Lovers: 6
Astrological correspondence: Gemini
Kabbalistic letter: 
Zayin
Path on Tree of Life: Binah (Understanding) to Tipheret (Beauty)
Here is a card almost everyone wants to get, especially in readings that ask that perennial favorite question, “When will I meet my soul mate?” In its modern versions, it speaks of love, deep relationships, fulfillment. But that was not always the case.
Lovers cards from Visconti, Marseille, Rider, Golden Dawn Ritual, Egyptian & Shining Tribe
The older name, or at least theme, for this card is choice, and many people still see it that way. The Golden Dawn linked it to Gemini, the twins, which gives us the concept of possibilities. The idea of a requirement to choose goes back to the Marseille image, which shows a young man between two women, seemingly deciding which he will choose for a partner. Above him, Cupid prepares to shoot an arrow, as if to inspire him with love.
It often strikes me that people miss the implications of the arrow. Love, it reminds us, takes the choice from our hands, or at least a rational choice, the kind where you consider both options and decide which makes the most sense.
The image of union is primarily modern. Arthur Edward Waite kept the basic structure of the Marseille image but changed it in significant ways. Instead of a young man between two women, all in proper dress, we see a single man and woman, both naked and unashamed, and instead of Cupid with his bow, an angel holds a hand over each, as if to bless and unite them, perhaps a marriage without need of church or ritual.
Look at the Rider Lovers alongside the Devil:
The Devil appears like a parody of the earlier card. In fact, the Devil is the older image, close to the Marseille “original,” above.
In one of their most brilliant designs, Waite and Smith worked backwards from the Devil to create the Lovers, so that card six shows us a perfect relationship, while the Devil becomes a degraded or destructive relationship.
Some decks, especially the Thoth Tarot of Aleister Crowley and Frieda Harris, depict a highly ritualized hieros gamos, or sacred marriage. Hermetically, a hieros gamos shows a union of opposites, in which the masculine and feminine become mixed. The World card, often described as a “hermaphrodite,” fully embodies the concept of union. The Lovers card points to that complete expression.
The concept of sacred marriage goes back far beyond Hermeticism. In many “Pagan” cultures (I use the word loosely to signify nature-based traditions, especially pre-Christian Europe), the king or chieftain would symbolically marry the Earth Goddess, sometimes enacted by a priestess, a sexual union meant to help fertilize the land. In this sense, the Lovers becomes a culmination of the previous cards, with the Hierophant ritually marrying the Empress (the land) to the Emperor (the king, the social order), who themselves embody the masculine and feminine principles first shown in the Magician and High Priestess.
With the High Priestess, we looked at the Kabbalist idea of the female aspect of God, called the Shekinah, in exile from the male. The Lovers depicts their reunion. In some Kabbalist traditions, humans help bring about this reunion through sexual love. This is one of the great Hermetic/Kabbalist truths: that human beings participate in the divine, that in fact a divided god cannot heal without human involvement.
Do all these ideas belong strictly to the modern version? Consider the Visconti. Cupid wears a blindfold (“Love is blind,” we say), but the young man consciously looks up at him, as if eager to receive the spear aimed at his heart. Cupid’s Greek name is Eros, god of love. Homeric myth describes Eros as the son of Aphrodite (the Empress). Plato and the Mystery cults saw Eros as the first principle of creation.
Hermetically, Eros—love—suffuses all creation, an idea that perhaps illustrates a difference between science and Hermeticism. In Newtonian physics, a force called gravity defines the attraction that holds Earth in orbit around the sun. Gravity is seen as a mechanical connection, and science cannot explain how this “action-at-a-distance” operates (Einstein created a different version of gravity in his general relativity theory). Hermeticism describes the attraction as one of love, of Eros. The relationship between Earth and the sun is both sexual and sacred. Think of the way an attraction to someone across a room can hold our attention, or we can feel connected to a lover halfway across the world. As above, so below. Newton was, in fact, a Hermeticist, and he may have intended his theory of gravity to contain a secret message.
What do the early interpreters tell us? Once again, we find a surprising mix of ideas, with “choice” being only one strand.
Some Lovers Meanings
Excerpted from Mystical Origins of the Tarot by Paul Huson.
Pratesi’s Cartomancer (1750): Love.
De Mellet (1781): Love. A man hesitating between Vice and Virtue.
Court de Gébelin (1773-82): Marriage.
Lévi (1855): The Hebrew letter Vau, Vice, and Virtue. Interlacement, lingam (the Hindu term for phallus [author’s note: specifically of Shiva], which Levi introduces in his Doctrine of Transcendental Magic as a kabbalistic symbol of Venus), entanglement, union, combination, equilibrium.
Christian (1870): Arcanum VI. The Two Roads. The Ordeal. A man standing motionless at a crossroads. Two women stand each with a hand on his shoulder, indicating one of the two roads. The woman on the right personifies virtue, the one on the left, vice. Above and behind, the genius of Justice, borne on a nimbus of blazing light, is drawing his bow and directs the arrow of punishment at Vice. The whole scene expresses the struggle between the passions and conscience.
Mathers (1888): The Lovers. Trials surmounted. Reversed: Unwise plans, failure when put to the test.
Golden Dawn (1888-96): The Children of the Voice Divine, Oracles of the Mighty Gods. The Lovers. Inspiration, motive power, impulse.
Grand Orient (Waite, 1889, 1909): Lovers. Material union, affection, desire, natural love, harmony, equilibrium.
Waite (1910): The Lovers. Attraction, love, beauty, trials overcome. Reversed: Failure, foolish designs. Another account [Etteila] speaks of marriage frustrated.
Love is the earliest meaning, from the manuscript discovered by Pratesi. De Mellet says love as well (it seems rather obvious, doesn’t it?) but introduces the concept of choice between vice and virtue. Lévi keeps the vice/virtue concept but adds union. Paul Christian emphasizes choice, details it, and—curiously—makes the archer Justice, who, he says, aims the arrow not at the young man about to fall in love, but at Vice. It takes Mathers, then the Golden Dawn, then Waite, to return to the seemingly obvious idea that the Lovers means lovers. Waite especially emphasizes attraction and union.
Notice that choice does not mean the need to decide between two equally valid options, such as what to wear to a party, or what job to take, or even whom to marry. Instead, it means moral choice, good and bad, Vice and Virtue. Medieval and Rennaisance imagery often allegorized this choice as two women, one blond, one dark-haired. Blonds in those days did not have more fun, and no one thought of them as dumb. Instead, their light coloring made them appear pure to people who polarized light and darkness. Dark hair and complexion appeared more earthly, more tempting because it was more physical.
We might give a modern slant to the idea of choice and sexuality. In the early cards of the Fool’s progress, we see him encountering various aspects of life that he must understand and assimilate—principles in the Magician and High Priestess, nature and social rules as well as mother and father in the Empress and Emperor, education and tradition in the Hierophant. These all involve learning about things essentially outside of us. The Lovers shows a personal experience, that of sexuality. When we become adolescents, we begin to make our first independent choices. Often our parents will disapprove. And the choices do not involve only love and sex. We begin to think for ourselves, to question our parents’ and society’s beliefs. We begin to become independent people.
As well as pushing us to become people in our own right, sexuality teaches a vital metaphysical lesson, the power of mind. Because it happens to all of us, we don’t notice how strange this is, but we can just look at someone, or a picture, or simply think about a person or a situation, and our bodies become physically aroused without ever being touched.
From the Marseille-inspired themes of choice, sexuality, and adolescence, we return to the Rider tradition. The naked man and woman, symbol of fulfilled relationships, are Adam and Eve. The flamelike leaves behind Adam represent the Tree of Life, while behind Eve the serpent winds around the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But something is very different here from the Bible story. There, Adam and Eve commit a disastrous act by eating the fruit. God expels them from the garden, placing a seraph (a kind of angel) with a flaming sword to prevent their return. In the Lovers card, the angel blesses the union. The picture becomes subversive in that it supports knowledge and desire.
The Hebrew word translated as “knowledge” is Da’ath, which also appears as a kind of hidden sephirah on the Tree of Life, in the gap between the top three sephiroth and the bottom seven. Da’ath carries connotations of sexuality, as in the famous line “He knew her in the biblical sense.” We can look at the Lovers card as symbolic of Tantra and other sexual practices designed to awaken kundalini energy and move us towards enlightenment. Again, we might contrast this card with the Devil. There sex becomes its own end, physical release without either spirituality or real emotional connection. Of course, sometimes this is just what we want. Like all Tarot cards, the Devil has its place.
In the Rider picture, the man looks to the woman and the woman looks to the angel, whose blessing connects them, like closing a circuit so that energy can move. This too is subversive. Western culture, especially in the Middle Ages but even today in some places, has described men as rational and women as emotional, with the further idea that rational men are closer to God, who is pure reason, while women are closer to animals. Therefore, women were not to speak in church but let their husbands speak for them. Here the man, in a sense, goes through the woman to see the angel. Since these are not people but symbols, we can say that the masculine must go through the feminine to reach the divine.
This does not so much reverse the roles as reverse their significance. In other words, the rational masculine can serve us well in certain aspects of life, but to reach spiritual consciousness it must go through feminine instinct. Yang must embrace yin to experience Tao. To put it another way, the conscious self must travel through the unconscious to reach superconsciousness, the divine self. In the three-line structure of the Major Arcana, the first line represents the challenges of consciousness, of our place in the world. The second shows a journey through unconscious to initiation, death, and rebirth. The third takes us into the realm of spirit, called superconsciousness. The Lovers card codifies this as the relationship between the man, the woman, and the angel.
It also can show us a picture of ourselves, with our own conscious, unconscious, and higher consciousness brought together and flowing with dynamic energy. If you use the Rider deck or one of its variants, it is worth taking this card out and studying it, writing about it, meditating with it. It holds powerful mysteries.
The Rider deck contains three angels, seen in the Lovers, Temperance, and Judgement. Opinions vary, but I see them as Lovers/Raphael, Temperance/Michael, and Judgement/Gabriel. Raphael means “healing power of God.” Love heals. (Since there are four archangels, where is the fourth, Uriel? We will answer this later, but for now see if you can find another Major card with a winged figure standing above two lower ones.)
The Lovers card represents one of Waite’s major changes from the Marseille. Until the Golden Dawn version was published, people assumed that the Rider came from the Hermetic Order. In fact, the Golden Dawn shows a very different picture, the Greek hero Perseus rescuing the maiden Andromeda from a sea monster.
The Shining Tribe Lovers comes from a meditation I did with the Rider version. When I entered the picture (for this technique, see the Readings chapter), Adam and Eve were having a picnic. There they were, naked, with the angel above them, but now behind a redwood table with potato salad and barbecue. When I went to join them, however, the angel swooped me up into the sky for a passionate kiss. After I drew the picture, two things struck me. One was that in most versions of the card, the figures do not actually touch each other. They present a formal arrangement. The Shining Tribe version lets us see the way love transforms us, lifts us. We often think of sex as tawdry, or funny, or just exciting, but sex can give us a glimpse of divine union.
The second thing the picture does is open up the genders of the two figures. Most versions show a man and a woman (or a man and two women). Some lesbian feminist decks depict two women; very few decks show two men. In the Shining Tribe, because the bodies embrace, we cannot identify their gender. They go beyond limited identities.
Shortly after I finished the Shining Tribe deck, I attended a myth and theatre festival in France that was dedicated to Aphrodite. As part of my contribution, I did a Shining Tribe reading. The first card was the Lovers! Looking at it, I realized that it teaches a lesson of self-love, of the human and the divine inside of us joining together as lovers. When we feel most human—weak, vulnerable, struggling—we must embrace our own divinity. When we feel most angelic and powerful, wise, archetypal, we should make sure we embrace our humanity. And these two aspects do not simply join together, they love each other. This too is the message of the card.
The Lovers in any deck heads up one of the most powerful of triads. The sixth position includes Lovers, Death, and Judgement—love, death, and resurrection. Love is like death in that it takes us beyond ego. No matter how much we might work at being great lovers, how much we might try to project an image, in the act of love we must let go of self, at least for a moment. In the Middle Ages, people called orgasm “the little death.” The idea actually came from a belief that a man shortened his life by six or seven seconds every time he climaxed. This belief came from a too-literal understanding of esoteric practices of withholding orgasm to transform energy. But even with such a negative idea, men still pursued sex, still surrendered to love.
And the connection to Judgement, the resurrection card? Love heals.
What do we say when this card appears in readings? First of all, it signals love, so that we often welcome it joyously. Obviously, this meaning becomes strongest when we have asked about a possible relationship, but even in a reading about, say, a new job, the Lovers can mean meeting someone, especially if other cards support this idea, such as the Two of Cups. If the Hierophant and/or the Four of Cups appears with the Lovers, the combination hints at marriage.
At the same time, other traditional meanings may apply, especially a choice. The querent may have to make some difficult choice, maybe between a temptation and what the person knows he or she should do. Vice and virtue. Or especially with a Marseille deck, the Lovers card can mean a choice between possible partners.
In business readings, the card can signal a good and fruitful partnership, or again a significant choice to be made.
Another possible meaning is adolescence, or a person coming to a new level of themselves. Finally, it can mean a person in harmony with her or his various levels.
Reversed, it means, first of all, not love. If someone asks, “Will I meet a partner at this event (new job, etc.)?” or “Will this relationship become serious?” or “Will I meet my soul mate in the next six months?” the reversed Lovers card says, “Probably not. Not this time.”
The Lovers upside down also can indicate a hard choice or someone who avoids such a choice. It may indicate someone not in touch with some aspect of her- or himself, or, in the case of a young person, a troubled adolescence.
A Lovers Reading
1. How have I experienced love in my life?
2. What has it done?
3. What do I desire?
4. What holds me back?
5. What does love ask of me?
6. What can love give me?
