The Lovers

The Italian 'Gli Amanti' means 'the lovers'. The card was also called 'L'Amore' (Love) in early sources. The plural form already signals that the trump is about relationship and choice rather than a single romantic feeling.

In the Visconti-Sforza deck a winged Cupid aims an arrow at a young man who gazes at a woman — a straightforward courtly-love scene. The Marseille tradition complicates it: a young man stands between two women while a winged figure presides above. The card became a moral allegory of choice, often read as a decision between virtue and desire.

Smith recast the scene as the Garden of Eden. A naked man and woman stand beneath a winged sun and the archangel Raphael; behind the man rises the Tree of Life with twelve fruits of flame, and behind the woman the Tree of Knowledge with a serpent coiled about it. The card becomes a sacred marriage rather than a moral dilemma.

The angel Raphael blesses the union; the sun above signifies revelation. The two trees represent the poles of immortal life and the knowledge of good and evil, and the serpent denotes the necessity of desire and discernment. The Lovers now signify conscious union — the integration of opposites in love, choice, and commitment.

The Marseille Lovers is a scene of choice — the youth must decide between two figures, often interpreted as Vice and Virtue. Waite shifted the meaning to sacred union and relationship. In the Thoth deck Crowley frames the card as the alchemical 'coniunctio', the sacred marriage of opposites, and links it to Gemini and the Orpheus myth.

The card draws on courtly love, the Garden of Eden, and the alchemical wedding. Astrologically it corresponds to Gemini, signifying duality and union. As trump number 6 it marks the first encounter with relationship and the decisions of the heart that follow the establishment of self in the preceding trumps.