VI — The Lovers/ The Selkie and the Paramour
The Lovers
… the friendship of the sea and the earth …
I find the Lovers utterly fascinating, not because of the potential the card could have but the dullness, uniformity, reiteration most decks ascribe to it. There seem to be only two different motifs that are ever used. The first, such as the Rider-Waite deck, has Adam and Eve and some oddly dressed archangel passing blessings over them. The Tree of Life with Tempting Serpent is on Eve's side and a Burning Bush (more like a Flaming Twig) is on Adam's. The androgynous angel, who appears to have been miscast from Godspell, is complete with green and red flames (or are they autumn leaves?) issuing from its head. All and all, depending on how you view the Fall from the Garden of Eden, one can find the ever-present, inherent sexism that is Judea-Christian dogma's attitude towards all women, as well as the tired old belief that sexuality is ultimately sinful and lovers who somehow expound a higher, spiritual rapport to each other (i.e., celibacy before and after marriage) are somehow paragons of virtue over those of us who base our relationships more in carnal flesh.
Then there is the older version of the card that many decks hearken back to. Originally, L'Amour depicts a young man standing between two women. A bloated Renaissance baby, a stand-in for Cupid, aims a bow at the youth. Usually one of the women is young and good looking, perhaps even sensual, while the other is older and thus cranky, unappetizing and dour. Instead of the Fall as a theme, we are faced with The Choice; does one follow convention and choose the grumpy paramour or go the unconventional route and pick pretty girl for once? Freudians, true to form, have apparently written much about the fact that, since both the young man and the older woman have dark hair in many decks, then (logically) she must his mother and so this card represents the Id's development of sexual desire and the Male Ego's need to break free from pushy, overbearing mother-types. Choices, choices, choices. What Freudians do with decks where both women have light colored hair is a mystery.
Perhaps those are two ways of looking at the Lovers, but I sincerely believe are many more ways as well. For example, the title of the card, The Lovers, might be a good place to start since sexuality is, next to food, the basic building blocks of many national and cultural identities. You might want to ask yourself, what is sexuality, exactly? How do you feed your libido? Love, pleasure, passion and desire are complicated issues, and yet we in the West act many times as if they are separate from our daily routines. Indeed, so much of sexuality in the West is devoid of respect, responsibility and soul that it is no surprise many associate erotica with pornography.1 It has been a long time since I heard anyone ascribe something as simple as humanitarianism, goodwill, friendship to the Lovers. And yet, without friendship, how can there be love?
***
The Card
A young woman sits on the sand by the edge of the ocean. Having cast off his seal skin in order to be with her a naked youth strides through the surf. He is one of the Seal People, a Selkie (Selkie, Selchie, Silkie are all common spellings of the same word); one form of the animal bridegroom in popular mythology, and this girl's paramour.
The Seal People come to us down through the folklore of the Orkney, Faroe, Shetland, in fact all throughout the islands off the coast of North Scotland as well as in parts of Iceland and Scandinavia. Some stories tell of how they are tricksters, but most fall into the mythology of the oceanic animal bride. Sax declares in The Serpent and the Swan that animal brides are usually connected to the ocean and moving water: "Nature becomes embodied in the image of a female animal … intimately associated with the tribe … [and] animal brides are generally associated with water … as the bride variously becomes a mermaid, seal maiden, or a fairy dwelling in a lake … It is present from the early ophidian goddesses of mythology such as Nammu and Tiamet to the little mermaid of Andersen and Disney" (Sax, 202 — 03)
While there are both Seal Men and Seal Women, the Selkie Bride stories all follow a similar theme; a fisherman discovers a woman wandering alone on a beach and steals away her seal skin forcing her to marry him. Whether willing or unwilling, they later have children but one day the woman discovers where her skin is hidden and thus escapes back into the ocean. The Selkie Bridegroom legend differs in that the Seal Men appear to choose to live among humans, rather than being forced.
"The Selkie males are flirtatious and will often marry human women, but they are unreliable and the marriage does not usually last. Children of such a marriage are said to have webbed fingers and toes" (Rose, 287). In the ballad, The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry, the Seal Man declares:
"I'm a man upon the lan,/ And I am a silkie in the sea;/ And when I'm far and far frae from lan,/ My dwelling is in Sul Skerry" (Benwell, 19)
***
The Lovers/ The Selkie and the Paramour in a Reading
If the Lovers embrace you in a reading, ask yourself what does a sexual friendship mean to you? Perhaps one of the least talked about subjects when it comes to love is the concept of divine friendship. That is, a friend is neither purely physical nor purely spiritual, but a combination of the two. The ties between the Seal Man and the young woman are the same. All relationships are burdened with the possibility of ambivalence, fickleness, skepticism of one or both partners, regardless of age or gender. To only focus on the physical nature of a relationship does not forge the deeper spiritual ties that are needed for the long duration. But to see only a friendship in spiritual terms does not create the physical bonds a couple requires as well.
The Selkie and the Paramour are more than a choice between physical pleasure versus higher consciousness, more than easy "pious" behavior versus "sinful" dogma. Perhaps if ask ourself what is preventing us from achieving friendship with our lover then we can move on to bigger questions such as what is personal satisfaction? How do we reach our joie de vivre? How do bring fulfillment to each other? But a word of caution. If the Lovers appear reversed in your reading, it might be because you are focusing too heavily on one aspect or the other. Foolishness over sexuality has caused many a once-stable relationship to dissolve but by the same token celibacy is no reassurance that people might not get bored with a life without pleasure. Do not let your paramour slip back into the ocean.
***
I wish this was easy. A gift! I write so few
letters anymore. I have been thinking.
Take this skin of mine, I give it to you
as a friend, this skin. For my safekeeping.
For your safety. Some day I'll be needing
it but until then, please, pack it away.
And one day, like today, when a pleasing
west breeze arrives and the seals stop their play
and the gray gulls their song — as if they
know I shall return — take my skin and shake
the crumbs out. For even seals and gray
gulls know I'll return. I will not forsake
you, friend. Think of me as the boy who'll lend
you his skin; as your own skin-lending friend.
***
Works Cited
Benwell, Gwen & Arthur Waugh. Sea Enchantress; the tale of the mermaid and her kin. London: Hutchinson. (1961)
Rose, Carol. Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins: an encyclopedia. New York: Norton. (1998)
Sax. Boria. The Serpent and the Swan: the animal bride in folklore and literature. Blacksburg, Va.: McDonald & Woodward Pub. Co. (1998)
- And what is your stance on literature or art intended to arouse lust, desire, passion? Like religion, erotica dates back to the dawn of recorded history. In Dutch it is erotische kunst; in French, littrature rotique; in German, erotische Literatur oder Kunst; Italian has simply,erotica; while the Portuguese have, literatura ou arte sobre o amor; the Spanish say, literatura ertica; while the Swedish say, erotisk litteratur. What is it for you? [back]