The Lovers

The sixth trump was originally singular. In French it is L'Amoureux, the lover, not the lovers, and the older image is not a couple at all. A young man stands between two women while a winged archer aims down at the scene from above. Whatever the two women represent, and readings from virtue and vice to mother and bride have been proposed, the card is structurally about a man in the middle of a decision, with an arrow about to be loosed at him.

That structure is not preserved in the deck most modern readers use. The 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith card replaces the triangle with Eden, and Waite disparages the older interpretation explicitly. Once the two women become one woman and the archer becomes the angel Raphael, the card stops being a dilemma and becomes a union, and the modern keyword "the Lovers, harmony, partnership" follows from the new picture rather than from anything older.

Both readings are now current, and the honest position is that they are different cards wearing the same number. A reader working a Marseille deck who reads this card as a choice under pressure is reading the fifteenth-century image correctly. A reader working the Waite deck who reads it as the union of opposites is reading the twentieth-century image correctly. What is not defensible is the common move of asserting the union reading as the card's ancient meaning, since the ancient card shows a man who has not chosen yet and is being shot at while he decides.

There is a further wrinkle worth naming. The winged archer above the older card is usually taken for Cupid, and Cupid's arrows in the Renaissance were not benign; they compelled. A card in which desire is imposed from outside rather than chosen from within is a considerably darker object than the one most modern decks print, and readers working a Marseille pattern often keep that edge.

The Golden Dawn assigned the sixth trump the letter Zayin, the sign Gemini, and the seventeenth path from Binah to Tiphareth. Zayin means a sword, and the choice of a cutting instrument for a card about love is deliberate: in the order's system this card is about discrimination, the act of separating one thing from another, which is closer to the older French picture than to Waite's Eden. Gemini, the twins, supplies the doubling.

The attribution is late nineteenth century, like all of them. What is interesting is that it preserves the dilemma reading even though the deck it was attached to had abandoned it. The Golden Dawn's own sense of the card, and Crowley's after it, keeps the emphasis on decision, analysis and the union that follows an act of separation, rather than on romance.

In practice the card is read for relationships more often than for anything else, and that is a narrowing rather than an error. Its wider and better range covers any decision where the querent's values are what is actually being tested: what to commit to, what to refuse, what one is prepared to be. Readers who take the card only as "love is coming" tend to miss it entirely when it turns up in a question about work.

Reversed, Waite gives disharmony, misalignment and a bond broken. Readers who do not use reversals arrive at much the same reading by asking a simpler question of the upright card: chosen, or still choosing?

It is also worth saying that the two decks in widest use disagree here more sharply than on any other trump except Strength. A reader who learned the card from a Waite-derived deck and then picks up a Marseille pattern will find an image that does not support the meaning they were taught, and the sensible response is to read the picture in front of them rather than the keyword in their memory.