Editor’s Note: This article continues our weekly series on the tarot. You can find some of the earlier ones by clicking the “tarot” category link above. In case you want to experiment with the cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator. The formation is called the Celtic Wings spread. It’s based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells how to use the spread. We’re happy to respond to questions and will take direction from readers who comment, so please let us know what you think. You can visit Sarah’s website at this link. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
In previous articles in our Intro to Tarot series, we have introduced tarot as a means of communicating with another part of ourselves in order to reconcile our conscious and unconscious aspects. We have explored why it is that tarot is able to work in this way. Last week, we started down a more practical route of learning how to read a particular card.
It is down this practical route that we continue this week, when we build on what we have learned by comparing and contrasting a specific card from the major arcana as it appears in three different tarot decks:
– The Tarot de Marseille by Alexandre Jodorowsky and Philippe Camoin
– The Thoth Tarot by Lady Freida Harris and Aleister Crowley
– The Xultún Tarot by Peter Balin
The card: The Lovers — number 6 in the major arcana, preceded by The Hierophant (5), and followed by The Chariot (7).
It’s probably fair to say that many of us unacquainted with, or new to, tarot see The Lovers in relatively simplistic terms. I’m not aware of another card that is as immediately recognised and positively received by a querent (the person for whom we are doing a reading). Well over half of the readings that I do have relationship as their focus; and The Lovers seems to amplify any feelings of hope and expectation when it shows up. It also tends to introduce the idea of a sexual element into the reading. In short, it carries a high charge.
But The Lovers means so much more than simply two people falling in love.
Consider this quote in The Way of Tarot by Jodorowsky and Costa (referring to the Marseille card):
We can speculate infinitely on the relationship of the three figures: a boy presenting his fiancée to his mother; a woman discovering her husband with his mistress; a man attempting to choose between two different women, or, as the traditional interpretation views it, between vice and virtue….
The interpretations are inexhaustible. All of them lead us to the conclusion that The Lover is a relational card that depicts the beginning of social life.