The Lovers – Meanings & Interpretation – Major Arcana

The Lover’s Meaning In A Tarot Reading

The Lovers card of the Rider-Waite tarot deck represents the power of new love, whether of a person, or a philosophy.

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It represents when we first find our love for something before the harsh light of reality has tempered it. Its light side is the power of transformation and the explosion of this wonderful feeling, a weakening of our usual boundaries in place.

The Lovers Tarot Card Meanings – Upright

Overview:

The new light of new love, inspiration, and the charge of creation. The powerful transformative aspects of love. The time when all things to do with your new love are exciting and blissful, and nothing makes it tiresome. Whether you’re learning a new vocation or mutually falling in love with someone special, love is in the air!

Past Events:

You have recently found a new love, and all things about it are magnificent! The bloom is coming off the rose, however. This doesn’t mean your affair is over.

It just means that you’re moving into a new stage. This is where the work begins. It won’t be as easy as it has been, but that represents a deepening of your relationship. Keep working!

Present Events:

Have you met a new love? No? You will and soon! Again, this isn’t necessarily romantic love, but whatever it is will be deeply exciting and fulfilling for you.

This does not represent some transitory joy but a deep sustaining love that will welcome new elements to your life. Keep your eyes open and at least peek beneath the clouds every so often, but enjoy the ride!

Future Events:

The train of love is coming, and in this position, it’s almost certainly romantic. Please keep your eyes open, though it is likely to happen when you aren’t looking. Be prepared for your life to be turned upside down and to be in a place where you couldn’t be happier this is occurring. It might be time to brush up on your care to help things along.

The Lovers Tarot Card Meanings – Reversed

Overview:

The Lovers tarot card of the Major Arcana in this position signifies difficulties. This represents the sick misrepresentation of love, where it’s riding you like a monkey on your back. It could represent problems in life or a lover in your life that is a deeply unhealthy situation. You may know this or hear it often from your friends, but you can’t quite get away.

Past Events:

You’ve been in a tough place, or at least dancing with a dangerous partner. You’ve likely heard the voices of concerned partners, or you’ve been keeping it a secret as it’s no secret to you that it’s unhealthy. Its grip on you is firmly in a hold. It may have moved on to something more closed.

Present Events:

Ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? If you haven’t, you may very well be headed that way. In your environment right now are the seeds of a dangerous obsession. The new person you think you’re deeply in love with may wind up being much different than you expect.

This idea that you can’t quite get out of your head may be dangerous. Think over the influences in your life, and keep an eye out for a new one. There’s a bad moon on the rise.

Future Events:

It’s time to start keeping an eye on the love in your life. Whether it be work, a relationship, or a hobby, it’s threatening to take a dark turn. Keep your eyes open for signs of preoccupation. Remember to moderate your current activities. Too much of a good thing is poison, and the joy in your life threatens to become one.

Associated Colors:

Pink/Red for passion and love

Meditation For The Lovers – Upright

For the tarot meditation on the Lovers tarot card, lay out the cloth and place the card on it, with a candle at the top, the card in the center closest to you, upright.

Focus on the card and let your mind drift, thinking about feelings of passion, excitement, love, and the drive that comes from being thoroughly entranced with someone or thing. As you drift into the place, you will find yourself in a Victorian hedge maze.

Rather than hedges, the walls are covered with beautiful, well-tended roses, and the uncannily fresh air is rich with their fragrance. Quiet music fills the air, and the secret laughter of lovers having a clandestine meaning occasionally drifts through as you begin to wander the hedge.

Coming around a corner, you’ll see a sculptor standing in front of a piece of marble, slowly pulling the shape out of it as he works fervently.

His face is a mask of fascination and joy, and he occasionally will stop to admire his work, take another view, and dive back into it.

Tarot Meditation Techniques For The Lovers Upright Card

As you come around another bend, you pass by an archway that draws your eye. Through it, you see a large fountain. It centers on a satyr chasing a maiden, who is forever spilling her vase of water into the fountain, trying to escape.

Surrounding the garden are multiple small nooks. In each are couples or groups of people all engaged in the acts of love. All of them are lost in each other in absolute bliss.

As you travel on, you hear the tell-tale rapid-fire tapping of a keyboard and come around the corner to find an author spilling her heart out onto the virtual page. The occasional laughter or mutter as they think out the next scene shows they are lost in their world.

Another woman comes by and sets a mug of tea on the desk next to them. The writer pauses, leans up, kisses her partner affectionately, and returns to her work.

Lovers and Passion?

Throughout all, the air of passion is obvious. Each is deeply engrained with joy and excitement in everything they touch. Their works enhance their world, bringing them joy and meaning.

As you walk through the garden, note these details and those that catch your eye most clearly. Is there something in your life right now bringing you great joy and passion?

Are you following your bliss and finding your purpose? If not, perhaps there is a message here for you to pursue in this tarot meditation of the Lovers card.

Associated Colors:

Jewel/Emerald Green for Obsession

Meditation For The Lovers – Reversed

The Lovers card has a dark side, a mirror that shows what happens when love and passion become an obsession. This tarot meditation will take us down that path. There will be no Victorian garden on this trip. Settle your card in front of you, inverted on the cloth with the candle at the top of the cloth.

Surround it with those things that you see as your vices or that represent vice to you. Whether it be a lover’s cologne, a collection of coins, your work badge, or your favorite CURRENT chemical vice (please don’t bring past bad influences into this meditation.)

As you settle into it, feel the cloying presence, that distinct discomfort you experience when you are around the truly obsessed.

There is a weight to the air, a sickness, and for this meditation, that is where we are going to go. Let the tarot meaning of the card pull you in.

Lovers and Vice?

You find yourself at the edge of a heavy thicket, and at its edge is a pair of heavy cellar doors in the foundation of a long collapsed and ruined house. Swing open the doors and see the cloying darkness within, barely lit by flickering firelight.

The thick heavy smell of incense, unclean bodies, and worse come slithering out of the gate. Take your step within the traveler, and hold close.

Beneath, you find a damp hallway made of old crumbling brickwork. It twists and turns around on itself to the point you lose track of where the exit is. Roots and worms slither between the bricks, slipping their way through long-rotted mortar. Everything here reeks of sickness.

You come to an alcove, and within you find a sunken, sallow-eyed man curled over in front of his computer, one hand seeking to pleasure himself, the screen covered in the worst images.

He is consumed and surrounded by tissues and filth. There is no joy here, just an unending pit of need. He is lost to real love and connection. There is only the need.

You travel on, and the thick chemical smell fills the air. The next alcove has a group of people, all passing about a glass pipe. Their eyes are sunken, their flesh thin, their bones and ribs visible.

They smoke, they pass, and even the food around them stays uneaten. A crib sits in the corner, strangely silent before you see more you walk on.

Tarot Meditation Techniques For The Lovers Reversed Card

The next room contains two couples, a woman holding her arms close to herself, her eyes fearful as she whispers into the phone. “It’s ok, it’s ok, and it’s my fault. I know what he’s like when he gets mad. I know he loves me.”

The man standing next to her looks contemptuous and violent, glaring pompously down at his subdued plaything, not lover, just a thing he keeps around.

For those who know how to look, the fear in his eyes almost mirrors hers, but as a form of control, what is she if she is lost? He cannot see what he does to her. All he cares about is that she listens and is kept.

You will come around one last corner, and standing in that alcove is something that pulls you, something that terrifies you—your obsession, your vice, your weakness that lies within.

As it starts to pull you in, you spot streams of fresh, healthy light at the tunnel’s end and tear yourself away, running for the light of fresh air, for freedom. As you rip open the gate and leave, you hear the words, “You’ll be back… They always come back.” Echo behind you.

Free your Vices

Come out of the tarot meditation of the Lovers card reversed. Know that this need not be. You can be free of your old vices. It just takes awareness and learning the necessary steps.

This is love in the wrong sense. Take yourself out, take a few deep breaths, and then write what you experienced and what lessons you took with you in your journal. Then take care of yourself. This trip wasn’t a pleasant one.

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