The Lovers
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The Marseilles card
The Waite-Smith card
A Transcendental Card
The Lovers
This card is not about physical love or sex, not is it about relations between the sexes. The essence of unconditional love is to bring things together without limit. So that which was severed in the previous stages is now ready to be reunited. The card depicts either two or three figures below, with some sort of angelic being above. The clearest explanation is that the energies on either side (of the spinal column), known as Ida and Pingala in Tantrism, have been united in the central column called sushumna. The kundalini that resides therein, formerly dormant, has now risen as an angelic being, meaning that a new being has been birthed.
This is all very abstract, but the card of Love belongs here, as without the presence of universal love, attraction, unification or reunion, the Fool’s journey cannot be completed. The spiritual act of intent undertaken back in Stage I has now been consummated.
A passage from Castaneda’s The Fire from Within will help us with another aspect of this card. The old sorcerers “are not caught by death, like the rest of mortal men, but choose the moment and the way of their departure from this world. At that moment they are consumed by a fire from within and vanish from the face of the earth, free, as if they had never existed.” This fire from within is what burns up the Phoenix, and is also shown on The Lovers in Waite’s card as the fiery angel, who is separated from the earthly realm. An ascension and a rebirth are heralded here, but are not fully realized until the remaining cards are encountered.