Two Eves: The Lovers & The Devil
two brown hands reaching towards each other on a pink and purple gradient background.
Poets are born to sing of love. I am a love poet. The focus of my work is Black love, in all it's complexities and subversions. I write about finding love, keeping love, hiding love, and losing love too.
When you are a poet of love, love itself tends to test you. You'll get D'Angelo love, but you'll also get SZA love, Frank Ocean love, Donny Hathaway love, Anita Baker love and my favorite, some Stephanie Mills love. (What can I say, there's just something about the comfort of a man.)
Obviously, I made a playlist for this week. Here ya go.
There's no acolyte card people are fonder of than The Lovers. Once The Lovers hits the table, most folks float away on rose scented breezes into fantasy love. The imagine their most idealized lover, their most idealized version of love.
As I've written before, however much we hate it, capitalism sculpted what love can look like in its image. So it's impossible to think of the virtues of The Lovers without finding the face of capitalism.
The face of capitalism is The Devil. Of course our Capricorn card shows us the traps of practicality and sensuality. The Lovers asks us to choose. The Devil reminds us that our choices are overdetermined.
I'm studying to become a two-headed doctor. My mentor assigned me a book I've read most of, but not well: The Bible.
I was hesitant, but game. Then I got to the second page. "God made male and female." One could be tempted to read that passage and assume that the story about the rib would not follow. Yet a few lines later, here comes the rib nonsense once more.
Tarot is a book, but it's also a library with a wide range of religious references. Most of those references, though certainly not all, relate to the Christian Bible.
The Lovers and The Devil are two examples of such blatantly Christian messages in tarot. They subvert each other's purpose. They are each other's mirrors.
While I was reading for my mentorship, and now, as I write this, I can think of nothing so much as the two eves.
The Two Eves
The truth about The Lovers and The Devil is that we are two excited about one, and not excited enough about the other.
Your heart may race at the sight of The Lovers, but are you ready to do the work of finding real love? Are you ready to do the work of maintaining relationships? Do you have the maturity to let go of a relationship that's no longer operating with dignity and trust?
These are questions that The Lovers rarely provides us time enough to ask. The Lovers, in fact, rarely asks us directly to love. It asks us to choose. Every question presented by The Lovers is a Yes or No question.
When that question does manifest as a question about love, it is often about our belief in our own lovability as it is about our choice of lover. There is always a wrong answer, and you are free to choose it. We are as likely to choose the wrong answer as avoid it under The Lovers' influence.
We see this in the Smith Rider Waite imagery of The Lovers. There's the choice between two trees. There's the two sides of the mountain which, from a distance, look the same.
But there's also the common Eve, the Eve who deceived by God. The Eve who the adversary educates (which is what many Black Christians call The Devil.)
It would be so simple to believe this divine presence knows what's best as it hovers above the card. Until you remember the story.
God tells Eve if she eats of the tree, she will die. The serpent tells her true--that she will not. She eats of the tree and she does not die. She is punished, but she does not die. What does that say about the influences at play on this card?
There are two ways to look at this, in my understanding. The first is that God is lying by omission. Eve will die, eventually but not immediately. God didn't say immediately. The second is that it was just a regular lie, told to restrain and control.
Hence another question: what reference would this Eve, so recently made, have for death? There were only two people alive. No one had ever died! Would she even understand the concept?
The Lovers
It makes sense that we'd prefer to see The Lovers as our fantasy, rather than the gamble it is. We have no idea what twists of fate may befall us.
These are the stakes of The Lovers. This is why we so often find The Lovers and The Devil together.
Let's go back to the first, and more apocryphal Eve, since she is the Eve of The Devil. This Eve was made at the same time as Adam.
The presence of the Eve on The Devil is proof that there is a wrong answer to the The Lovers that still feels right. It shows us that even in the absence of forever, in the presence of our worst tendencies, there can still be pleasure.
It also presents the possibility for love that isn't predetermined or divinely assigned. It reminds us the worst thing about tarot reading generally, about our free will.
We have the power to choose a lover who cherishes us for all that we are. We have the power to choose a lover who indulges in our vices with us. Either could be the lover we need at the moment. One can look like other in the night of a bedroom. One can look like the other in the morning sun.
The Devil
The Devil reminds us that we are responsible for our choices. It's important that it comes up after The Lovers and not before. It's a result.
These are both acolyte cards, subject to the whims and will of others. Yet we can be tempted to perceive one as free and one as hopelessly lost.
I won't romanticize The Devil. After all, it's a card of tricks, deceit, lies, even addiction and abuse. But it's also a card of the body, of our flesh. It allows us to know better even if we do better.
It's the Tommy Gnosis line "Eve just wanted to know shit." And she did, which is exactly how we find her in her predicament. Her story is pulled by the strings of a patriarchal God intent on controlling us all, through our desire to know the truth.
So what should one make of what the serpent revealed to her? Did he reveal a lie, and thus, her chains. Or did he lie to her, thus distracting her from God?
What you believe about the story can influence what you believe about these cards. Where do you find free association? Where do you find unfair restraint?
Within that question is the potential of love itself. It can hurt us. It can lead us down the path to our worst self. It can swell our hearts. It can make it easier to love ourselves. It can, surprisingly, do all these things at once.
When we understand that love is overdetermined we see how we've been misled by the powerful. We can see how our idea of loved is shaped around what's marketable, what our oppressors prefer. When we understand that love is a choice we make, we may find away to love better, love more.
The Lovers and The Devil are fraternal twins. They tell one whole story about love. To understand one well is to understand them both. To dive all the way to the bottom of either archetype is to commit to the whole of love.
Further Thoughts
hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.
