How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)
Sonnet 43
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was long dead before Pamela Coleman Smith was born, but I think they could have been friends. Barrett’s strong sense of justice for those less fortunate, the stirrings of feminism in her work, and their shared family lineage of colonialism in Jamaica could have kept them up all night comparing notes. Elizabeth was the oldest of twelve to Pamela’s only child status, but studies show the oldest and the only have similarities in behavior within the family structure. Elizabeth also fell in love and left a brutal father to marry and live with Robert Browning in Italy until her untimely death at only fifty-five, while Pamela remained orphaned and unmarried in England until her death in 1951. My task this week is to look at The Lovers card, and tease out a couple of questions with ideas for how I can perhaps answer them.
The Waite Smith deck takes a major turn in presenting The Lovers. In both the Visconti Sforza and the Marseilles deck (pictured above), we have four figures, a man choosing between two women and a cupid getting ready to shoot its arrow from above. A popular and I think fitting interpretation of the card is the pull between the love for one’s mother, and the necessary separation as we move to independence, and find a romantic and mature love in adulthood. It represents choice and transition, and the changes which occur as we mature.
What we see in the Colman Smith rendition is wholly different. The Biblical reference is unavoidable, but as always with Smith, there is a twist. It is not so simple as to show Adam and Eve with the Tree of Life and the tree of temptation behind them. Who is watching them from above in the clear sun, while there are clouds between them? In the Waite Smith Lovers card, Adam looks to Eve, and Eve looks above at what must be an angel, but what kind of angel has flames for hair? The clouds show confusion, or possibly the unknowing, that leap of faith which happens when two sides choose to commit to each other, or what Duquette refers to as an “alchemical love story”. (Understanding Crowley’s Thoth Tarot) However, the duality this card shows us transcends far beyond a love story. It represents the dualities of light and dark, conscious and unconscious, mind and body. The sum is always more than its parts. It is the spark of human creation.
Lilith and The Lovers
I have hesitated to bring up Lilith but she stays in my mind so out she must come. I posit that the angel above Adam and Eve may well be Lilith, Adam'‘s first wife, who refused to be subservient to him and was banished to the night, seen in most mythological representations as a dangerous demon. If Colman Smith wanted to insert her feminist take on the heteronormative codes of her time, she might have decided to put a twist on the concept of God above as intermediary between humans and the divine. She may also have liked to imagine Lilith as a kind of angel, but more than that, a powerful female figure. Waite doesn’t identify the figure in his Pictorial Key to the Tarot, rather he leaves it ambiguous when he says “the sun shines in the zenith, and beneath is a great winged figure, with arms extended, pouring down influences.” (p.92) Eve looking up to the figure rather than directly at Adam points to a question in her mind. Am I doing what’s right? Do I want to merge? The clouds are “clouds of unknowing,” which must be clarified to move forward. Unity is the goal, and we know how the rest of the story goes, but I do think Waite didn’t necessarily know what to make of Smith’s depiction, so he left his analysis purposely ambiguous.
I’ll leave you with my favorite quote about The Lovers from Meditations on the Tarot
Now to feel something in the full measure of its reality is to love. It is love which awakens us to the reality of ourselves, to the reality of others, to the reality of God. (p. 126)
What does The Lovers card bring up for you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
xo Hanna