There are radical differences between ‘The Lover’ of The Marseilles Tarot deck—originating in the 13th Century Italian Renaissance—and ‘The Lovers’ from the Rider Waite Tarot, first published by Golden Dawn occultists in 1909.
Originally the Lover was shown as a bachelor preparing for marriage, with Cupid coming out of a cloud above his head, flanked by two women, perhaps his mother and a future wife. In the Rider Waite deck, however, the lovers are the biblical Adam and Eve beside the two trees in the Garden of Eden. The figure in the cloud is not Cupid but an archangel with red wings and flaming hair.
How to explain this metamorphosis? One speculation: the Rider Waite lovers bring to mind romantic love, a uniquely modern ‘problem’. Traditionally, in many cultures, inflated romanticism was considered an affect rather than a virtue—a mild sickness at best—at worst, a reason for suicide. The Jungian psychotherapist Robert Johnson points out that in medieval Japan, lovers were encouraged to jump off a cliff. In other words, the traditional person did not conflate ordinary sexuality with divine ecstasy. An Indian man might go into ecstasies in front of the goddess Kali in his local temple, but his family life was sober and disciplined. In other words, the fire of divine love was not projected on a mere human being—the sacred and the ordinary were strictly segregated. Therefore, in the modern world, we can relate to Rider Waite lovers much more than the singular lover who wrestles with fate.
Today we would like to do away with the great divide between the divine and the ordinary. The need for romance has become a substitute for transcendence; we look for divine fire in our partners, setting ourselves up for terrible suffering and tragedy. No human being can survive our projections of divine love, so we get burned. This is because secular people have no temple to worship other than the bedroom, the bar, the nightclub, or the office—and our modern temples are not places of conscious ritual but unconscious drama.
While we do not want to go back to the days of arranged marriages, we aren’t usually strong enough to handle ‘the fire of divine love’, as it was once called. We are caught in the in-between world—‘too late for the gods and too early for being,’ as Martin Heidegger put it. There is so much pathos (which means suffering) in the realm of the lovers. Since Shakespeare and Courtly love, sexuality is usually a tragic affair, like war—and the story of passion ends at marriage.
So what can we do? First, we need the maturity to understand that passion is a painful business. And if we have a passion, we also need the temperance of wisdom—which the archangel in the card represents. Marriage and love can be a passionate and spiritual path, a road to that high mountain or peak—but are not a destination in themselves.
The Rider Waite deck tells us that love outside the walled garden is a dark path, which is often our contemporary experience. The fact is, almost nobody marries their first love. The first lover is, more often than not, the vision of the extract and agony that an immature person cannot sustain. And romantic love tends to make monsters of people, mirroring all of the hidden shadow elements. Marriage tends to be the taming of passionate love, not its free expression—the cooling of the lover's fire. On the other hand, in a good marriage, the lovers find another kind of deeper intimacy and more subtle passion than the early innocent love of the garden.
In a traditional society, the lover was marked by fate. He had to marry a particular woman or man, and the community ordained this—his love for his principal partner was not a given but something he needed to cultivate. The courtly troubadours seduced but didn’t dare marry their desired muses because they knew that would be impossible. Dante was dedicated to Beatrice on a spiritual level, but he married Mrs Dante and had five children with her. His love had a dual nature: religious adoration and earthly friendship.
Today the problem with romantic love—and the Rider Waite lovers who are naked and vulnerable—is that we expect our partner to be both Beatrice and a wife, a vessel of all our projections and desires, but also a friend and a mother to our children. Women are looking for a Greek god and a husband—men are searching for The Goddess in their wives. Romantic inflation is chronic. No wonder people are so utterly lost and disappointed in the realm of love, sex, and desire. No wonder we are so demanding, so unmerciful with our partners—no wonder there is much pathos and drama around love.
The remedy is a third element, a higher principle—and the community consecration of love and the presence of the Matriarch. The original Lover is a deeper and fuller symbol later because there are two women instead of one. Two women mean the wife and the lover, the matriarch and the bride, etc. The lover has to acknowledge both or be booted from the Garden of Eden. The Rider Waite Lovers points to a lack of ‘Matriarch’ or mature feminine principle and is full of modern anxiety and pathos. We can learn more from the original, which is far more subtle and less affected by modern anxiety.
This article is part of a consideration of our study group on symbolism and Psychomagic. If you want to become a member and join one of our study groups, please write to me at andrewpgsweeny@gmail.com or check out the events calendar below for more details.