The Lovers
Trump VI of the tarot: two lovers beneath a winged figure. A. E. Waite read it as attraction, love and beauty.
Meaning
In Waite's card the sun shines overhead and a great winged figure extends its arms above a man and a woman, "as if Adam and Eve", with the Tree of Life behind him and the tree with the serpent behind her. Waite wrote that it replaced "the old card of marriage", which showed a father and mother with their child and a Cupid above.
What does the Lovers card mean?
Waite's meanings are "attraction, love, beauty, trials overcome"; reversed, "failure, foolish designs", with another account giving "marriage frustrated".
In older decks
Papus joined the card to the sixth Hebrew letter, Vau. In a nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum it is Gli Amanti.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsThe ChariotTrump VII of the tarot: a victorious prince in a chariot. A. E. Waite read it as triumph.
- The same shape in Angel numbers000 angel numberThree zeros, read by angel-number writers as a message about God and wholeness. Doreen Virtue’s 1999 list called 000 a reminder that “you are one with God” and a sign that a situation has come full circle.
See also
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles, letters and numbers or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
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