By Sarah Taylor
I have written about The Lovers card several times over the course of this column (The Lovers — A three-card comparison, Symbolic Alchemy — A view of The Lovers and Art, and The Consort and The Lovers — Venus in Gemini), but I wanted to take another look at it this week because of its significance to us over the coming year.
Numerologically, 2013 is the year of The Lovers: if you add up all four digits in “2013”, you get the number 6, and The Lovers is card 6 in the tarot’s major arcana. You may well ask how it is that a single card can be universally relevant. My response to that is the personal and non-empirical assertion that synchronicity — the coinciding of factors that seem to be causally unrelated but are meaningful — just works.
In the same way that the movements of the various bodies in our solar system are reflected in the structure, themes and narratives of our lives, so a tarot card that holds significance (whether through numerology or because you chose it from a tarot deck) also reflects a certain timbre in our internal and external worlds.
This means that The Lovers will touch your life in some way that will be recognisable and meaningful in 2013, whether primarily in how you relate to yourself, how you relate in your interpersonal relationships, or in your relationship to humanity and the world as a whole — although doubtless all three will be affected.
But what does The Lovers card mean in tarot? Probably not what most people think it does, or not primarily. To understand it better, we need to look at how we get to the sixth card in the journey through the major arcana. Card 0 — The Fool — represents potential. It is non-dual, it simply is. Cards 1 through 5 describe the process of creation. And card 6, The Lovers, is the moment where creation becomes aware of itself.
The corresponding sign for The Lovers in astrology is Gemini, the twins. Seen symbolically rather than literally, the twins represent duality. Whereas the world of Spirit is defined by one-ness — no time, no space, no differentiation — the physical world is composed of opposites and all permutations between: up-down, black-white, night-day, summer-winter, male-female.
To what end? So that consciousness is able to know itself. This is embodied in The Lovers — the love affair between the creator and its creation. (If you look at the Rider-Waite Smith version of the card, you will see this particularly clearly.)