The Lovers

  • Arcana Major
  • Number VI
  • Figure on this site Baldur and Nanna
Historical evidence

In the earliest decks

The Lovers is an Italian card. In the fifteenth-century Milanese trump decks it was probably a card of love and marriage, and the Italian name seems to have been singular, L’Amore, “Love”. The best-known early images are in the Visconti family decks made in northern Italy in the middle of the 1400s. One of them, usually called the Cary-Yale or Visconti di Modrone set, is at Yale University Library. Scholars date these hand-painted sets differently (roughly the 1440s to the 1460s), and no complete deck survives. One specialist essay ties the Love card to the Visconti-Sforza wedding, with the couple joining hands under the word “Amor”, but that link rests on interpretation and is not settled.

The French Tarot de Marseille pattern (the earliest surviving cards date from the 1600s; later makers include Jean Dodal and Nicolas Conver) changed the picture. Its card is titled L’Amoureux, “the Lover”, in the singular. It shows a young man between two women, one younger and one older, with Cupid above aiming an arrow. Why the scene changed from a couple to a man between two women is not documented. Some writers compare it with the old story of Hercules choosing between Vice and Virtue, which is a suggestion and not a proven source. The plural English title “The Lovers” probably came later, from Italian printers’ Gli Amanti and from English occultists.

Historical evidence

The Rider-Waite-Smith card

Pamela Colman Smith drew the card in 1909 for Arthur Edward Waite’s deck, published that year by William Rider & Son. Older versions, as Wikipedia puts it, showed a clothed couple receiving a blessing from a noble or a cleric. Smith’s version shows a nude man and woman in a garden, a great winged figure with arms spread above them, and the sun above that. Behind the woman is a tree with a serpent twined round it; behind the man is a tree bearing twelve fruits.

Waite explained the design as Adam and Eve in the earthly paradise, and said it replaced the older card of marriage and the “later follies” that showed a man between vice and virtue. Cutting the human figures from three to two also fits the card’s later link to Gemini. Later Golden Dawn readers named the angel Raphael; Waite’s own text does not.

Myth and literature · Quotation

Waite’s description

The sun shines in the zenith, and beneath is a great winged figure with arms extended, pouring down influences. In the foreground are two human figures, male and female, unveiled before each other, as if Adam and Eve when they first occupied the paradise of the earthly body. Behind the man is the Tree of Life, bearing twelve fruits, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is behind the woman; the serpent is twining round it. The figures suggest youth, virginity, innocence and love before it is contaminated by gross material desire. This is in all simplicity the card of human love, here exhibited as part of the way, the truth and the life. It replaces, by recourse to first principles, the old card of marriage, which I have described previously, and the later follies which depicted man between vice and virtue. In a very high sense, the card is a mystery of the Covenant and Sabbath.

The suggestion in respect of the woman is that she 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. […]

Myth and literature · Context

Later meanings

Everything in this section was added after the cards were made. In the nineteenth century French occultists such as Éliphas Lévi, Papus and Oswald Wirth described the card as a man choosing between Vice and Virtue. Wirth’s 1887 deck linked it to the Hebrew letter Vau and to Taurus. Michael Dummett showed that Lévi’s claims of hidden Hermetic imagery in the old cards were unfounded.

When the card reached England in the 1880s, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn gave it the Hebrew letter Zayin (Zain) and the sign Gemini, and the plural name “The Lovers” became usual in English. Aleister Crowley later used the same letter. Waite then rejected both the marriage and the vice-and-virtue readings. None of this belongs to the fifteenth-century Italian decks.

Modern interpretation

As read on this site

This is the meaning used for readings here. Using the tarot to divine is a modern practice, and the Norse figure shown for each card is this site’s own association; the tarot began as an Italian card game. A short history is on the Tarot page.

Upright

Keywords: true partnership, mutual choice, harmony, commitment, alignment

Baldur and Nanna's bond is remembered as one of the genuinely uncomplicated loves in Norse myth — not because nothing ever threatened it, but because it was real, chosen, and unforced on both sides. This card marks union built on actual choice: two people (or two parts of a single decision) recognizing each other clearly and opting in, not because it's convenient or expected, but because it's wanted. Whatever's joining together here strengthens both halves rather than diminishing either.

In general: A genuine alignment is forming or strengthening — values, goals, or affections meeting in the middle without either side bending out of shape.

In love: A relationship built on real mutual choice, not convenience or habit. Both people are here because they want to be, and it shows.

In work: A partnership or collaboration that works because both sides actually want the same outcome, not because they're stuck with each other.

Reversed

Keywords: complacency, disconnection, unexamined commitment, drifting

Even the best bonds can run on autopilot. A connection drifting doesn't announce itself with conflict; it just slowly stops being chosen and starts being assumed, which is a quieter kind of distance. Ask whether this relationship, partnership, or commitment is still something you'd pick today, or whether it's just something that's still technically there. Habit isn't the same as love, even when it looks identical from the outside.

In general: Something that used to be a choice has become a default. Worth checking if you'd still choose it on purpose.

In love: Going through the motions of togetherness without the actual presence that made it worth choosing in the first place.

In work: A partnership that's calcified into routine, neither side bringing real engagement anymore. Reassess what each of you actually wants from it now.

Draw a card for a reading · How to read cards together · Reversed cards

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