The Lovers Tarot Card Meaning and Art Vivid Waite Smith Tarot Deck
Designation
About the Deck
Vivid Waite Smith Tarot Deck
These cards are featured in my book, "A Concise Guide to the Tarot" by Loren Lundgren. I took the information for the meanings on these tarot cards from "The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Being Fragments of a Secret Tradition Under the Veil of Divination", by A. E. Waite, 1911, now in the public domain. I edited the tarot card descriptions and meanings for clarity and brevity, modernizing the text. I scanned in the original black and white illustrations of the cards drawn by Pamela Colman Smith, from the 1911 book. I digitally retouched and painted those illustrations in detailed color.
Provenance
Loren Lundgren, © 2021
Description
The sun shines above, and beneath is a great winged figure with arms extended, pouring down mystical influences. In the foreground are two human figures, male and female. They are naked before each other, like Adam and Eve when they first occupied Paradise. Behind the man is the Tree of Life, bearing twelve fruits. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is behind the woman, with the serpent wrapped around it. The figures suggest youth, virginity, innocence, and love before it is contaminated by gross material desire. This is the card of human love; part of the Way, the Truth and the Life. In a very high sense, the card is a depiction of the Covenant and the Sabbath.Meaning of The Lovers from the Vivid Waite Smith Tarot Deck
Upright
Attraction, love, beauty, trials overcome.
Reversed
Failure, foolish designs, prevented marriage, and opposition of all kinds.
According to Many Schools of Thought
A. E. Waite's Secondary Meanings
The Lovers or Marriage. This symbol has undergone many variations, as might be expected from its subject. In the eighteenth century form, by which it first became known to the world of archaeological research, it is really a card of married life, shewing father and mother, with their child placed between them; and the pagan Cupid above, in the act of flying his shaft, is, of course, a misapplied emblem. The Cupid is of love beginning rather than of love in its fulness, guarding the fruit thereof. The card is said to have been entitled Simulacyum fidei, the symbol of conjugal faith, for which the rainbow as a sign of the covenant would have been a more appropriate concomitant. The figures are also held to have signified Truth, Honour and Love, but I suspect that this was, so to speak, the gloss of a commentator moralizing. It has these, but it has other and higher aspects.
S. L. MacGregor Mathers's Divinatory Meanings
Upright
Wise Dispositions, Proof, Trials Surmounted
Reversed
Unwise Plans, Failure when put to the test.
Papus's Divinatory Meanings
Love.
