The Lovers Tarot Card Meaning and Art Court de Gebelin Trumps
Designation
About the Deck
Court de Gebelin Trumps
Drawn by Court de Gebelin in attempt to show that the Tarot was Egyptian in origin, these cards represent the height of circular logic. They are far more eighteenth-century than they are Egyptian, and in any case they are basically a reproduction of the far older Marseilles pattern tarot deck, with some ideological changes to help him prove his own point.
Provenance
Court de Gebelin. France, 1781.
Tags
According to Many Schools of Thought
A. E. Waite's Secondary Meanings
The Lovers or Marriage. This symbol has undergone many variations, as might be expected from its subject. In the eighteenth century form, by which it first became known to the world of archaeological research, it is really a card of married life, shewing father and mother, with their child placed between them; and the pagan Cupid above, in the act of flying his shaft, is, of course, a misapplied emblem. The Cupid is of love beginning rather than of love in its fulness, guarding the fruit thereof. The card is said to have been entitled Simulacyum fidei, the symbol of conjugal faith, for which the rainbow as a sign of the covenant would have been a more appropriate concomitant. The figures are also held to have signified Truth, Honour and Love, but I suspect that this was, so to speak, the gloss of a commentator moralizing. It has these, but it has other and higher aspects.
S. L. MacGregor Mathers's Divinatory Meanings
Upright
Wise Dispositions, Proof, Trials Surmounted
Reversed
Unwise Plans, Failure when put to the test.
Papus's Divinatory Meanings
Love.
