Flash Silvermoon

Flash Silvermoon

Interviewed in 2012 and 2017

Flash Silvermoon, born in 1950 and died in 2017, was named at birth Deborah Kotler. She grew up Jewish in Bayonne, New Jersey. After attending college in Trenton, New Jersey, she moved to New York City. She stirred up New York until she was enticed to move to Melrose, Florida, in 1975, where she lived until her death in 2017.

Flash Silvermoon always had the seed of feminism. In kindergarten her love of music began when she rebelled at being told that girls don’t play the snare drum. This rebellion nurtured her ensuing activism, which continued through high school and college, blossoming as a life-long exploit.

She enrolled in Trenton State University, in New Jersey, intent on majoring in piano and minoring in percussions. Again, she met with resistance to being a female percussionist and to her choice of music. She switched her major to art, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in art.

Flash Silvermoon performed her first, flashy, feminist act by becoming a contestant in the Miss Trenton State Beauty Pageant during her university years. Her motivation wasn’t to flaunt her beauty. Her ambition was to flaunt her radical feminist self. She filled the auditorium by inviting members of Students’ Committees for Radical and Activist Politics (SCRAP), and that was, as she said, “pretty much all the radicals in the tri-state area.” She was threatened with expulsion from the college if a riot broke out. She didn’t win the contest, but the next day, her politics were on the front page of the local newspaper. It was a win for Flash Silvermoon.

After university, Flash Silvermoon worked at Bonnie and Clyde’s lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, in New York City, New York. She read Tarot cards and played music there. It was there that she met Corky Culver, who convinced Flash and Flash’s then partner, Pandora, to visit Melrose, Florida. A year later, and many Tarot cards later, Flash and Pandora made a permanent move from New York to Florida, where Flash eventually found sanctuary in the home she called Moonhaven.

In Florida, Flash Silvermoon zealously put her talents to use serving, healing, and uniting two-legged and four-legged beings alike. She was a prolific author, musician, and healer.

While working on a Tarot book, The Wise Woman’s Tarot, Flash Silvermoon began creating a vivid deck of Tarot cards, illustrated by Barbara Vogel. Her e-book, Janis Joplin and Me: 40 Years of Music and Magic, portrays the love and the personal, psychic relationship she had with the musician. Her book The Planetary Handbook describes the ways that astrological signs can help people understand themselves and their relation to the world.

Flash Silvermoon taught classes on Tarot cards and healing techniques at her Moonhaven Mystery School of Earth Magic for Women and at the University of Florida. Her spiritual path, self-defined as the Rainbow Goddess tradition, led her to help organize gatherings and circles such as Woman Spirit Rising in the 1990s and Wise Women festivals from 2003 to 2010. These gatherings celebrated women of many cultures, honoring diverse healing and spiritual traditions. Flash also worked with local shelters to conduct ceremonies for women to help them rebalance after rape.

Flash Silvermoon’s first love was music, and it shared space in her heart with her more esoteric pursuits. She became an expert on the keyboard and the guitar, and was a spirited percussionist. Flash’s love of music continued throughout her life as she performed up and down the East Coast. She recorded two music CDs, Flash Silvermoon and Phases of the Silvermoon.

Flash Silvermoon loved animals, and they were a big part of her life. She considered herself an animal communicator and vibrational healer, and volunteered her services at animal sanctuaries around the area. Her book Lifetime Companions: Love Never Dies is about her healing work with animals.

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