The Lovers

✦ Title

6. The Lovers

✦ Associations

Air / Gemini (Mercury)

✦ Keywords

Making a choice or commitment, individuation, self-acceptance, self-love, relationships, connection.

✦ Quote

Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself. — bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

✦ Meaning

✦ Choice and Individuation

After receiving the Hierophant's exotic knowledge and traditional wisdom, we are informed and ready to make a choice. A choice about what we believe, what we value, who we are, how we love. A choice about what sort of life we want to live and what kind of person we want to be. Will we live the safe, predestined life of the status quo, following the Hierophantic rules of conventional wisdom, or will we search within ourselves to plumb our own desires and fascinations, to follow the independent urge to imagine a life by our own rules? At its root, the Lovers is about love but it's even more about that choice, the big choice: the choice to choose oneself.

✦ Cultural Pressures and Self-Acceptance

Love and self-love are not easy in the modern world. The cultural voice screams its hairless airbrushed fever dreams of perfection, its gym-bro vanitas, its cereal box nuclear families and paper doll gender roles. From a young age, we are subjected to outside pressures from family, school, peers, religion, media, all pushing their ideal roles and values and standards upon us. But the Lovers counsel us not to fall for this glamour, not to mold ourselves to the standards of others to gain their approval, which may masquerade as love but is not love. Love starts within, not without, with self-acceptance, not societal approval.

✦ Self-Love as Discovery

No other person, not parent nor friend nor lover, can love us well enough to replace loving ourselves. One thousand other people can shower us with adoration, and it will only run off our skin like rain. The Lovers ask that we embrace ourselves in all our brilliance and depth, all our virtues and vices, for love is unconditional or it is not love. This act of self-loving is also self-discovery, the first step on the path of individuation and of liberation, of embracing and embodying one's truth.

✦ Smith-Waite Innovation

One of the innovations the Smith-Waite Tarot made was to change the depiction of the Lovers, scrapping the obnoxious older imagery of a man choosing between two women and replacing it with a scene from the Garden of Eden. This may seem a regressive step even further back in time, but it's actually quite wonderfully subversive, and I pay homage to Smith's pivotal imagery in our Lovers card. In case you didn't grow up listening to fiery sermons about the temptation and sin of women like some of us did, we'll briefly retell the story of the Garden of Eden here to understand its connection to the Lovers and to choice.

✦ Garden of Eden Story

Eden was the earthly paradise where Eve and Adam, the first woman and man, lived in complete innocence and harmony with God and his creation. Two trees stood at the center of the biblical Garden: the Tree of Life, which the flames in our card reference, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, with its iconic apples and serpent. Eve and Adam lived in ease and comfort in the abundant garden and wanted for nothing, but one thing was forbidden by God: they must not eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, for it will kill them. As the story goes, Eve was tempted to eat the forbidden fruit by a serpent, a creature that Christian theologians have since conflated with Satan and with evil, but which was formerly a powerful pre-Christian symbol of fertility; creation, healing, wisdom, and the spirit of life itself. The serpent tells Eve that God had lied about the fruit, that instead of killing her, eating the apple would open her eyes. Curious and emboldened, Eve plucks a fruit and eats it.

✦ Eve as Self-Determination

The Bible frames this act as the original sin, for which God exiled humanity from paradise, curses them to live mortal lives of toil and pain. The Tarot, however, reframes Eve's choice as a radical act of self-determination. Eve chooses knowledge over ignorance, experience over fear, liberation over obedience. As mythological scholar Joseph Campbell puts it in The Power of Myth, it was by eating that forbidden fruit that humankind "became the initiator of [their] own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience." This is humanity's original rebellion: a woman choosing herself.

✦ Mirror Imagery in Fifth Spirit Tarot

In our card for Fifth Spirit Tarot, the Lovers is not two people but one person facing their mirror image, but made of stars instead of flesh. This is their shadow and also their pure, cosmic spirit. This is their essence and their true lover. The Lovers are touching palms, smiling in recognition. Echoing back to the High Priestess's message of finding the divine within oneself, the Lovers show us that whatever we search for in other people and relationships, we already have within ourselves.

✦ Chest Binder and Trans Experience

The Lover is also wearing a chest binder. This won't be obvious to some viewers, but I think those familiar with binders may see it. The Lovers, like the Empress, often comes draped in platitudes about self-love, a common message of which is to love your body exactly how it is, because you're beautiful exactly how you are. This is an essential message for encouraging body positivity, but one that isn't so simple for some people, particularly those on the transgender spectrum. Sometimes, the "beautiful the way you are" narrative can have the reverse effect for trans folk, causing them to feel doubly shamed: first for being in a body that feels wrong, and then for not loving it enough.

✦ Self-Love and Transformation

Self-love and self-acceptance messages can become dangerously, if accidentally, transphobic in this way, easily slipping into the territory of biological essentialism. Self-love can be fully loving the body you were born with (which can be a radical act in itself, even for cisgender folks), and self-love can also be loving yourself enough to change yourself, to gift yourself the body or appearance that matches your insides, your cosmic self, your individual truth.

✦ Diversity of Love and Choice

Love is a vibrant and diverse spectrum, and so is self-love, and so is identity, and so is choice. There is no right or wrong path to choose, the Lovers tell us, as long as we are each the one making the choice for ourselves.

✦ Invitation

You are at the garden gate with an apple in your hand. It is your choice to bite.