We can either choose to see our relationships as being ‘out there’ and little to do with our emotional and psychological make-up. The partnering of The Consort and The Lovers is our invitation to inner, contemplative focus in the realm of relationships - starting with the one that we have with ourselves.
However, movement from the upper- to the underworld is also paralleled in our own search for our ‘abducted selves’: the feminine enslaved by the masculine, the denial and repression of our creativity, bound up as it so often is in sexuality and its common bed-partners of guilt, shame and a lack of self-love. This is most obviously linked to the change from spring and summer to autumn and winter - the natural world dying back while Persephone is separated from the land and her mother, only to spring back to life when she returns. Or is that the underworld and the upper? The Consort is linked to the Greek goddess Demeter, who descended into the underworld in search of her daughter Persephone, who had been abducted by Hades. Except that Venus is currently retrograde, and will remain so until June 27, which shifts the mood and focus of The Consort to one that is more devoted to the inner world than the outer. There is a tension, then, between the extrovert nature of The Consort and the invitation to introspection presented to us by The Lovers. They look beneath the surface of the world. They look downward, absorbed in something other than the ego. Further from consciousness, in the twilight, are the Priestess and the Lovers. The Consort, Ruler and Priest are attended by the sun and their focus is on strengthening consciousness. As Jungian therapist Michael Owen writes of this row of cards: The Consort and The Lovers fall on the first row of five, separated by The Ruler (The Emperor) and The Priest (The Hierophant). (You can see an image of the major arcana here.) The Xultun Tarot’s major arcana is, or was, unique in that the cards are arranged into a single image, from zero through twenty-one, with two cards in the top row, and five in the proceeding four rows. Looking at the two cards, there is a definite complementariness to them. The deck I have chosen to work with this week is the Xultun Tarot: a Mayan tarot deck created by New Zealand artist Peter Balin in the mid-Seventies, and one that felt fitting given this year’s link to the Mayan Long Count Calendar. They are The Consort (The Empress in traditional decks) and The Lovers, respectively. I decided to select the two tarot cards that represent Venus and Gemini in order to explore this idea through image. Venus is one of the guardians of the sexual realm, and in Gemini, the dance of opposites will have an extended opportunity to explore within those polarities. On May 15, Eric wrote this in the Daily Astrology column entitled Invoking the Goddess of Curiosity:įor the next 43 days, Venus will take us on an introspective journey into many of the opposites and inner polarities that we contain, many of them emotional and psychological.
This, to me, feels like the stuff of Venus Retrograde in Gemini - the theme of this week’s tarot article. It is time to start re-introducing myself to the parts of me that have remained shut off through fear, shame and a sense of not being deserving enough to own them. If the last half-year has taught me anything, it has taught me to craft the conviction that I will not enter a new relationship in half-measures any more. In other ways, my relationships and my life feel like my own: unlike my parents - whose divorce was bitter and embattled - my ex-husband and I have a solid, loving friendship I have chosen to be a single mother instead of staying together ‘for the sake of the children’ as much as I love male company - the banter, the physicality, the meeting and merging of different energies - I am finding a contentment in being on my own. In some ways my most intimate relationships are a reflection of my family of birth: I leave in my wake a history of co-dependence and control I can see my own role in games of emotional withdrawal and avoidance I carry with me the self-same triad of mother, carer, child that I was a part of when I was growing up.
The Consort and The Lovers from the Xultun Tarot deck - a Mayan tarot deck created by New Zealand artist Peter Balin in the mid-1970s. I’m sitting here, today, amidst the detritus of my son’s toys (It amazes me the mess that one small person can make!), in the house that he, I and our au pair moved to less than a fortnight ago - marking the physical separation from my ex-husband, from whom I separated in name over a year ago. But then face to face: now I know in part īut then shall I know even as also I am known.
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