1. Love and Marriage from Milan to Etteilla
The Lover or Lovers card, as it has been known since the 17th century, was in the earliest lists just "Love". The card survives in two early Lombard decks, the Cary-Yale (CY) of the 1440s (left above) and Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo of the 1450s (center), as well as the "Charles VI' deck of a little later, the 1460s, probably of Florence (right).
The two Lombard cards are much alike: a man and a woman shake hands, with Cupid overhead (for the Cary-Yale: Beinecke Library, http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/, then "Visconti" or "Cary Sheet" For the Visconti-Sforza, Dummmet, The Visconti-Sforza tarot cards). The CYs handshake is that of the marriage contract, with heraldic emblems of the two families above them. They might be those of Pavia, for the groom, and Visconti, for the bride, and the marriage that of Francesco Sforza and Bianca Maria Visconti, legitimated daughter of the Duke of Milan.
The Viscontis' heir-apparent was traditionally the Count of
Pavia. Even though Sforza was only a Viscount, the flag of Pavia might
have been to get Sforza's hopes up, even if in the end, Visconti had
other intentions. On the other hand, the banners might commemorate some
other marriage, between a Visconti duke and a daughter of the duke of
Savoy, as had happened twice in the history of the dynasty and would
happen again. The word "LOVE" can be seen on the tent. The dog is a
symbol of faithfulness.
In the PMB, Cupid is older than in the earlier Cary-Yale, and so perhaps the couple, renewing their vows, perhaps. In
the Charles VI the love being celebrated seems less serious and more
romantic, simply people following their instincts. In another early version, c. 1500, the man seems to be swearing an oath of fealty.The
arrow in the breast of the lady is reminiscent of similar arrows in
Petrarch's heart, doomed to love the recalcitrant Laura, who in
Petrarch's poetry pledges herself to eternal chastity. That Love should be 8th is exceptional, as it is usually 6th. Before it, after the Pope, are both Temperance, 6th, and the Chariot, 7th. The champion of the tournament is claiming his reward.
In the sequence as it appeared in Florence, the next card will be Temperance: one must learn to control the appetites with the virtue of self-control. In Ferrara and Venice, Temperance is first, Love after: that is to say, when one has learned Temperance, then one may experience Love safely. In Milan the next in the order was Justice: it is the contract that allows for chastity within moral bounds, the chastity of sex within the sanctity of marriage. Each side binds itself to the other, with duties to fulfill. For men, the principal one is to provide for the family and be a good father; for women, it is the duty to be a good mother to the man's children and to obey her husband, with no cause for disgrace due to infidelity or even immodest dress. If that makes for a double standard, that is the way it was. Of course the instinct by itself will not confine itself to such bounds. That is the function of Temperance and the marriage contract.
The Schoen horoscope of 1515, in which many of the twelve astrological houses seem to correspond to a tarot card, adds a priest, as though to say, it is time we made
the theme of marriage explicit! This image is for the 7th house, that
of partnerships and contracts. (Schoen zodiac: Ernst and Johanna Lerner, Astology and Astronomy: a pictorial archive of signs and symbols. Vieville: Heron. Contracts: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_(astrology)). Love is a serious business: Cupid is
absent. Vieville's version appears to represent the same scene, now with Cupid. An older
figure, male as nearly as we can tell, puts his hand on a young man's
shoulder, while he clutches his belt, and the young woman beside him (or
perhaps another man) puts her hand on his heart.
De Gebelin in 1781 saw the card in terms of an ancient Roman tomb painting in which a youth, Amor is between two older figures, representing the mother and the father, with the whole as the "Image of Faithfulness." (Karlin, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, p. 21, original French of Monde Primitif, vol. 8, 1781, p. 370, in Gallica). In the 16th century this image appears in both Alciato and Cartari emblem-books. Cartari's comment next to the engraving says that the wreathed woman is the mother, Truth; the father is Honor; and Love is their bond. (Cartari, Images of the gods of the ancients, 1647 edition, p. 84. Long leaves as honor: p. 218). Cartari's image derives from a Roman tombstone.
In the tarot, from this perspective, the father, with the leaves, has been changed to an older woman, the mother to the young woman, and Love is divided into two, Cupid and the Lover. That is a bit of a stretch! Yet the older woman with the leaves does look maternal, as though the lovers must be sanctioned by family, even more than by a priest.
In Greco-Roman mythology Cupid was the son of Mars and Venus, but not as the result of any marriage: Venus was already married to Vulcan. The hieros gamos, or sacred marriage, was that between Jupiter and Juno, whose offspring were Mars and Bellona, god and goddess of war. A close correspondence would be to the Egyptian Osiris and Isis, whose offspring was the warrior Horus, who took the form of a hawk. It is hard to say whether anyone would have made such an interpretation of the tarot card figures in the 16th-17th centuries, but the gods of ancient Egypt were quite fashionable at that time. Cartari has an image of Isis, Osiris and Carpocrates (a Greek term for the younger Horus, for which see Plutarch: Of Isis and Osiris XIX, at http://thriceholy.net/Texts/Isis.html); notice the wings on the child and the bird next to him with similar headgear, which in turn can be compared to the hawk representing Horus at his temple at Edfu, a short distance from the Nile. Such images of Horus were surely known by the time of the Cartari image, 1647.
In Cartari's caption, Isis is
called Angerona, goddess of the returning sun, because Harpocrates'
birthday was celebrated at the Winter Solstice (Cartari 1647, p. 198). Carpocrates was one of
several precursors to Christ, whose feast days Christianity co-opted.
Both he and the hawk-god and hero Horus were seen by 
the Greeks as
equivalent to Apollo, the sun god, appropriate for the sunburst behind
the child on the cards.
For the sunburst, besides an assimilation to a solar deity, another interpretation would be in terms of the Eros of the Orphics, of whom the Orphic Hymns declared:
First (I have sung) the vast necessity of ancient Chaos,
And Cronus, who in the boundless tracts brought forth
The Ether, and the splendid and glorious
Eros of a two-fold nature,
The illustrious father of night, existing from eternity.
Whom men call Phanes. (http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/af/af10.htm)
Phanes is Greek for "light-bringer," a suitable epithet for who is the
center of intense rays of light. This "Phanes" was also an epithet of Dionysus himself, probably because Eros was considered the first incarnation of the god later born as Dionysus. In this role, too, Dionysus has his epithet Hues,
god of moisture and fertility. Aside from being the protector of agriculture, his particular product was wine, the lubricator of
procreation. Cartari says that the ancients called Priapus the son of
Venus and Dionysus because sexual love results from the combination of
beauty and wine. Cartari also quotes the saying that "Venus can do nothing without Bacchus; indeed, another of his epithets is Phallen.
His followers, for some of the time under the master's guidance, produced the following other meanings for the card, upright and reversed (I have combined two lists below):
[Mariage.] MARRIAGE (13)—Union, Meeting, Joining, Assembling, Bond, Alliance, Vow, Oath, Intimacy, Copulation, Coupling, Chain, Slavery, Financial Straits [Gene; Stockman has “discomfort or difficulty “], Captivity, Servitude.
Reversed: [Union.] UNION. Society, Contacts, Concubinage, Adultery, Incest, Alloy, Blending, Mixture, Compounding.—Peace, Concord, Accord, Harmony, Correct [Good] Understanding [bonne intelligence; Stockman has “good terms”]. Reconciliation, Patching up.
We see more than union in the Uprights: there is a Vow or Oath, as in marriage. Such a contract can also be a form of captivity if one person dominates without the consent of the other. The reverseds have terms that could apply to metals or chemicals as much as to people; to me this suggests consciousness of an alchemical analogy.
The emblem-writers, in fact, were not adverse to such an interpretation. The mythologist Natale Conti wrote a compendium of stories about the gods in 1551, entitled Mythologies.
In it he includes what he specifically calls an alchemical
interpretation of Juno. He calls her "water of Mercury," and says, among
other things,
She is in charge of marriages because "she is the means for conjoining the sulphuric vapors, Venus and Mars, as it were, and because before the distilling process, she is joined with Jove, and the two together engender the alchemical Sun, hence her being called the wife of Jove. She is the queen of the Gods because she controls, dissolves, joins, separates and constrains the metals, which are named after various Gods. (Anthony DiMatteo, Natale Conti's Mythologies, A select translation, p. 81)
Here again we see Juno, the older woman on the card, depicted as that which brings about the transformation of others, in this case envisioned as vapors and metals, in other words their initiator into higher stages of development. As for the "alchemical Sun" engendered by this Jupiter and Jove, the myth would have predicted Mars; but now it appears to be the sun-god, the nature-god Helios but in the Olympian pantheon Apollo. It is also the sunburst behind Cupid, who is another product of a hieros gamos, that between Mars and Venus.
2. Pythagorean influences
In the ancient Theology of Arithmetic (Roman Empire period), which came to Italy in manuscript with the Greek scholar Bessarion in the 1460s, received its first publication in sixteenth century Paris. In it the number 6 governs the animal soul, the soul of that which can move its body from place to place of its own volition (pp. 72-73 of Robin Wakefield's English translation, in archive.org) in any of the six directions: up, down, left, right,
forward, back (p. 78). As such, it corresponds to the sixth day of
creation in Genesis, when God made the four-legged animals--although a
Pythagorean account would probably hold that all animals would have been
made on that day. Genesis also has God making humans on that day. Humans possess rational as well as animal souls, and to that extent
correspond to the Pythagorean Seven. In the Lovers card, however, the instinctual or animal side would be suggested, at least as a force to be reckoned with.
The number 6 is also one of two numbers of marriage in Pythagorean theory, based on two ways of combining 2 and 3, the first female and male numbers. Added, the result is 5, and since that is an odd number it was called the male number of marriage. Multiplied, the two numbers are 6, an even number and hence the female number.
In the Theology of Arithmetic, the Hexad is called "presider over
crossroads" (p. 81). At a crossroads, one must choose. In human beings, reason is supposedly dominant, but
instinct probably plays more of a role than we realize. As bearing the
number for choices, the interpretation of the Lover card in terms of the
choice between Pleasure and Duty fits best. The choice was actually
called "the Pythagorean Y," the Y being the crossroads of Hercules. That leads into another interpretation of the card.
The Comte de Mellet, in his companion essay to de Gebelin's in the latter's Monde Primitif, saw the card as being about the "choice of Hercules" between virtue and pleasure, in an era when "man . . . is no longer led by reason" (Karlin, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, p. 53, original p. 399). Whether the arrow of Desire will go right or left "will be guided by chance," as signified by the blindfold. There is ample
justification for thinking that the "choice of Hercules" view of the card existed long before de Mellet, if not his view that neither choice was guided by reason.
In some versions, Cupid is about to bury his arrow into the man's
heart; in others, it is the younger woman's or somewhere in between. In the myths, when Cupid strikes, his victim will fall in love
with the next person he or she sees; in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, he even pricks himself, and the next person he sees is Psyche. On the card, it is to our left that
the young man looks. He will fall in love with Virtue. Thus the woman
on the right, with the wreath of flowers, frowns. She is the one who
will be rejected.Levi's follower Paul Christian's view of the card (History and Practice of Magic, trans. from 1870, p. 100) is simple: "The whole scene expresses the
struggle between conscience and the passions." He adds, "The woman on the
right has a fillet of gold around her head and represents virtue. The one on the left is crowned with
vine-leaves and represents the temptation of vice." The figure on top,
whom I have identified as Cupid, is for him "the genius of Justice," who
"draws his bow and directs the arrow of punishment at Vice." In the
initiation he imagines elsewhere in the book, the candidate is killed by
such a blow if he should exhibit the least tendency toward that choice. I wonder if Christian has mixed up who the two are: the leaves are as likely laurel as ivy, and no one would be aroused by the rather plain features of that lady, as opposed to the pleasure-giving visage on the right.
Papus,
having in mind both the Conver-style card and the one that Wirth
designed (the 1927 version is at right), says much the same, in the same
words, but with a few additions, especially as regards the resolution of
the antagonism. (Notice that Wirth has made the lady on the left more attractive than the rather overweight one on the right, a reversal of the customary depiction.) First Papus identifies the man as the same as on card one,
the Bateleur, but (Morton trans,, 1896, p. 128 in archive.org):
Here the man is not one of the Initiates. He does not know how to direct the magnetic currents of the Astral light; he is therefore plunged into the antagonism of different ideas which he has no power to master.
The result is the antagonism
between the two sides. But "this antagonism is also the most powerful
natural producer that exists in the world, when it resolves itself into
Love, which attracts the opponents and unites them forever" (p. 129).
This resolution, or "equilibrium" takes three forms: in the divine world
the signification is the Equilibrium between Will and Intelligence -
Beauty" (and also, he mentions later, Tiphereth). In the human world it
is "the Equilibrium between Power and Authority - Love and Charity", and
in the natural world it is "the Equilibrium between the Universal soul
and the Universal life - Universal attraction, Universal Love" (pp.
130-131). That is rather a mouthful; presumably it is a Platonic, i.e. non-sexual love, that Papus has in mind.
Wirth, writing in 1927, identifies Virtue as a queen wearing a crown. The other, in green and yellow, is a bacchante, and represents sensuality. The man in the middle is no Hercules; he is at the meeting of two roads with "his eyes lowered, uncertain of what direction to take" (Tarot of the Magicians, 1985, p. 86, in archive.org). The choice is clear, of course:
We must involve ourselves, with no going back, in the harsh path of virtue, precisely so that our volitions are not squandered in pursuing pleasure and the little diversions of life. . . . To love to the point of existing only for others, that is the objective of the Lover.
Thus, shining with "moral beauty which corresponds to the sixth Sephirah," he becomes "the initiate whose apprenticeship is completed." His crossed arms allude to two triangles, one pointing down, for water and the human soul, the other pointing up for fire and the Divine Spirit, two elements that when combined tend to cancel each other. Their combination in the hexagram, however, is the marriage of the two. In that way "the Lover brings us back to unity through love, for Man becomes divine by loving as God does" (all p. 80).
The sixth sefirah, Tifereth, is a fitting name for the lover, because in Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus, what inspires love in the sense of Eros is beauty, in a kind of hierarchy of forms, from the procreative urge to love of the divine. In Paolo Ricci's 1516 Latin translation of Gikkatila's 14th century Gates of Light, (Portae Lucis,
p. 86), the word is pulchritudo, beauty; Johannes Reuchlin in 1517, also in Latin, calls it orna, adornment, and adds that Tiffereth is also
"the tree of life" (lignum vitae), pleasure (voluptas), the Line of the
Mean (linea media), the High Priest (sacerdos magnus), the rising of the
sun (ortus solis), and the color purple (species purpurea)--presumably,
as the royal color. "Line of the mean" I presume means the middle
column of the Tree of Life. That voluptas and sacerdos, implying priestly duty, might be in conflict is not considered. Certainly in Judaism there was no requirement of celibacy as a prerequisite for mystically connecting to the divine.
It is perhaps worth backtracking a bit to see how the Renaissance handled the conflict between Virtue and Pleasure. Edgar Wind, in Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance (1958, in archive.org), has a chapter called "Virtue
Reconciled with Pleasure." He describes Raphael's painting "The Dream of
Scipio" (below, from http://www.wga.hu/framex-e.html?file=html/r/raphael/2firenze/1/21knight.html&find=scipio). The sterner of two women offers Scipio the book of
Wisdom and the sword of Courage, to put the allegory in terms of Plato's
Republic. The other woman
offers the flowers of sensual delight, the physical appetites. 
Similarly, although Pleasure in the "Marseille" versions is dismayed at the young man's
attention to Virtue, Virtue might well be approving of the young man's match
with Pleasure, precisely for the same reason--namely, that he only
chooses Pleasure when she is in accord with Virtue.In this vein, as early as 1498 Albrecht Durer did an etching, which he called simply "Hercules" (at left), in which the figure of Virtue is about to club the recumbent Pleasure (http://www.bmagic.org.uk/objects/1955P47/images/94104). Hercules blocks Virtue's swing with his cudgel. It is as if to say that Virtue need not oppose Pleasure, that the two can co-exist. The two ladies here are similar to two portraits Durer did at that time, of the same young woman, once as Piety and the other as Voluptas, Joy. They are the two aspects which when combined made a young woman attractive as a mate, as Panofsky observed (Durer, p. 41).
From this standpoint, we can see more in the traditional Marseille cards than a simple choice between one and the other. Pleasure raises her hand to the young man's heart, as though to say that the pleasure she offers is of a loftier kind than mere sensuous enjoyment: her love is of the heart. And Virtue looks at both young people with a kindly expression: she is not pleasure's rival; she is blessing the union of the young man with the mate of his heart.
Some writers of the time went further. In 1580, Montaigne said, "Even in virtue our ultimate aim---no matter what they say--is pleasure" (The Essays: a selection, trans. M.A. Screech, p. 18f, in Google Books). Even the pursuit of virtue is high pleasure, for it means being near her:
Those who proceed to teach us that the questing after virtue is rugged and wearisome whereas to possess her is delight can only mean that she always lacks delight. (For what human means have ever brought anyone to the joy of possessing her.) Even the most perfect of men have been satisfied with aspiring to her--not possessing her but drawing near to her. (pp. 18-19)
Love looks not only with the eyes, but with the mind;This speech is from the love-struck Helena, whose love, like the flower-wreathed tarot woman, is not yet reciprocated. In her case, she loves both her beloved's virtues and his vices. To the lover, she observes, even the beloved's bad qualities assume a "form and dignity." They are part of the whole person who is loved.
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
(Midsummer Night's Dream 1.1.234f.)
In that way Love is a deceiver, in the service of a unity between lover and beloved that is compelling but not always wise. It is in this same vein that the disillusioned King Lear says:
Do thy worst, blind Cupid, I'll not love!Love was his downfall, Lear thinks, in fostering illusions. Yet Shakespeare does not disagree with Pico. For in Lear's very next scene, he does love, and the object of his love is the daughter he formerly scorned, whom he now loves with an enlightened mind that sees his former rejection as a product of his own faults.
(King Lear 4.6.134.)
Helena's love has something in common with that dialectic. She perceives her beloved's faults for what they are and loves them as part of the person she loves. It is an acceptance of imperfection in others. First we love blindly, not seeing the other's faults. Then we see them, and find them unacceptable; for us to continue loving the person, he or she must remove these faults, because they compromise the integrity of the one who loves. Then there is the loving of a person with his or her faults, and perhaps seeing one's own faults as well.
By the 18th century, some interpreters of the card in Masonic circles were surely combining the two motifs, Virtue and Pleasure, into two stages of initiation, the "choice of Hercules" for the first and the hieros gamos as the second. We know from literature about the secret societies that so-called "sex magic" was part of their quest for merger with the divine, at least in their imaginations. On the card, it might be that the marriage is not yet settled. Perhaps, like Tamino and Pamina in Mozart's Magic Flute, the pair must first prove themselves worthy, as initiates and lovers, by a series of tests.
We were introduced to a pair of candidates for initiation in the Pope card, as the acolytes, both male, perhaps taking an oath before the initiation-master. In the present card, the
older woman wearing the wreath is still the Domina. And there is another
initiator, above them: Cupid, the Orphic Eros/Dionysus. The two initiates are the two young people.That Cupid is blindfolded, as we see him in Noblet and Dodal (near and far right), is in keeping with a Renaissance revival of Orphism, the ancient revival of the cult of Dionysus in the Greek city-states starting around the 5th century b.c.e. Plato refers to it, often sympathetically. Thus when Pico speaks of a blind Cupid, he is consciously echoing a line from an Orphic hymn quoted by the Roman-era philosopher Proclus: "in his breast guarding eyeless swift love" (Wind, p. 57). For Proclus and Pico alike, "blind Amor" (Latin for "Love") was an Orphic phrase for the love beyond intellect.
In this context of ritual hieros gamos, I can think of another interpretation of the older woman's hand, pointing in the direction of the phallus. Perhaps, as either his mother or his female initiator, she is asking him, "Do you know how to use that thing?" The young man, for his part, has his middle finger sticking out of his belt, pointing toward the young woman's lower midriff, as if to say, "Sure, it goes in there!"' The young woman has her left hand on the young man's heart, as if to assure the older woman that she truly loves him and wants only his heart. Cupid, with his blindfold off, has shifted his arrow and is ready to shoot it at her her.
There remains the hand between the two young people. Is it his or hers?
It could be either. From the position of the thumb in what appears to be
a hand turned palm down, my best guess is that it is his. If so, it
reinforces the gesture of his other hand. On the other hand, if it is
hers, she may be warding him off, saying playfully that he is being
indecent. Or she may be telling the domina that she is already pregnant!
But the subject is not merely physical procreation: it is production
from passion, giving pleasure to oneself and others, by work or hobbies,
for example, or even the mystical marriage with Christ. And if another meaning of the card is that of being at a crossroads,
perhaps the choice is not only between duty and pleasure, but of how to
handle a crisis of passion.
Jean-Claude Flornoy, a late 20th century card maker who was the first to reconstruct Noblet, Dodal, and Vieville, has a charming story in connection
with this card, another way in which it suggests crisis in love and its
resolution. A young woman of 36 comes to him because she cannot shake
her melancholy after being cast aside by her boyfriend. In the course of
their interaction he notices her talent in drawing, a talent belittled
by her family and which she now does secretly. Flornoy praises her. When he hears from her six months later, he learns that she made
drawings for her employer and now has been promoted from saleswoman to
designer in the wallpaper company she works for. The sadness about the
boyfriend is a thing of the past; she has an inner passion now. (Flornoy, Pelerinage des Bateleurs, p. 85f.)
In the context of this story the two women represent two forms of passion, one of
dependency on another and another coming from within and not a longing
for fusion with another. It is not, I think, to say that dependency on
another is wrong, but only that it can be one-sided without the other.
The longing for peaceful contentment in fusion, a feeling left over from
the womb, is what is to be transcended.
Production from passion, however, also has its downside. It is not in
the card, but we know it from life, and interpreters of the card notice
that this card comes up often when there has been, or soon will be, a
disappointment in the results and a crisis in the soul The great feeling
of oneness with another person shows its twoness soon enough. Likewise, one's
passionate production in work or art may be unappreciated and rejected.
Despite one's devotions, God is silent. The child one longed for dies or
has some disability. Is this really one's bliss that one has
been following? So the card becomes a card of crisis, a crossroads,
where one of the choices may not even yet be known. In this case the resolution of the crisis will be the hieros gamos to come, with its offspring, Eros on a higher level.
4. Waite and Case
Waite rejects both of the alternatives presented so far. "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." Instead, for him it expresses the Judeo-Christian message of fall and redemption, in which the pair are Adam and Eve, the two trees that of Life and of Knowledge, and Eve the fall from innocence into the "sensitive" life. Yet "only by her can he complete himself. The card is therefore in its way another intimation concerning the great mystery of womanhood." Here it is the direction each figure looks that tells the story. The man looks at the woman, who is the source of the Fall. The woman looks at the angel, as the source of redemption. The angel looks at both of them compassionately.
Case's card is similar to Waite's, with a similar interpretation, but expressed psychologically: Self-consciousness is the power to make discriminations, seen first in the Magician, who corresponds to the man in the Lovers card. The woman is subconsciousness, first seen in the High Priestess card, and now represented by the woman. They stand in a reciprocal relationship. Case says:
Self-consciousness gives suggestions to subconsciousness. The latter receives the suggestions, works them out, and gives back the results to self-consciousness.(Tarot Fundamentals, 1936, lesson 15, p. 3, in archive.org)
This process of mutual giving and receiving is then the basis of love or hate.
Reciprocity between opposites, when it is harmonious, expresses itself in the field of the emotions as Love. An inharmonious relationship is akin to Hate, the inversion of Love. (Ibid.)Through this exchange, when it is harmonious, "we approach the inner, superconscious life of God," (Ibid. p. 4) represented by the Angel, symbol of what Case calls the Self. On the other hand,
hate takes us into the field of the Divine wrath, and we become identified with the cycles of necessity and pain which characterize nature in its apparent separation from the Divine. (Ibid.)
What happens within the subconscious is expressed on the card in part by the woman's gaze, which in turn is affected by self-consciousness's suggestions:
The man looks at the woman, but the woman looks upward toward the angel. Whatever self-consciousness observes directly is the activity of subconsciousness. Yet subconsciousness brought under the influence of right discrimination, may be made to reflect the activity of super-consciousness. (Ibid.)
Subconscious activity is also expressed by the serpent. Negatively it is a force pulling the personality (which includes both the man and the woman) toward temptation and the senses, represented by the fruit on the tree. But it is also "the Kundalini of the yogis" (Ibid.).
What is meant is that the serpent-power of vibration is the voice which at first leads us into temptation through delusion; and then delivers us from evil, when we know how to apply it to overcome our errors. (Ibid.)
Thus on the card the snake coils upward, like the Kundalini energy in the spinal column.
Just as the Tree of Knowledge is behind the woman, behind the man is the Tree of Life. Of its leaves or fruit, which are triple flames, case says:
They represent the twelve signs of the zodiac, which are subdivided into three decans (divisions into ten degrees) for each sign. Hence they represent the twelve basic types and the thirty-six subtypes of human personality. (Ibid., p. 2)The mutual interaction between self-consciousness's power of discrimination acting upon subconsciousness, both influenced by superconsciousness, leads
at last to mental recognition of a Unity which transcends all pairs of opposites. A Unity we cannot define, a Unity for which silence and darkness are symbols. (Ibid., lesson 15, p. 6)
In Tarot: a Key to the Wisdom of the Ages, Case relates the card briefly to the Kabbalah. Referring to the old cards which show three people in the lower part of the card, he (like Waite) rejects the idea that the scene shows the choice between virtue and vice. Rather:
In old exoteric versions of Tarot there are three figures - a youth and a maiden, facing a crowned woman. These are the Qabalistic Son and Bride combined with the Qabalistic Mother or Queen. The design, aside from its deeper meaning, has obvious reference to marriage. The title intimates the union of opposite but complementary modes of existence. It is also closely related to "Disposing Intelligence." (1990 revised ed., p. 86, in archive.org)
By "opposite and complementary modes of existence" I think he means self-consciousness (the man) and subconsciousness (the young woman), as the two partners in the marriage. They are in what Case calls a reciprocating relationship:
Self-consciousness gives suggestions to subconsciousness. the latter receives the suggestions, works them out, and gives back the results to self-consciousness. In connection with Key 6., reciprocation is also the relationship between superconsciousness and human personality, when the latter is considered to be a combination of the two poles of personal mentality, self-consciousness and subconsciousness. (Lesson 15, p. 3).
So we have self-consciousness as the man/husband, subconsciousness as the woman/bride, and superconsciousness as the angel/mother. Or, in the Marseille version, it is the man, the young woman, and the older woman, respectively. We might ask, what in the occultist version corresponds to Cupid? And what in the Marseille version corresponds to the serpent? Perhaps they correspond to each other.
The Kabbalistic relationship can perhaps be explicated further in reference to Pico in his 900 Theses of 1486, a work studied by esotericists for centuries. He says that in the Scriptures, love of male and female denotes mystically the conjunction of Tifereth and Keneset Israel [Malkhuth], or of Beth [Binah] and Tifereth (28.17, in Farmer's Syncretism in the West, 1998). In the "Marseille" version of the card, it would be the man, Tifereth, between the two women, the elder Binah, and the younger Malkhuth. In Case's card, the man and woman below are Tifereth and Malkuth, while the Angel above would correspond to Binah. For Pico, Tifereth is "the shining mirror," "the full sun," and in the soul, "free choice." He adds "When the light of the mirror not shining becomes just like that of the shining mirror, then Night will be just like Day, as David says" (28.20). That is the Judgment day, the "Great Jubilee" in Binah.
I gather from these cryptic remarks that Tifereth is to shine the light received from bright Binah (Understanding) onto dark Malkuth. When she receives it sufficiently and reflects it back, they will be joined and raised to Binah. This seems to correspond to the idea of the Messiah redeeming Israel (Kenesset means "assembly"), in a reciprocating way in which Israel must also be worthy of being redeemed. So on the card the man shines the light of discernment from Binah (Understanding), i.e. superconsciousness, onto Malkhut, the subconscious. From her he can recognize what is above them both. It seems to me that Case is saying the same thing on a personal level when he says:
The self-conscious intellectual mind, although it is the determining factor in personal consciousness, does not become directly aware of superconsciousness. Selfconsciousness, as the symbolism of Key 1 shows, does receive and transmit the powers of superconsciousness; but conscious awareness of the nature of those powers comes from careful observation of the activities of subconsciousness. (The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the Ages, 1990 ed., p. 88)
It is as if to say, the Messiah does not know whose son he is and what his purpose is until he gets the light from above reflected back to him from Israel. He merely reflects the light onto Malkuth, and discerns Binah there to the extent that Malkuth recognizes her from that light.
Case, following the Golden Dawn tradition, identifies the card with the path on the Tree between Binah and Tifereth. It is this path that makes Adam shine.
5. Jung and Case
Case's "reciprocity" between self-consciousness and subconsciousness corresponds in significant ways to Jung's process of active imagination, as a dialogue between ego and unconscious, resulting in a "suspension of the opposites" in the transcendent function, experienced as a mediation between opposites transcending both. Jung writes :
This function of mediation between the opposites I have termed the transcendent function, by which I mean nothing mysterious, but merely a combined function of conscious and unconscious elements or, as in mathematics, a common function of real and imaginary quantities. (Psychological Types, Collected Works Vol. 6, paragraph 184)The product of the unconscious will be something both symbolic and concrete, an image emerging out of a mood or dream recollection put onto paper, sculpted, danced, a combination of toy figures on a sand tray, perhaps even a tarot card or two, if they provides the occasion for the free expression of imagination. As for Case, it is a matter of the reciprocal interaction of opposites, thesis and antithesis, but for Jung it comes from the unconscious, yet "forms the middle ground by which the opposites can be united, a "mediatory product" that holds the tension that threatens to dissolve it. But:
Then if the mediatory product remains intact, it forms the raw material for a process not of dissolution but of construction, in which thesis and antithesis both play their part. ... The standstill is overcome and life can flow on with renewed power towards new goals. (Ibid., paragraph 827)Case describes something similar, but places the origination of the process with self-consciousness:
All our miseries and limitations result from subconscious developments of erroneous interpretations of our experience. Self-consciousness makes these erroneous interpretations, Self-consciousness must correct them. For subconsciousness has no power of independent inductive reasoning. and its production of mental imagery is determined by the premises, or mental seeds, planted by self-conscious thinking. (Tarot Fundamentals, lesson 16, p. 3)
Jung, in contrast, would start with the reflection of consciousness upon a product of the unconscious, i.e. a dream, reverie, a vision. Discrimination, i.e. analysis, is second, and then a dialog, each developing the other. For examples see his Red Book, which is essentially his discovery and record of the method through his own self-analysis, through dialogues between his rational ego and various sub-personalities, emerging from the unconscious, resulting in new images and new sub-personalities. toward the creation of a "new thing" that is on a higher level than either.
Case sees the Lovers card as a further stage in the process that began with the Magician in relation to the High Priestess, then the Emperor in relation to the Empress, and now two figures on the same card. In Jungian terms, the card depicts the third stage of anima and animus development: from a sensuous participation mystique with the imaginal mother (High Priestess/Magician) to physical and social reproduction (Empress/Emperor) to the interaction between the male and female figures, by which both reason and the unconscious in partnership may access the Self.
Yet Jung and Case mean different things by the Self. For Case "the true Self is identical with superconsciousness," a fundamentally spiritual awareness of "eternal principles" (lesson 13, p. 3) that nonetheless sees beneath appearances to the inner essences of things and their interrelationships; it is sometimes called "cosmic consciousness (lesson 3, p. 7). It is a pre-existent force guiding both consciousness and unconsciousness. For Jung the Self is the whole personality, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical, and as much a construction as a pre-existent guide. In this whole there is a particular role for Eros, which is not an angel guiding the whole but an instinctual force that breaks one out of the self-imposed limits of self-consciousness. He says of this god:
Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so, whatever the legislation of the future will have to say about it. He belongs on one side to man's primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he only thrives when spirit and instinct are in right harmony. If one or the other aspect is lacking to him, the result is injury or at least a lopsidedness that may easily veer towards the pathological. Too much of the animal distorts the civilized man, too much civilization makes sick animal (Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Collected Works Vol. 7, par. 32)
And it is more than just instinct vs. spirit. Eros is the force of relatedness towards others, real others as well as imaginal. Sallie Nichols says:
The Tarot Pope, one might say, offers initiation into the life of the spirit. In this card [the Lover], the challenge is to connected the spiritual life with emotional life and, through passionate involvement in all of life, achieve a new relationship with others and a new harmony within oneself. (Jung and Tarot, p. 134)
It is thus the drive toward connectedness that leads us to learn about our shadow, that part of ourselves we hide both from others and ourselves, but which others react to, often unconsciously. It is also that which leads us to withdrawing our projections onto others and see people for who they are, in terms of their own needs and perspectives. In that regard our dreams can serve as important counterbalances to our conscious perspectives, a kind of other to consciousness not dissimilar to other consciousnesses in relation to our own.
The card began as Love, i.e. Amor or Cupid, an instinctual force. It somehow became "L'Amoureux," the Lover, between virtue and vice. Then it became "The Lovers," and then somehow Cupid was no longer in the card, with the subject being the interaction between the man, the woman, symbolic opposites, and the angel. Yet a snake appeared, which is hardly a passive force incapable of "inductive reasoning," i.e. hypothesis-formation: "If you eat, you will not die," it says. As an instinct luring downwards and spiraling upwards ("Be ye wise as serpents"), perhaps it is another form of "blind Cupid" himself.
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