The Lovers
Overview
The Lovers: Archetype & Symbolism
Ah, the Lovers! Perhaps the most anticipated card in any Tarot spread, the Lovers card shows a man and a woman.
stands for the principle of partnership, love. The Lovers card symbolises decision-making, and choice. Do you feel passionate when making your desired choice? If yes, it is the way to go.
Love may be central to the card’s meaning, but what does love actually mean? Despite its seeming simplicity, we mostly don't know what love is. The young lovers Romeo and Juliet die for one another - their love was overpowering to the level of denying them the survival instinct. This speaks to the imagination. Yet the word ‘love’ has been overused, abused, and distorted - most people believe that love is the emotion you feel when you want to be with a particular person more than anyone else. Love trumps fame, fortune, and wealth - in its distorted form, it is the truest form of power. Love keeps the human species alive by awakening hormones, stimulating sexual connections and creating babies. We may wish to add some romanticism into this equation to make ourselves feel better, which is not wrong, but far from the truth of the matter and only delusion. The Lovers card is about having the courage to know truth with another, and if that other is first God — in non-religious terms, Oneness — it eventually shows in our relationships with people and states of being. Love is godliness.
The Lovers: Advice, Lesson, and Higher Wisdom
Love does not depend upon a partner. The deepest mystery is finding love within ourselves - it is hence not a relationship, but a state that does not depend on anything external. Only then will we know how to relate using that state of being. The partnership with your lover is an expression of the love you have for yourself. If this self-love is sustainable and genuine, so will your relationship be. If you are dependent on the other for that feeling of love, it is a vulnerable state, because it can end. But if you internalize it as something of you, you can access and present that to whomever you are with. That's the power of the Lovers card. The truth is that love is the only thing that matters. It is bigger and more important than our spirituality or worldly power.
Love is deeper than everything, and understanding the mystery of love will not come through relationships alone, even profound connections like those with our children, parents, or lovers. The deeper mystery is a spiritual experience, and through spiritual practice, we find that through love, truth is sustainable. Without love, truth is unsustainable. This connection between love and truth shows that each depends on the other. There is no love without truth. If you're not truthful with your lover, do you love them? If you cannot accept someone in all of their naked truth, how is that love? It's not sacred love. To accept the darkness in someone to prove and test our love, that's the profound spiritual state of being the Lovers card represents.
We have no consciousness of the state we were in before incarnation, but we have some kind of body memory or deeper unconscious memory that there is somewhere, some when, where we're reunited with God. That feeling of love, the kind of love you would die for and surrender your ego for, is overwhelmingly more powerful than anything else, even though we've forgotten about it. This is the fundamental teaching of the Lovers card: we would give everything up to know God's love. The love in God, the love of God, is not comparable to anything else. It's overwhelmingly destructive of the ego. It kills the sense we have of being important or special.
The process we go through to get even close to that sense of remembering love is a very special choice we make in life. There aren't many things we can do to re-embody our knowledge of the love of God. One of the redeeming features, probably the only one, is that we dance and know music as a species. Other species don't know about music, and dances are elaborate rituals for attracting a mate. We know music and dance and the states we can get into through these mysterious gifts from another world.
Journalling Prompts
How can I love myself in all my naked truth?
