The Devil and the Lovers

When you fold the sequence of the major arcana in half, you get eleven pairs of trumps. Each of these pairings reveals a double energy - like the sun and moon, or the yin and yang. The pairing of the Devil and the Lovers is one of the most instructive in the Tarot. When Waite designed the majors for what is now known as the Rider Waite Smith deck, he was careful to show this link - in both cases a naked couple appear - the man linked with fire, the woman with fruit, and in both cases a central "density" - an altar on the one hand and a mountain on the other. Finally, in both cases a figure - demonic in the Devil, angelic in the Lovers - presides over the couple.

I will give this interpretation: both the Devil and the Lovers encode a mode of "relation to the other" - the main difference being that with the Devil, that relation is mainly instrumentative - the other is viewed as a means to an end (to quote Kant). In the Lovers, the other is an end in themselves. This sets up two different dynamics of relationship in terms of how they manifest. The Devil relation is entropic, it is a downwards spiral, that even when slow, gradually loses energy on each cycle and becomes more and more of a burden. For this reason, addiction is often associated with this card. The Lover relation is negentropy, an upwards spiral - because the two are not in the same sort of competition with one another - tugging at the chains that bind them - they are able to climb the mountain together. In each round of the lover's cycle, ground is gained. Vicious and virtuous cyclicality are shown in these images.

Most of our relations oscillate between these two pairs. The goal is not to drop the Devil in preference for the lovers, but to remediate the Devil by means of the connections the Lovers can grow. If this is done, the "dark" space becomes green and fertile, and the whole dynamic (particularly it's dualisms) change nature.

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