The Lovers
Card VI in a majorly arcane series
(Previous entries in this series are found here.)
‘Love conquers all’ is, as everyone knows, a great rotted overflowing load of absolute bollocks. It’s a comfort game for the powerless, a teenager’s myth of self, a dangerous inversion of of ‘The personal is political’ into its cookie-fortune twin, ‘Don’t worry be happy.’ It’s a lie about death, among other lies, and if there is a single evil that underlies all others, it is telling lies about the one moment that every earthly life shares.
I wish it were otherwise.
And as it happens — spoiler alert! — this, the Tale of Two Bodies, the Lovers’ Tale, is one of those stories where wishing makes it so. I feel like a rube typing that, so just imagine how I’ll feel when I start carrying on about babies and the real meaning of ‘humanity.’ Sigh. Maybe I’ll just skip that part.
The story of Adam and Eve is the wellspring of half the bad feelings I’ve ever had in my life, probably. God makes boy, boy donates bone marrow, boy meets girl, girl meets snake, snake points out the way boy and girl have internalized oppression, snake suggests moral discrimination and self-consciousness as tools for ‘rising above’ primitivism, apple symbolizes all of the above, girl eats apple, boy eats apple, boy and girl realize that they are naked in the jungle, self-conscious nakedness is established as paradigmatic embarrassment/self-loathing state, boy and girl are expelled at flaming swordpoint from earthly paradise to live in the most depressingly-named Land in the history of Lands, ever, ever.
Work and childbearing are established as punishments for sin.
Boy and girl have kids who start killing each other.
THE END.
What kills me about this story is that eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil sounds like a fine use of time and energy, not to mention an exercise in itself of personal responsibility. But in Genesis, God doesn’t want the Lovers to be responsible. Indeed, once they seek out Knowledge of etc. etc., they’re forbidden (here’s the kicker) from returning to bliss, which is joyful submission to their World in its mere materiality. They can’t get back into their shared body.
None of this happened, of course; this is ‘literary.’ But if the rainsoaked paradisiacal garden is a metaphor, it’s also a garden. Expulsion from Eden means the loss of material richness. There’s more work to do, but less reason to do it, out in the wastes. The reason — the point of being — is the Garden.
Self-consciousness is the problem, and the story of Genesis sets it up as inescapable and insurmountable. There’s nothing the Lovers can do, we’re told, to get back into the Garden, which is bliss. It’s bliss or the fallen world, and the choice is made at the moment when we become human.
i.e. The invention of agriculture and the end of happy-happy polygamy, if you believe Sex at Dawn. Let’s just leave that aside for the moment.
If you’re interested in the tarot in any way you have to deal with the brilliant irritant Arthur Waite, who collaborated with artist Pamela Colman Smith (‘Pixie’) to create the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck, the first popular tarot to feature fully illustrated minor arcana. Smith’s illustrations are full without being cramped — she had a cartoonist’s grasp of the difference between structural definition and clutter. I love Smith’s cards. Waite provided a book-length interpretive guide, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot.
I don’t care at all about Waite’s suggested interpretations of the cards.
Waite’s gloss on the Lovers insists that it
signifies that attraction towards the sensitive life which carries within it the idea of the Fall of Man, but she is rather the working of a Secret Law of Providence than a willing and conscious temptress. It is through her imputed lapse that man shall arise ultimately, and only by her can he complete himself. The card is therefore in its way another intimation concerning the great mystery of womanhood.
Bullshit. The ‘great mystery’ of womanhood isn’t a mystery, it’s just men’s willful ignorance of women’s society and mankind’s incomplete understanding of our nervous and endocrine systems. Bored now.
So Smith gives us Adam and Eve looking pretty happy. Evidently their bellies are not yet full of bad apple. The sun’s high — ‘at its zenith’ sez Mr Waite — and the ‘winged figure…pouring down influences’ seems perfectly happy for them to continue playing with wild animals and fucking. The uncanny power that the Eden story holds for me — and for many many (lapsed) Christians, I suspect — partly stems from the deeply Weird initial conditions from which the world-system would be run, the pagan energy that animated the Edenic life, which after all was free from religion — maybe the best thing about it, after all the sex and food. God-the-Creator doesn’t really become God-the-paternalist-conservative until after the first human Sin, at which point His administrative responsibilities somewhat sour His (im)personality.
The Lovers follow the earthly powers in the procession of Major Arcana. Not for nothing does pure dwelling in what Waite groovily calls ‘the paradise of the earthly body’(!) supersede, indeed ‘trump,’ the institutional array that kicks off the Fool’s Journey.
After Waite you have to get past Aleister Crowley, which is more enjoyable, as Crowley’s Book of Thoth (his guide to the Thoth tarot, on which he collaborated with artist Lady Frieda Harris) offers his usual blend of crazed invention, shameless jarbled plagiarism, and ironically casual (or casually ironic) oddballery. Crowley and Harris’s Lovers card, whose twinned twins twin with those depicted in trump XIV (Art) to ‘compose the comprehensive alchemical maxim: Solve et coagula,’ is supposed to show an alchemical wedding, referring to Christian Rosenkreutz, ‘founder of the Rosicrucians,’ and honestly I can’t be bothered with this nonsense either. If you have time for the Chymical Wedding of Mr C.R. then by all means enjoy, but you don’t actually need Rosicrucianism to get a kick out of Harris’s gorgeous Thoth deck. Still, it’s worth flipping through the Book of Thoth for stuff like this, Crowley’s plan for the card:
”There is an Assyrian legend of a woman with a fish, and also there is a legend of Eve and the Serpent, for Cain was the child of Eve and the Serpent, and not of Eve and Adam; and therefore when he had slain his brother, who was the first murderer, having sacrificed living things to his demon, had Cain the mark upon his brow, which is the mark of the Beast spoken of in the Apocalypse, and is the sign of Initiation.
“The shedding of blood is necessary, for God did not hear the children of Eve until blood was shed. And that is external religion; but Cain spake not with God, nor had the mark of initiation upon his brow, so that he was shunned of all men, until he had shed blood. And this blood was the blood of his brother. This is a mystery of the sixth key of the Tarot, which ought not to be called The Lovers, but The Brothers. (my emphasis —wa.)
“In the middle of the card stands Cain; in his right hand is the Hammer of Thor with which he hath slain his brother, and it is all wet with his blood. And his left hand he holdeth open as a sign of innocence. On his right hand is his mother Eve, around whom the serpent is entwined with his hood spread behind her head; and on his left hand is a figure somewhat like the Hindoo Kali, but much more seductive. Yet I know it to be Lilith. And above him is the Great Sigil of the Arrow, downward, but it is struck through the heart of the child. This child also is Abel. And the meaning of this part of the card is obscure, but that is the correct drawing of the Tarot card; and that is the correct magical fable from which the Hebrew scribes, who were not complete Initiates, stole their legend of the Fall and the subsequent events.”
Cain slew Abel with the Hammer of Thor? Yes please. The Book of Thoth is full of this kind of wacky symbol-play; you might say that’s the original, central point of the ‘mystical tarot,’ not divination (which, remember, doesn’t actually work) but an art of superposition and bisociation that’s always been a little groovy, a little psychedelic. ‘What if every myth was, like, the same myth?’ is bad human history, but it’s very good creativity. The tarot is a prompt to creative alt-cognition. Crowley’s Thoth book supports that aim a hell of lot more effectively than Waite’s drab, moralizing Pictorial Key, however you might feel about the two decks’ visuals.
Crowley sez his Lovers card ‘represents the Creation of the World’:
The subject of this card is Analysis, followed by Synthesis. The first question asked by science is: “Of what are things composed?” This having been answered, the next question is: “How shall we recombine them to our greater advantage?” This resumes the whole policy of the Tarot.
I like that. Analysis, then action. Creation, then indwelling. Explosive movement (they’re Lovers after all), then the emergence of something new. Obvious alchemical parallels, equally obvious sexual ones; and the trick with Crowley the ironist is to realize that he means for each to allegorize the other, all the time.
Crowley’s Sex Magick is an important pressure on 20th century occultism, and is part of (or at the very least an inspiration to) a sexual counterculture that’s played a vital role in the subterranean history of the 20th century West. The idea that Those Pesky Kids just wanna take drugs, fuck, and be lazy while the Grown-Ups get everything done isn’t quite right; sex matters in the (magical) counterculture precisely because it’s a way of generating power, both through the sheer outpouring of carnal energy and in its ironic distance from what’s expected. Magical sex is supposed to be shared, paraded, put on display; it’s a creative act, after all. (See Lost Girls for more in this vein, if you can tolerate Alan Moore being very Alan Moore.) It’s a contribution to the shared public discourse, not an escape, but its language — the grammar of the magical-sexual answer to the question ‘What is to be done?’ — isn’t shared by most people. Not least because that grammar itself is strictly forbidden by those who currently have, y’know, all the power money weapons churches etc. etc. etc. You’re not supposed to wonder whether more and better sex with more and better friends could change everything for the better — never mind actually going out and doing it, which would settle the matter definitively.
The ‘whole policy of the Tarot’ is to answer the question: how do we change our (experience of our) world through contemplation and creative interaction?
Seems like a pretty useful question. A narrow definition of ‘creative interaction’ only makes it harder and less fun to answer. Love is often described as a tumble downhill. Nature abhors a gradient but it’s an awfully useful thing when you need to pick up speed.
Too much sentimentality in most tarot depictions of the Lovers. Naked couples holding hands and kissing in the woods, yay. Evidently a lot of tarot designers love drawing cocks. Some substitute the singular ‘Lover’ for the Lovers, which literalizes the Fool’s Journey aspect of the Arcana without adding much by way of symbolic richness. Young kids like sex. It’s nice but after a while you get bored of it and move on to…studying tarot, I guess? Waste of a perfectly good word. ‘Lover.’ I do love the sound of it. Even if ‘love’ isn’t actually the subject at hand.
‘Making love to…’ is worse, though. Than almost everything. Love is something you make (share, cocreate) with another person. To make love to someone sounds like pressing something against them in order to transmit a message. Which might be how you have sex, good for you, but isn’t really the point. The message isn’t the point. Anyone who gets with improvised music knows that. Listening hard is the point. Listening becomes the message.
The role of the Lovers in the tarot is — well, that’s up to you, I suppose, but I like that Crowley doubles the Lovers as Brothers. Unity as cocreation. I love Waite’s phrase ‘the paradise of the earthly body,’ too. Gestalt effects. Sex is one. When you don’t have sex for a while the pain you feel isn’t just physical, it’s deeply emotional (even if you don’t know you’re feeling it). What’s missing is the overlap of your body map with another being’s. 1+1=3: the two individuals and the paradisiacal greater body which contains and redefines them. Alchemical marriage: not just combination as linear addition but a complex of feedback loops by which two beings decisively shift into a new mode.
Sex is a hallucinogen, duh, and one of the visions it grants is of a new possible self beyond the self, which contains the other — your Lover — but also provides a (narrative?) frame for the Lover to contain you. ‘I get lost / In your eyes / And I feel / My spirits rise,’ after all.
There’s no reason to get sentimental about this. You shouldn’t turn nutrition into treacle about ‘true love.’ Sex is about nutrition. In a literal sense it’s something that your mind and body can’t really live without: a necessary extreme of recombination and dissolution within another body. But there are plenty of other activities on the spectrum between shaking hands and mind-shattering sex, many of which are ‘brotherly’ rather than ‘romantic.’ Romance is just etiquette. This really is about food for the expanding mind.
(Remember that you are what you eat.)
