Previously
in this series, I've noticed how some of the card titles changed when
occultists such as Waite and his French predecessors began creating
their own tarot decks (the Papess and Pope, for example, became the
High Priestess and Hierophant). With the Lovers card, though, we have
an example of a title and concept change that occurred much earlier
in tarot history.
In the original Italian tarot tradition, the card is always called simply "Love" (never "The Lovers"), and the picture almost always shows a couple with Cupid above them. In the Cary-Yale Visconti card (possibly the oldest surving tarot, shown at right), the scene seems to show a royal wedding. Some historians have speculated that this card commemorates the marriage of Duke Filippo to Maria of Savoy, based on heraldic designs on the canopy. In Mitelli's deck, the idea is reduced to a bare minimum: the couple is omitted and Cupid is alone on the card! In the Gringonneur card, several couples are shown, but the idea is clearly the same. Thus, in the Italian tradition, this card is a simple allegory, one of the most familiar and easily interpreted throughout western culture. It is just what we still find on Valentine cards today.
In
the Tarot de Marseille design, which originated some time in the 16th
or possibly early 17th century, a new motif enters in: the couple is
joined by a third party, standing off to the left! The concept
intended by the new design is probably the choice between virtue and
vice. The figure in the center is often a young man; the one to the
right is a seductive young woman, and the one to the right is an
older, but more modest and regal, lady. (Cupid's arrow usually
signals that the young man prefers vice!) By the seventeenth century,
the French cardmakers were printing titles on the cards (something
the Italians had never done). The titles sometimes did not show much
awareness of the old Italian tradition, and tended to reflect the
concrete, rather than the allegorical, implications of the pictures.
So the card became "L'Amoreux", The Lovers.
Details and nuances are hard to maintain in the medium of woodblock carving, and so the precise characteristics of the three figures on the card sometimes shifted around in strange ways. The figure on the left, Lady Virtue, might appear to be a mother, chaperone, a male priest, or an older gentleman (as on the Swiss 1JJ), perhaps using the younger man as a go-between in his attempts to woo the young lady on the right. Part of the fun of the Lovers card in the old decks is coming up with your own story of who the three people are and what they are up to!
A
personal favorite is the Gumppenberg Neoclassical deck (reprinted by
Lo Scarabeo as "Ancient
Tarots of Lombardy"), which shows a female figure choosing
between two male suitors: a dashing soldier on the right, and a more
reserved king on the left.
Waite's deck shows the Lovers as Adam and Eve. Although the explicit Biblical symbolism is not reflected in the old cards, by eliminating the third figure, Waite actually brings us closer to the Italian originals: the image of male and female juxtaposed and drawn together by love.
So in working with the old decks, one should be conscious of the fact that there are two different traditions reflected in the card: the Italian tradition, which gives an uncomplicated allegory of "Love", and the Marseille tradition, which presents some permutation on the theme of "choice" or "temptation". Despite the difference, there is also a common thread uniting these two ideas: that love or lust is a powerful force, overpowering and indifferent to the dictates of human authority. With a few exceptions, the Love/Lovers card follows the Pope in the tarot sequence, a wry commentary on the idea that all of us, no matter how pious or mighty, can become Love's victims.
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