The Lovers

A Tarot card. Position 6 in the Major Arcana.

Rider Waite deck
The sun shines in the zenith, and beneath is a great winged figure with arms extended, pouring down influences. In the foreground are two human figures, male and female, unveiled before each other, as if Adam and Eve when they first occupied the paradise of the earthly body. Behind the man is the Tree of Life, bearing twelve fruits, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is behind the woman; the serpent is twining round it. The figures suggest youth, virginity, innocence and love before it is contaminated by gross material desire. This is in all simplicity the card of human love, here exhibited as part of the way, the truth and the life. It replaces, by recourse to first principles, the old card of marriage and the later follies which depicted man between vice and virtue. In a very high sense, the card is a mystery of the Covenant and Sabbath.

The suggestion in respect of the woman is that she signifies that attraction towards the sensitive life which carries within it the idea of the Fall of Man, but she is rather the working of a Secret Law of Providence than a willing and conscious temptress. It is through her imputed lapse that man shall arise ultimately, and only by her can he complete himself. The card is therefore in its way another intimation concerning the great mystery of womanhood. The old meanings fall to pieces of necessity with the old pictures, but even as interpretations of the latter, some of them were of the order of commonplace and others were false in symbolism.

Meanings
discrimination, smell

Develop an understanding of the interdependent relationship between the superSelf and The Other.

Reversed Meaning
A failed test, lost love.

Correspondences

 * Links Binah to Tiphareth as path number 17 of the Tree of Life
 * Yetziratic Intelligence - the Disposing intelligence
 * Organic Time - The Cambrian Explosion The linking of single-celled organisms into multicellular organisms that can replicate their forms. What's more important than Love when loving another? Understanding them as another individual in the system, living with you in the universe, not living for you to love. It's called teamwork, baby. In Time, everyone is together, every Other Self is part of It/Us/You.

Resources

 * Waite, A.E. (1911) The Pictoral Key to the Tarot: Being Fragments of a Secret Tradition Under the Veil of Divination. London: Rider.