takes charge and asks for bold action. Emotions may run hot, but you’ll need to that to release the BS that has been weighing on you.
Next Crone Moon in Cancer—October 3 If the current Crone Moon is about thinking our feelings, the one in October will be about feeling our feelings. I’m glad there isn’t a moon that is about eating your feelings.
A Note on Tarot
Tarot is for entertainment and self-reflection. It does not predict the future or tell your fortune. I invite you to look at the pictures and symbols on the cards and exercise your brain to put them together in a way that is meaningful to you. Skeptics welcome.
The Deck
Today, I am using the Mythos Tarot by Helena Elias.
As you saw in my Sick Day post, I’ve been really into Greek Mythology lately. I love this particular deck because every single card is paired with a figure from Greek mythology. Get ready because today’s reading is going to have many layers—the spread, the cards, the myths, the zodiac sign. My head is already spinning. Totally appropriate for a Gemini Moon.
Now on to Our Reading
What to Celebrate: Queen of Cups/Phoebe Reversed
This card is a reminder to celebrate the light of the last moon cycle. What did it bring that is worth honoring before we retreat further into the darkness of the crone moon?
Phoebe’s name mean “Bright” which is totally appropriate because she is the Titan Goddess of intellect and prophecy. Her influence over light, wisdom, and oracles flows through her decedents. She is the grandmother of Apollo, Artemis, and Hecate, and she is said to have gifted Apollo the Oracle at Delphi for his birthday.
Paring Phoebe with the Queen of Cups is brilliant, especially under the Gemini moon. Phoebe infuses wisdom and clarity into the Queen’s compassion and emotional intuition. This is a powerful combo of mind and heart.
She is reversed. So….maybe we haven’t blended our minds and hearts too well over the past month. But that’s okay. Maybe we let the Queen of Cups take over and our emotions poured out all over the place leaving Phoebe to come behind us trying to use our brain to soak up the mess.
For a chronic over-thinking Gemini moon, like myself, I think this IS something to celebrate. See…there I go thinking again. Find a time you let your emotions or intuition lead and celebrate it.
What to Examine: Nine of Swords/Phobos
Just as the moon reflects the light of the sun and invites us to celebrate our wins, it also reflects to us what we are holding onto and need to set down before we retreat further into the darkness.
Even if you know nothing about Greek Mythology or Tarot, this card is pretty self-explanatory. Fear. We need to examine what scares us.
Phobos is the god of fear and panic and his name is literally the root word for phobia. He and his brother Deimos (dread) both accompany their father Ares into battle. Of note, their mother is Aphrodite and without love there would be no fear or dread in war.
Phobos is a little on the nose for the Nine of Swords, the classic anxiety card. In the RWS imagery, the Nine of Swords is a person sitting up in bed with 9 swords over their heads. I know Phobos and Deimos have both come to me at night.
I love the detail on this version of the Nine of Swords. As the swords pierce him, his skin is cracking and gold light is seeping out through the cracks. You could be cynical and say it is just the golden ichor of the gods. But I want to look at it as only by examining our fear can we slowly chisel it away to reveal the golden light inside.
What fear is holding back your shine?
What to Release: The High Priestess/Persephone
As the reflected light of the sun recedes it becomes more difficult to see, and we need to rely more on our own intuition and guiding light than on what we see around us. The release of the Crone asks us what we need to quietly set down before going further on our crone journey.
I am loving this card for release. Partly because I LOVE Persephone. I mean, what a boss? Versions of her tale range from the terrible to the horrific. But in the end, she transforms from Cora (a generic maiden) to Persephone, the bad-ass Queen of the Underworld. She has equal power to Hades, and she is the one the heroes seek on their quests—Orpheus, Odysseus, Heracles. Some say she was tricked into eating the pomegranate seeds. Others say they were her excuse. Either way that girl took Pomegranates and made POM Juice.
It takes some strong intuition to be able to play the hand she was dealt and still rise to be Queen. I guess that is why she is on the card of intuition, The High Priestess. Intuition is what guides us as we start feeling our way around in the darkness of the Crone Moon. And Persephone knows a thing or two about transitioning from light to dark and back again.
Persephone released the “poor me” story when she changed her name from Cora and crowned herself Queen. What story do you need to release to move you from maiden in distress to the Crone Queen you are?
The Threshold: Nine of Pentacles/Plutus
The half illumination and half dark of the Crone Moon is a liminal threshold moment. Everything in the cycle has led us here, and now it is our time to decide on how we will proceed.
Here we are with one of Persephone’s brothers, or maybe her son, Plutus. Don’t you love how the genealogy is hard to track in Greek myths, but you can bet that everyone is related a little more closely than should be comfortable?
Plutus is the god of wealth. He is often depicted with an overflowing cornucopia. One of his main myths is that he was blinded by Zeus to ensure that he gave out his gifts without favoritism. Literally giving in the dark. As in all Greek myths, this is grotesque yet beautiful.
I know Plutus can’t, but can you see how that all ties in with the Nine of Coins energy of material success and rewards of hard work? In the traditional RWS Nine of Pentacles you see a person in a beautiful garden that looks ready to fill Plutus’s cornucopia. In fact, I just went back to double check—the card doesn’t have a cornucopia on it, but one wouldn’t be out of place.
What does this have to do with the threshold? Well, we already have the abundance of the Nine of Coins. Plutus doesn’t make us justify it. Maybe our threshold under this Gemini Crone Moon is deciding the story we do or do not want to tell ourselves about it.
Intention: The Lovers/Aphrodite Reversed
In the darkness of the Crone’s Moon, the distraction of the light melts away. It is time to rest, reflect, and recover. Our inner crone whispers to us about our intentions for when the light returns.
Aphrodite was born from sea foam after Uranus was castrated by his son, Cronus, and the pieces were thrown in the ocean. Grotesque and beautiful. When we Examined we learned Aphrodite is the mother of Phobos and Deimos. Fear and Dread born from Love and War. Aphrodite is more than just the goddess of love and beauty. She is the foil to many of life’s hardships and she is present in places we often forget to look.
We pigeonhole her to “love” but her appearance on The Lovers card runs deeper than that. The Lovers card is just as misunderstood as Aphrodite is. It is a card about choice, and not always romantic choice. In fact, in astrology-tarot parings, The Lovers is paired with Gemini. Twins. Duality.
The card shows up reversed here. That doesn’t mean it is about making the wrong choice. It is about how much harder it is to make a choice when the head and the heart are fighting each other.
When setting your intention for the Crone Moon ask yourself what you would want if you didn’t have to explain it to anyone, even yourself.
The Crone Speaks: Six of Swords/Eos Reversed
Your inner crone has seen all five Crone Moon cards, and she has something to say about it. Listen up. She doesn’t stutter.
Remember the first Crone Speaks? It was the Six of Swords, and I told you it was my card. Well, here she is reversed for today’s reading. What a cute little wink from the Gemini moon about duality.
Eos is one of those goddesses you don’t hear a lot about. Until you start reading The Odyssey, and then you see her every several pages—the rosy fingered dawn. As the goddess of the dawn, Eos opens the gates of heaven for her brother Helios the sun god to pass through and she often leads the way in her own horse drawn chariot.
Aphrodite cursed Eos to desire mortal men after she caught her sleeping with Ares. This led to the tragic tale of Tithonus, a mortal prince of Troy. Letting her heart override her head, Eos successfully asked Zeus to give Tithonus immortality, but she forgot to ask for eternal youth to go with it. Poor Tithonus is still aging to this day.
Eos didn’t overthink her desire for Tithonus. She didn’t think about it at all. She just asked for forever and didn’t think what forever would look like.
The Crone sent Eos here as a warning. She is the opposite of the overthinking Gemini moon. Her reversal reminds us that we need the overthinking part of the Gemini moon. Feelings without thinking are just as dangerous as thinking without feeling.
Putting It All Together:
We started off this month talking about how the Gemini Moon is about dualities, words, and thinking over feeling. We saw that story play out throughout the cards.
We started with Phoebe, the goddess of intellect and prophecy trying to help us mop up our feelings that spilled everywhere in our celebration of the prior month. Our deeper examination brought out Phobos—the child of Love and War—a powerful duality. We got a lesson in intuitive perspective shifting and personal story rewriting from Persephone, the ultimate Queen of Duality, light, and dark. Plutus reminded us that we already have good fortune and the story we wrote about ourselves doesn’t have to justify the good fortune for us to enjoy it. Aphrodite, on the card of Gemini (The Lovers) underscored the importance of dualities in our intention setting. We shouldn’t let our head or our heart win out but rather work to balance them. Eos makes sure we remember that.
Aphrodite has earned a separate discussion in this reading because she is showing up in multiple cards. She shows up first as Phobos’s mother in Examine, and then on her own card for Intention, then again behind the scenes in Eos’s story. Fear and Dread aren’t her only children either. They have a sister, Harmonia, Harmony itself. Which means the same duality that produces fear also produces the thing fear is afraid of losing. (For other Greek mythology lovers out there temporarily forget about Harmonia’s cursed necklace).
So, by the time we get to the Crone’s extra message of Eos, Aphrodite isn’t randomly showing up again. She is making a point. She doesn’t want us stuck in the foolish all-feeling maiden phase like Cora or Eos. She also doesn’t want us to fall into the trap of thinking that the Gemini moon is trying to set for us. She wants us to step into our full Crone Power, and equally balance both feeling and thought, head and heart.
Challenge accepted, Aphrodite.
We will touch base again on October 3rd’s Crone Moon in Cancer to celebrate all you accomplish this month and use Gemini’s energy for a more in-depth analysis of our crone journey.
Journal Prompts
The crone does not assign homework. But if you want to go deeper, here are some questions worth sitting with.
Where have you been explaining a feeling instead of letting yourself have it?
What fear are you examining honestly, versus which one is just noise?
What are the two halves of you currently arguing about, and what would it take for them to agree?
Are there any cards or myths that spoke to you? Tell me in the comments.
The content on Crone Powers is for informational and entertainment purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice. I am a doctor, but I AM NOT YOUR DOCTOR. Always consult your medical and mental health professionals before ADDING—NEVER SUBSTITUTING—spiritual modalities to your care. Remember, woo only works when you do the work.
The views and opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of my employer or any institution with which I am affiliated.