All love relationships mirror our relationship with ourselves. They ultimately reflect upon our relationship with the world around us—how we think others see us, what we believe we are worthy of. Our beliefs about love relationships can even embody our thoughts about how we feel the universe nurtures and supports us.
This truth is a rewarding but complicated conundrum which all humans confront throughout their lives, for we are surrounded by relationships from our first breath. They begin with our dependence upon our parents for our very existence, and continue through our friendships. They reach their perhaps most intense expression in the magical, self-contained world of lovers.
In many ways, the ultimate expression of our connection to the world is to fall in love. Daring to love another brings us face to face with whatever is going on within ourselves, for better or for worse. It brings up our hopes about our lives, our fears of abandonment. Love can be viewed as the bravest act of all, for in order to be truly intimate, we must be honest in our vulnerabilities. As we reveal our innermost selves to our beloved with all of our imperfect glories, we are truly exposed in body and soul.
Experienced authentically, love relationships offer the sweetest rewards and the thorniest challenges. They also present us with an unparalleled opportunity to gain awareness and wisdom.
The Lover’s Path Tarot was created for this very purpose. It takes its users upon a journey, where emotional and spiritual wisdom is gained by daring to love another.
The Lover’s Path Tarot is a tool to examine and improve relationships—whether they be with yourself, with your beloved, or with the world. Examining our preconceptions about love, the ways we yearn to connect with another, what we desire in a partner, is an act of self-illumination. More importantly, it’s one way to take personal responsibility for our lives.
The genesis of The Lover’s Path Tarot could not have occurred without The Goddess Tarot, which I created in 1997.
In many ways, the road to creating The Goddess Tarot began when I was a small child. Ever since I saw my first tarot deck when I was five years old, I’ve been fascinated by tarot. Though I was too young to comprehend how the cards were used, there was something irresistibly powerful about them. Years later, while in college at the School of Visual Arts, I began working with tarot. I first used the art nouveau-inspired Aquarian deck, which was designed by one of my professors, David Palladini. I also worked with the Predictive and Rider-Waite Tarots. While I was attracted to the serene simplicity of the Predictive Tarot’s art, I soon felt its limitations. I continued working with the Rider Waite, but I wasn't fully satisfied by it, or by other decks I came into contact with.
It was around this time that I began to fantasize about creating my own deck, one which would contain the elements that I wanted in a tarot deck: Beauty, feminine strength, creative empowerment. I completed four drawings—The Moon, The Sun, The Star and The High Priestess—but became deterred by the amount of work involved. In 1994, I painted the art for The Book of Goddesses. As I worked, I noticed that each goddess seemed to naturally correspond to a tarot trump. From there, The Goddess Tarot emerged in an organic manner.
In the years since the publication of The Goddess Tarot, I’m grateful to have heard from many women about their experiences with it. I learned that a number of them often used the deck to clarify relationship issues. I also noticed that the most popular area on The Goddess Tarot website was the section devoted to relationships—no other section even came close.
Love, the most ecstatic of emotions, seemed to bring up the most complicated scenerios—ones for which there appeared to be no easy answers. I wondered why this was so. As I pondered these questions, I began to think there was something more at play than the deeply-rooted need all humans have for affection and connection with another person. Ultimately, weren’t these women really using their love concerns as a vehicle to explore their feelings about their lives, their place in the world, their hunger for nurturance?
Around this time, I also got married. Even though I was with my husband for seven years before our wedding, I was amazed by how marriage changed me. I began to think of creating a tarot deck which would reflect my new life experiences. Just as The Goddess Tarot used goddess myths, I decided that this new deck would use classic love stories from myth, folktale, and history to explore these core emotional issues. It would remind men and women that love relationships are a mirror for our relationship with ourselves—that loving another can be a path for enlightment and growth.
And so The Lover’s Path Tarot came into being.
The art for The Lover's Path Tarot was inspired by my first visit to Italy in 1990. This encounter opened up the rich world of the Italian Renaissance for me. I also fell in love with Venice, a city as mysterious and surprising as a masked lover.
During this trip, as I wandered the labyrinthine streets and canals of Venice, I could never be certain what wonder would appear before me around a corner. Often, just as I convinced myself that I was irrevocably lost, I would found myself exactly where I intended. Other times, I discovered a place better than I’d imagined.
My experiences in Venice seemed a perfect metaphor for the unpredictable way life unfolds before us. Try as we may, we often cannot see where our experiences will lead—all we can do is trust they will take us where we are meant to be. It is the same way with relationships.
Accordingly, the art for The Lover's Path Tarot is inspired by the art, architecture, books and maps of the Italian Renaissance. The decorative borders for each card were painted in gouache upon handmade paper. Other elements incorporated into the borders—the map backgrounds, the oil paintings of the elements—were digitally assembled.
The main card art was created with oil paints glazes, which were layered over a watercolor underpainting sealed with acrylic gel medium. The paintings were modelled for by friends and associates, each person chosen because they reminded me in some manner of the character they represented. In this way, the art reflects my personal belief that the human is divine, the divine human.
Like most traditional tarot decks, The Lover’s Path Tarot contains seventy-eight cards. These seventy-eight cards are divided into twenty-two major arcana cards and fifty-six minor arcana cards.
Each major arcana card is affiliated with a story of a famous couple from history or mythology. These stories explore the many experiences of love, and the major archetypes and universal questions we all experience as we journey through life. Accordingly, each card is named after archetypal emotional states represented by the stories; these, in turn, are related to traditional tarot symbolism. In this way, I hope that the world of The Lover’s Path Tarot will be accessible for tarot readers familar with the popular Rider Waite Tarot.
In the minor arcana, the great themes explored in the major arcana are brought to earth, made relevant to our individual experiences. The minor arcana is divided into four suits of cups, staves, arrows and coins, which are related to the elements of water, fire, air, and earth. Each suit retells one classic love story, with each card progressively depicting an important scene from the story. They serve to impart the lesson associated with each suit.
Excerpted from The Lover's Path Tarot. Published by US Games Systems, Stamford CT. All contents © 2004 Kris Waldherr. All rights reserved. Reproduction is forbidden except for short excerpts for review purposes.
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