The Lovers
This ongoing discussion of the Tarot
The Lovers. It would seem like such a welcome and pleasant card…
It was the first image that came to mind.
Depending on where one might be in a relationship:
More common these days:
Or more common:
Or even more common?
What is one to make of The Lover’s Tarot card in the Age of the Collapse of Romance?
Traditionally the card suggested Adam and Eve together in the Garden of Eden, in the presence of an Angel (Jophiel, The Archangel of Beauty?)
Adam and Eve when they first occupied the paradise of the earthly body. Behind the man is the Tree of Life, bearing twelve fruits, behind the woman the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; the serpent is twining around 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 light.
Waite said, humorously (if he were capable), it is the natural order of things: Man looks at Woman and Woman looks at the Angel. By that, he meant, Man finds the divine through Woman.
Another version of the Traditional Tarot has it as a choice of man between virtue and vice. He is at a crossroads, he is young, the choice is between the woman in white and the “harlot”; a woman he will build a family and grow old with, or many women, none of whom stay. Eve and Lilith?
The Angel Cupid aims his arrow, blindfolded. For the initiate the path will arrive at a similar destination regardless. For the uninitiated the choice is imperative and potentially disastrous.
Eve and Lilith?
In John Michael Greer’s Path’s of Wisdom, Cabala in the Golden Dawn, he counsels that before you meditate on the paths of the Cabala, spend a week meditating on Lilith, of whom Shiva and Kali the destroyers are merely aspects.
The Negative Power of the tenth Sphere is Lilith, a legendary figure around whom some very strange stories have gathered…she was identified with the desert and the ocean, with all the aspects of nature that are hostile to human beings. She was traditionally pictured as a beautiful, seductive woman who changes into a hairy twisted monkey-like demon. Jewish writers in the Middle Ages made her a villain of an ugly little fable in which she was Adam’s first wife, cast aside by him and cursed by God because she insisted on being treated as an equal and not merely as Adams property. Before this…an evil spirit in the Middle East, and further back…a pagan goddess ruling over the destructive powers of Nature and human nature.
In case you were wondering about the 90’s Lilith Fair, and the cause since of the liberal left, flooding the country with third world illegal migrants, transing kids and the killing of the unborn made a dark sacrament.
Consider The Devil card, and the male and female at his feet, chained in the material, Card 15, 1 + 5 = 6, The Lovers.
This is why I prefer traditional decks, where men are men and women are women. No gender confusion missing the spiritual point, justifying materialist priors.
Alchemical Marriage
Dion Fortune called the union of Man and Woman the greatest revelation of God. She believed a man and woman could not truly find God but through each other, in polarity.
In the esoteric, there are seven planes of being: the Material, two levels of Astral, Two in the Mental and two in the Spiritual. Love/sex/polarity take place on all seven levels, when love is healthy. When it is degraded it is merely on the Material plane, or the lower three levels including instinct and emotion (both Astral planes).
While the sex is fixed in the material (yes, there really are only two genders and you can’t change it), polarity can shift between two lovers in the upper planes.
As John Michael Greer has said, esoteric ritual is not inclusive.
Man is Force, Woman is Form. Man is active like the Sun, and Woman passive like the Moon.
If these two can meet together and form a continuity of substance, the life-force that is flowing out from the Divine through the positive or male individual, instead of radiating into free space, after it’s work…will flow back into the Divine through the negative or female individual. At the point of junction between the two units the force can be tapped and rendered available for creation.1
Which is an arcane way of saying, the force of man channeled through a woman makes for polarity and a circuit with the Divine, allowing for the creation of children, a family, a heritage.
In Contrast
A lot of what Covid policy was, was poisoning the relationship between men and women (for the purpose of depopulation.) That is much of the “gay/race communism” of the Left, denying any difference between men and women, demonizing men generally, and denying any transcendence in Love. That is much of the sickness that is Feminism, women attempting to usurp the force of men, emasculating men in the process, deranging women.
It should be no surprise then, that many feminist women working in institutions without polarity with a lover, are on SSRI’s. Even if they are married, often the polarity is backwards or non-existent, the “lover” a man who is not really a man, both of them are on SSRI’s and their children, soft, scared, weak cluster-b. 2
Marriage in America lasts less than 50% of the time, many of those existing marriages are unhappy, young people are not just not getting married they are not having sex. It is also true that the happiest people in America are conservative women with children, because they have achieved some kind of polarity with the husband.
By contrast, this is Dion Fortune on “The Ideal Marriage.”
In perfect marriage…the same pair mate with each higher body as it comes into function [seven planes/bodies] experiencing with each mating new depths of love. Physical union in mutual desire will give harmony and poise to their nervous system; love will blend desires and aims into one and bind the personalities together; the acquisition of a common fund of Knowledge will make companionship closer; belief in similar concepts and principles direct their lives into the same channel; spiritual aims and ideals of the same order complete their union; until, consciousness having risen to the level of pure spirit, this great love engendered between two souls will overflow all limitations and draw the whole universe into the bounds of their union. When this is achieved, it is held by the esoteric philosophers that the greatest stimulus which is possible to give from the physical plane is applied to evolution. These two, thus mated on all planes, “enter into the light and go not forth again as separate individuals”, but become one individual with a two-sided nature, complete in itself and self-fulfilling. Such beings, however, have passed to a higher order of life than ours and are unrecognizable by our senses.
Obviously these are lofty sentiments, given mainly to contrast between the esoteric conception of mating, and the debased, degenerate, scientific materialist, secular, neo-Marxist conception of “gender.”
In Conculsion
Two come together in unity, in duality, in polarity a union between the human and Divine. Love is not a Fall, but a soaring above the proverbial abyss, submission to time and death as an opportunity to evolve and transcend. Out of one, becomes two and unity, becomes three - creation. The Universal trinity embodied, manifest.
Love is an enduring commitment of the heart, for that which is cherished, a careful and nurturing attention for that which is most precious. The truest love is transcendent, on every plane, in every world.
The Lovers is the first card in the Ternary with 7 - The Chariot and 8 - Strength, two of the most purely powerful cards in the Tarot. In a sense, it is the anchor of this ternary. It is a testament to how much power there is in Love.
In our confusion about Sex in the West, we have forgotten about love, about a coming together with a lover in polarity, in union with the Divine. Confused about Sex, manipulated about “gender”, propagandized about scientific materialism, immersed in the digital, we have lost the language of Romance, the very concept of courtship, any sense of anything Divine in physical, mental and spiritual relations with a lover of the opposite sex.
The sexual revolution told us sex would be free and empowering, but that only made it more difficult, confused, problematic, and spiritually empty.
The Lovers card reminds us of a more innocent if more honest time. It is a call to be more conscious about the one you love. It is a symbol of “the way, the truth and the life.” It is a warning to not be too material, but to embrace the material in love, as a means to mentally and spiritually transcend.
Love is a risk. Nothing is worthy that is not a risk, and Love is the greatest.
Fortune, Dion; The Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage, Samuel Wiser INC, 2000.
People confused about sex, terrified of the risk of real relations, without any sense of the deeper spiritual potential of love, will be easy prey for AI “companions” and the possibility of demons hijacking the LLM and wearing it like a digital skin-suit.
Thank you William. I needed this beautiful reminder today.
"Love is not a Fall, but a soaring above the proverbial abyss"
"a means to mentally and spiritually transcend."
I wrote my first comment spontaneously with my thoughts about about being in close, intimate relationship with another person without reading your whole post. This part of what you said pretty much sums up where I am at as well.
“In our confusion about Sex in the West, we have forgotten about love, about a coming together with a lover in polarity, in union with the Divine. Confused about Sex, manipulated about “gender”, propagandized about scientific materialism, immersed in the digital, we have lost the language of Romance, the very concept of courtship, any sense of anything Divine in physical, mental and spiritual relations with a lover of the opposite sex.
The sexual revolution told us sex would be free and empowering, but that only made it more difficult, confused, problematic, and spiritually empty.”