Love presents crossroads in your life. From the first impulse to love a parent or caretaker, life is filled with opportunities one after the other to love family members, peers, romantic partners, and humanity in general. Often, the way you first encountered love as an infant colors your choices from then on.
The polarity between virtue and vice exists within all of us. Eve first tasked the apple partly because doing something different and forbidden has huge emotional appeal. Desire, then, is a double-edged sword.
Another way to perceive the duality of the Lovers is to recognize that sometimes you seek love and sometimes you simply want to respond to love. The Lovers card suggests that you are in a position to both respond and take assertive action.
In the psychology of both men and women, male figures usually symbolize consciousness, intellectual attainments, and spirit; female figures (again in the psychology of both sexes) symbolize aspects of the body, emotions, and soul.
- Sallie Nichols
The allurment of vice has a greater fascination than the austere beauty of virtue … Indecision is, above all else, worse than a bad choice.
- C. C. Zain
Not by addition
Doth the multiplicity of creatures
Come into existence,
For I, the source of all, am one,
One and alone,
Even as it is written,
‘Beside me there is nothing.’
- Book of Tokens
Sources
Zain, C. C., The Sacred Tarot. Los Angeles, The Church of
Light, 1936.
Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot:
An Archetypal Journey. York Beach, Maine, Samuel Weiser, 1980.
Case, Paul Foster, The Book of Tokens: 22 Meditations on the Ageless Wisdom. Los Angeles, Builder of the Adytum, 1968. Quoted with permission from Builders of the Adytum, 5101 North Figueroa St., Los Angeles, CA. 90042; http://www.bota.org/. Permission to use Builders of the Adytum images in no way constitutes endorsement of the material on this site.
De Angelis, Roberto, Universal Tarot Deck. Torino, Italy: Lo Scarabeo, 2003. Lo Scarabeo has graciously granted permission for the use of the Tarot images on this site. Copying the images without their permission wuld be a violation of copyright law.
