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Writer's picturePeter Duchemin, Phd

The Chiasm




The Lovers in the Thoth deck has one extremely unusual and insightful feature that sets it apart from portrayals of this card in other decks: a moebius strip. You can see it between the hands of the figure who is giving the benediction or blessing over the marriage of the king and queen. What does this signify?

Clearly the black king with the gold crown and the white queen with the silver crown are shown as a duality approaching unity. In fact the entire card appears to suggest different levels of this kind of coming together. Superficially, this card is about two-ness, then.


Secretly, though, it is about threeness, and oneness. The cupid, and the Ancient of days characters stand in the middle pillar, mediating the polarities, but it is really the moebius strip which suggests how the polarites can be revealed as a single continuity.


A moebius strip is essentially a ring with a twist in it. The twist is called a "chiasm". The result is that even though the ring appears to have two sides - those two sides are not opposed: they are a single surface, and so we could put our finger on one point of the moebius band, move it all the way around the ring and without taking it off the band it would eventually, after two circuits return to its starting point having traversed the entire surface.


This fact has enormous implications for all dualisms. From the moebial point of view, mind and body, sun and moon, inside and outside, above and below, darkness and light, and indeed any polarity at all are in essence only separate to a limited, contingent perspective, and in reality segue smoothly into one another, if a lateral dimension is applied.


This is thus a clue or a logical key that we can use to move from seeming separation towards the underlying unity. As a result, the Lovers card becomes about the links that unify, rather than the gulfs which divide.


The Lovers shows us the road to unity. It is up to us to walk it.

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