The Consort and The Lovers — Venus in Gemini

By Sarah Taylor

For now we see through a glass, darkly;
but then face to face: now I know in part;
but then shall I know even as also I am known.

— 1 Corinthians 13:12, King James Bible

I’m sitting here, today, amidst the detritus of my son’s toys (It amazes me the mess that one small person can make!), in the house that he, I and our au pair moved to less than a fortnight ago — marking the physical separation from my ex-husband, from whom I separated in name over a year ago.

In some ways my most intimate relationships are a reflection of my family of birth: I leave in my wake a history of co-dependence and control; I can see my own role in games of emotional withdrawal and avoidance; I carry with me the self-same triad of mother, carer, child that I was a part of when I was growing up.

In other ways, my relationships and my life feel like my own: unlike my parents — whose divorce was bitter and embattled — my ex-husband and I have a solid, loving friendship; I have chosen to be a single mother instead of staying together ‘for the sake of the children’; as much as I love male company — the banter, the physicality, the meeting and merging of different energies — I am finding a contentment in being on my own. If the last half-year has taught me anything, it has taught me to craft the conviction that I will not enter a new relationship in half-measures any more. It is time to start re-introducing myself to the parts of me that have remained shut off through fear, shame and a sense of not being deserving enough to own them.

This, to me, feels like the stuff of Venus Retrograde in Gemini — the theme of this week’s tarot article.

On May 15, Eric wrote this in the Daily Astrology column entitled Invoking the Goddess of Curiosity:

For the next 43 days, Venus will take us on an introspective journey into many of the opposites and inner polarities that we contain, many of them emotional and psychological. Venus is one of the guardians of the sexual realm, and in Gemini, the dance of opposites will have an extended opportunity to explore within those polarities.

I decided to select the two tarot cards that represent Venus and Gemini in order to explore this idea through image. They are The Consort (The Empress in traditional decks) and The Lovers, respectively. The deck I have chosen to work with this week is the Xultun Tarot: a Mayan tarot deck created by New Zealand artist Peter Balin in the mid-Seventies, and one that felt fitting given this year’s link to the Mayan Long Count Calendar.

Looking at the two cards, there is a definite complementariness to them. The Xultun Tarot’s major arcana is, or was, unique in that the cards are arranged into a single image, from zero through twenty-one, with two cards in the top row, and five in the proceeding four rows. (You can see an image of the major arcana here.)

The Consort and The Lovers fall on the first row of five, separated by The Ruler (The Emperor) and The Priest (The Hierophant). As Jungian therapist Michael Owen writes of this row of cards:

The Consort, Ruler and Priest are attended by the sun and their focus is on strengthening consciousness. Further from consciousness, in the twilight, are the Priestess and the Lovers. They look downward, absorbed in something other than the ego. They look beneath the surface of the world.

There is a tension, then, between the extrovert nature of The Consort and the invitation to introspection presented to us by The Lovers. Except that Venus is currently retrograde, and will remain so until June 27, which shifts the mood and focus of The Consort to one that is more devoted to the inner world than the outer. Or is that the underworld and the upper? The Consort is linked to the Greek goddess Demeter, who descended into the underworld in search of her daughter Persephone, who had been abducted by Hades. This is most obviously linked to the change from spring and summer to autumn and winter — the natural world dying back while Persephone is separated from the land and her mother, only to spring back to life when she returns.

However, movement from the upper- to the underworld is also paralleled in our own search for our ‘abducted selves’: the feminine enslaved by the masculine, the denial and repression of our creativity, bound up as it so often is in sexuality and its common bed-partners of guilt, shame and a lack of self-love.

The partnering of The Consort and The Lovers is our invitation to inner, contemplative focus in the realm of relationships — starting with the one that we have with ourselves. We can either choose to see our relationships as being ‘out there’ and little to do with our emotional and psychological make-up. Or we can choose to see the ways in which they are a reflection of us — the ‘in here’.

The Lovers are the first human figures to appear in the major arcana, and there is no mistake that this appearance is as a couple: just like the movement from Ace (unrealised potential) to Twos in the minor arcana, The Lovers represent the emergence of duality. We live in a physical world that is governed by duality; little wonder, then, that we look for our true nature in someone or something else. That’s as it should be; what we tend to forget to do, however, is to own what we find for ourselves.

In The Lovers in the Xultun Tarot, the couple are not looking at each other — they are looking into the mirror that they hold between them. So when they believe that they are seeing the other person, what they are really seeing is what they bring into the relationship: themselves. And what they bring into the relationship is the sum total of their experience. From a psychological perspective, this in itself is not dysfunctional. What is dysfunctional is when experience is either denied or goes unrecognised and so remains unintegrated. Consequently, we find ourselves in a state of dis-integration, and our experience of the world will reflect this.

Human parents function as transformers that moderate the power of the mother or father archetypes and “step down” their voltage so it can be harnessed for development. Good-enough mothering and fathering (not too much, not too little) in childhood provides a platform from which the life-giving aspects of the archetypal mother and father can be experienced without becoming overwhelmed or possessed by the archetype.

If one has had a deficient or damaging real-world mother or father then the archetypal mother or father rushes in to occupy the vacuum. Everything is larger than life and ordinary human relationship becomes difficult if not impossible.

The Consort is the archetypal Earth Mother. In the Xultun Tarot, she is the ruler of nature and its cycles, of birth, death, and rebirth. In her shadow aspect, she is the controlling mother, the abandoning mother, the master manipulator who refuses, through threat or guile, to let her children go. In this pairing, The Consort holds the two Lovers in her focus. Which mother is she? What of her do each of them bring to the reflection that they see before them?

How much of her is known and acknowledged? How much is unknown and remains in the shadows? Where do we fear our own abilities to nurture or destroy? Where do we hide our sexuality and cast it into the depths, where it is forced to seek our attention by bubbling up through gaps, screaming into silences, intruding into our dreams? Where do we not mother ourselves? Which parts of us do we believe are un-motherable?

And where do we seek healing for all of this in another person, or in activities that we compartmentalise and lock away, or in beliefs that distance us from what is crying out to be owned and embraced?

This lies at the crux of The Lovers card: choice. That choice, this Venus Retrograde, might be about what it is that we do that perpetuates patterns of relating that no longer work, or creates chinks in doorways that can be opened on to new possibilities. We have divine support that we can draw upon: the archetypal energy of The Consort who embodies renewal, love, nurturing. And the support of others: The Lovers as conscious partnership with something or someone in order to move towards wholeness.

This is the dance of the divine and the human, the world of the gods and the world of the mortals in interplay. If we can hold the tension of opposites — a mantra of late — and ask for awareness, we pave the way for something new to enter. And if it feels good, yet somehow mysterious, unknowable, and ‘other’, all the more reason to invite it in for coffee.

– You can purchase the Xultun Tarot deck here.

– Excerpts are from The Tarot Codex by Michael Owen. An updated version of this book, The Maya Book of Life, is now available.

 

If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article explains how to use the spread.