The Lovers Card
Who doesn’t love Love? The Lovers card is a perennial favourite. Who wouldn’t want the promise of passionate, romantic love in a reading? Well, it turns out it’s not as simple as that.
Left: Smith-Waite aka Rider Waite Smith tarot, Right: Universal Tarot de Marseille
In quite a few 20th century decks the Lovers card is illustrated with sexy characters pre/post/mid-coitus, but throw it back to some of the originals and you will see Cupid with a fully dressed couple or, as in the Tarot de Marseilles, you will see Cupid above a man and two women, one “dark” and one “fair”. For this reason, the Lovers card is often associated with a choice: the choice between good and bad or, in a more Freudian interpretation, the choice between mother & wife. Honestly, all of that leaves a bad taste in my mouth (ahem, the sexism!) and the departure from these illustrations and meanings is a breath of fresh air if you ask me.
Modern decks find so many beautiful ways of illustrating the breadth of romantic love! No longer do we need to be constrained by heteronormativity! Thankfully, queer folks can find many representations of themselves or people like them in tarot these days and this is certainly something to be celebrated and continued. As our mission to expand the way this card represents people who use tarot, so do its meanings.
Clockwise from top left: Modern Witch Tarot by Lisa Sterle, Next World Tarot by Christy C. Road, Slow Holler Tarot by Slow Holler collective, Mary-El Tarot by Marie White.
Yes, romantic love and sexuality usually remain pillars of the meanings of Minor Arcana number 6 but that has grown to include self love and communication. In Taschen’s Library of Esoterica - Tarot by Jessica Hundley, she writes, “The Lovers demand equilibrium and authenticity of emotion. They ask one to love while letting go, to give without needing to receive, and to empower without dominating. The Lovers also emphasize the necessity for personal foundation and individual fulfillment before embarking on any union. Self-love is the only path to mature and elevated connection. By standing up for inner beliefs, true desires become manifest.”
“If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”
I would add that I don’t personally think that self-love needs to be a prerequisite for romantic love. It certainly helps to create a better relationship off the bat, but often we come to that self-love through the trials and triumphs of learning to love one another in all of our imperfect and unresolved complexities.
“It takes two to make a thing go right.”
Interplay, interaction, intercourse, interlock, interrogate. All of these “inter” words (inter as a prefix meaning between or among) lead me towards the zodiac sign that corresponds to the Lovers, Gemini. Gemini is the sign of the twins, considered one of the humane signs because its symbol is human as opposed to animal (think Leo) or inanimate (think Libra). And not only is Gemini one human, but two! Twins come from the same source, so to speak, the same womb or even the same cell sometimes. The duality reinforces the interconnection of two people brought together by love. (I’m speaking symbolically. I’m not talking about incest, let’s not go there.)
Gemini is an Air sign and some keywords for Gemini could be communication, intelligence, quickness, lightheartedness, and the list could go on, just a like a Gemini in conversation, there is always more to say! Gemini is ruled by the planet Mercury. That mercurial nature is beautifully symbolized by bees and butterflies, pollinating and communicating with movement through the air.
The duality of two also makes our humans minds reach for the so-called opposites. Light & Dark. Masculine & Feminine. Solar & Lunar. Active & Passive. I would argue that the importance of opposites in this card is less than the importance of interconnectedness, the interplay of meanings, and the interaction of essential qualities. What we do when we focus on the opposites in the Lovers card is project the gender binary and subtle white supremacist ideas onto the tarot. We don’t need to do that. We can use other language that doesn’t reinforce exclusion. Some people like nocturnal/diurnal, for instance. Or we can go even further, dissecting what we mean by masculine or feminine and interrogating our perceptions of self & other. What/who is (y)our exact opposite? Think of how hard that is to actually pin down. Just a fun thought experiment.
For my Lovers pendant, I used the interlocking, DNA-like snakes to symbolize passionate love (& to reference the Biblical references to Eden in the Smith-Waite deck as well as the snakes on the Minor Arcana Two of Cups). Above the interlocking snakes is a winged Sun, embracing the Moon to reference the alchemical marriage of silver & gold and the product of their marriage, the hermaphroditic rebis.
On the reverse of the pendant is a sigil of two (or is it four?) triangles, one pointing up and one pointing down, Fire & Water. This six pointed star is also known as the Star of David, and its inclusion is also a reference to the many symbols of Jewish Mysticism used throughout foundational esoteric tarot decks. Within the triangles is a sideways glyph of Mercury. Arranging Mercury’s glyph on its side makes it appear as three parts: the cross of matter, the Sun’s glyph, and the Moon’s glyph. Above this is the Zodiacal symbol for Gemini.
This blog post was brought to you by the frenetic energy of Gemini & Venus in Mercury! I actually feel like I could keep writing for a while on this one (so many juicy tangents!) but I will close it here with one more quote from RuPaul: “Everybody say LOVE!”
Bibliography
Hundley, J. (2020). Library of Esoterica: Tarot. Köln, GmbH: Taschen.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
