You are the Devil, Romeo!
The correlation between Romeo and Juliet and the Devil card.
“ What lady is that, which doth enrich the hand of yonder knight?” Are the famous first words of Romeo when he spies Juliet from across the room. And we know how the story goes and ends. *spoiler alert* they die. They die for love, or so it seems.
Romeo and Juliet get swept up in an all-consuming, foolish passion. Not really love to me, and the parallels between the story of Romeo and Juliet, with the Lovers and the Devil cards in the tarot are plentiful.
Check it out:
The Devil means obsession, bondage, infatuation, drunkenness not necessarily of alcohol but a state of mind where you’re not thinking clearly and your senses and judgment fail you. Welp! I would say that’s a pretty damn near parallel to the Shakespearean story. Two youths infatuated with each other, inflamed by love and the need to prove themselves to their families as individuals. Perhaps an inner need to break the bondage of family duties that tie them down. That ominous overbearing force that family traditions can be watching over each of them.
As the Devil card shows, they are chained, an invisible bondage, and yet the chain is quite loose pointing to the fact that they can choose to stay or leave.
They do choose to leave the bondage of family tradition and decide to be with each other no matter the cost. Now did they really leave the Devil card? Not exactly.
Their infatuation continues to dominate their minds and emotions. They continue to be intoxicated by each other, and instead of actually running away together to start a new life, they forge a plan involving poison and paralysis.
As we now know the Devil card is all things that bind us and blind us, while the Lovers card (truly a mirror image of each card in the RWS system) shows us a much brighter image. This is what balanced emotions can look and feel like. Romeo and Juliet, if they had chosen to run away and build a new life together, appear as Adam and Eve, open and vulnerable to each other.
The Lovers card is about choice and balance. Behind the male figure, we have the Tree of Ascension, burning with the fire of purification, while being the female figure we have the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is the tree of deeper understanding of self and the world. Knowing that balance is what is needed here. That infatuation and passion can co-exist with the less shiny action and demands of the mundane.
The Devil and The Lovers are two sides of the same coin. One does not exist without the other. We are bound by responsibilities and duty, and yet each have a need to set ourselves apart and prove ourselves as individuals. We also have the need for love, for passion, for embrace with another. We want the intoxication of such sweet perfume, and yet we need to keep our eyes open, our head steady, and our feet on the ground. As Carl Jung said: “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell”.
Love can be heaven, but if we’re not aware and awake to our own personal hells, we cannot be awake to another’s, and that is the true poison drunk by two young lovers.
with tarot magic,
Icaro