Tarot Card Series: The Devil//The Lovers

 THE DEVIL//THE LOVERS

Trailing kisses along your neck,

candlelight flickering across our skin.

Watch as the shadows dance.

Darling, you’re shaking,

soft clink of chain-links

arms, legs, fingers, locking,

binding us, forever—

Darkling, Listen:

you’re the only

demon on my back,

curl your curved horns

beneath my chin

my heart beats here,

petrichor in grave-dirt.

These are two cards, but they mirror each other. If you look, on both cards, there are two figures—a man and a woman.

On the Lovers card, they are surrounded by a beautiful garden, indicating the peace and the communion that they enjoy in their relationship. On the Devil card, they are chained to each other, indicating the oppressive nature of their relationship. It’s very easy for a Lovers relationship to slip into one like the Devil.  

I usually draw the Lovers card for people who are in the honeymoon period of their relationship. During that first blush, when they’re just getting to know each other. However, a relationship can easily slide into the Devil card, where it can become oppressive, unhealthy.

On The Devil Card, there is the horned Baphomet figure, leering over the two lovers, who are chained. This doesn’t necessarily have to be a relationship between two people. It can be a relationship between an individual and something that is weighing them down.

In terms of the poem, I was definitely exploring a relationship between an individual and their shadow-side. At the time of the writing, I was experimenting with shadow-work for the first time and discovering that my relationship with my shadow wasn’t what I wanted it to be.

“Darkling, listen” is from John Keats’s poem, “Ode to a Nightingale.” The original line reads: “Darkling, I listen; and, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a museful rhyme…” When writing this poem, Keats was very ill. He knew he was dying, and was writing about lying in bed, sick and listening to a bird outside his window. For me, I feel a parallel with Keats and his relationship with his own death. It seems like he too struggled with the Devil//Lovers inversion here in this poem.

You can find “The Devil//The Lovers” in Bad Omens, which is available now through Querencia Press!