Bohemian Gothic Tarot

VI THE LOVERS

Lighter or more conventional meanings

Passion - usually for a person but it could also be for a project, object etc. * Sexuality, physical love * A deep emotional partnership * Important choices, often, though not necessarily, between two people.

Darker, shadow or more hidden meanings

Passion that's out of control * A love that turns out to be problematic or even dangerous * Sexual interest disguised as love * Making the wrong choice in love or passion * Becoming passionate about something or someone that you know, deep down, is damaging or destructive * Pursuing a love that could well hurt others.

This is almost the archetypal Gothic scene. A handsome, well-groomed nobleman bends to kiss a beautiful young woman - but he leans towards her neck, not her lips, and she looks both enthralled and despairing as she awaits the vampire kiss, with its promise of illicit pleasures, everlasting life - and horrors beyond the grave. In traditional tarot The Lovers has always been a curious card. Earlier versions usually showed a man standing in between two women - one young, one old. It gave the card the meaning of "choice" as well as the more obvious ones of love, passion and sexual attraction. Our card takes that idea of choice and plays with it in a darker way. This vampire's victim does not have much choice. She seems torn between desire and fear. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, there is certainly a strong implication that Lucy, Dracula's first female victim in Whitby, is in some respects a willing and even co-operative prey for the vampire. When her friend Mina tries to keep Lucy locked in her room at night, aware that there is some threat during the hours of darkness, Lucy struggles to escape and join Dracula. Perplexed, Mina writes:

Twice during the night I was wakened by Lucy trying to get out. She seemed, even in her sleep, to be a little impatient at finding the door shut, and went back to bed under a sort of protest.
- Bram Stoker, Dracula.

Later in the novel, when Mina herself is bitten by Dracula, she fights his influence much more than Lucy did - she is the "good" victim, the one who vows never to become one of the Count's brides, whereas it's implied that Lucy, a more flirtatious, sexually aware and amoral character, is much more willing to succumb. When we see the strangely ambiguous and faraway expression of the woman on our card we question the choices she is making. Is she giving way to the seductive evil of her attacker, or will she fight to stay out of his clutches? Torn between fascination and revulsion, she must decide whether to submit or attempt resistance.

The moon shines a cold, blue light on the "lovers" in our card, reminding us that in popular myth vampires, like all evil spirits, are believed to be most active on nights when the moon is full. The association between the "Nosferatu" (the undead) and the moon is ever-present in the original Dracula which contains no less than forty-nine references to the moon or moonlight. In The Bohemian Gothic Tarot cards the moon, in nearly all its phases, is also a recurrent feature. This underlines the central place of madness and lunacy, a word taken from the same root as luna, the moon, in the themes of Gothica dealt with by these cards.

Some further ways to consider this card

In this scene, we don't see the vampire's fangs or any blood, which leaves it potentially open to other interpretations. If the man is not a vampire, then who else could he be? Are there other ways of seeing this picture? Is the woman necessarily the victim?

There was no colour upon her cheek, not even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about her face that seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there: - upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein: - to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, " A Vampyre! a Vampyre!"
- John Polidori, The Vampyre, a Tale.

THE VAMPIRE

You have heard, no doubt, of the appalling superstition that prevails in Upper and Lower Styria, in Moravia, Silesia, in Turkish Serbia, in Poland, even in Russia; the superstition, so we must call it, of the Vampire.
- Sheridan Le Farm, Carmilla.

John William Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) is considered to be the book that sparked a craze for vampire fiction - a craze that has grown into a major popular genre and cult throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Montague Summers said of it's pervasive influence, "In Germany sensational fiction was long largely influenced by Polidori, and we have such romances as Zschokke's Der tote Gast, Spindler's Der Vampyr und seine Braut, Theodor Hildebrand's Der Vampyr, oder die Totenbraut." (Summers, Montague. The Vampire. His Kith and Kin). The story of the writing of The Vampyre is a remarkable one, as it was one of the supernatural tales (the most famous of which is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - see the Three of Pentacles) written by Lord Byron and friends during a disastrously rainy summer vacation in the English Lake District:

It appears that one evening Lord B., Mr. P B. Shelly [sic], the two ladies and the gentleman before alluded to, after having perused a German work, which was entitled Phantasmagoriana, began relating ghost stories; when his lordship having recited the beginning of Christabel, then unpublished, the whole took so strong a hold of Mr. Shelly's mind, that he suddenly started up and ran out of the room. The physician and Lord Byron followed, and discovered him leaning against a mantle-piece, with cold drops of perspiration trickling down his face. After having given him something to refresh him, upon enquiring into the cause of his alarm, they found that his wild imagi­nation having pictured to him the bosom of one of the ladies with eyes (which was reported of a lady in the neighbourhood where he lived) he was obliged to leave the room in order to destroy the impression. It was afterwards proposed, in the course of conversation, that each of the company present should write a tale depending upon some supernatu­ral agency, which was undertaken by Lord B., the physician, and Miss M. W Godwin.
- John William Polidori, From the original introduction to The Vampyre.

Incidentally, Miss Godwin later became Mrs. Mary Shelley and the work referred to was published as Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus so two remarkable works of the genre appeared as a result of that gathering. The introduction to The Vampire describes the legend as it was then understood:

The superstition upon which this tale is founded... formed the subject of many wonderful stories, still extant, of the dead rising from their graves, and feeding upon the blood of the young and beautiful. In the West it spread, with some slight variation, all over Hungary Poland, Austria, and Lorraine, where the belief existed, that vampyres nightly imbibed a certain portion of the blood of their victims, who became emaciated, lost their strength, and speedily died of consumptions; whilst these human blood-suckers fattened - and their veins became distended to such a state of repletion, as to cause the blood to flow from all the passages of their bodies, and even from the very pores of their skins.
- From the original introduction to The Vampyre.

At this point in history, the creature was something almost wholly repugnant, shunned and feared. When the vampyre, or vampire appeared in the sensational and rambling "penny dreadful" series, Varney the Vampire by Thomas Preskett, and in Victorian theatre with Planche's Vampire (1820) it was still a somewhat exaggerated and melodramatic depiction, rather akin to a demon or ghoul with some messy and nasty eating habits. In Preskett's work the vampire was even, by accident or design, somewhat comical:

"How should you like to be called a vampyre, and stared at as if you were some hideous natural phenomenon?"
"Well, but-"
"I say, Admiral Bell, how should you like it? I am a harmless country gentleman, and because, in the heated imaginations of some member of a crack-brained family, some housebreaker has been converted into a vampyre, I am to be pitched upon as the man, and insulted and persecuted accordingly."
"But you forget the proofs."
"What proofs?"
"The portrait, for one."
"What! Because there is an accidental likeness between me and an old picture, am I to be set down as a vampyre? Why, when I was in Austria last, I saw an old portrait of a celebrated court fool, and you so strongly resemble it, that I was quite struck when I first saw you with the likeness; but I was not so impolite as to tell you that I considered you were the court fool turned vampyre."
- Thomas Preskett, Varney the Vampyre or The Feast of Blood.

It wasn't until later in the 19th century that a certain refinement and glamour began to attach itself to the myth. The first lesbian vampire appeared, we can only assume rather shockingly, in the story of Carmilla by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu. Carmilla, in part because she was a female character, was portrayed in much more subtle terms than characters like Varney; she's a luscious and seductive countess of striking beauty and refinement. Here is the narrator's mother speaking of her daughter's growing infatuation with the

She was very witty and lively when she pleased, and after a time they had grown very good friends, and the young stranger lowered her mask, displaying a remarkably beautiful face. I had never seen it before, neither had my dear child. But though it was new to us, the features were so engaging, as well as lovely, that it was impossible not to feel the attraction powerfully. My poor girl did so. I never saw anyone more taken with another at first sight, unless, indeed, it was the stranger herself, who seemed quite to have lost her heart to her.
- Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla 1872.

The romantic, rather overblown and deeply atmospheric tone of this story proved a lasting influence on the style of vampire works. It was, at the time, almost certainly the inspiration behind Philip Burne Jones' 1897 painting, "The Vampire" which shows a gorgeous female succubus smiling over her handsome victim. One could well argue that Carmilla's influence can be seen right up to the present day in the work of Anne Rice with her bisexual cast of impossibly perfect male and female vampires. Certainly, it began a trend for emphasising the sexually alluring aspects of the vampire and it's this sense of forbidden attraction which is undoubtedly a large part of why the theme has been so enduringly popular.
Irish writers of the 19th century seem to have had a particular affinity for the theme and it was Bram Stoker's thoughtful and literary Dracula that thoroughly established the vampire in the popular imagination as more than a mere monster - here was a vampire who could be self-reflective and even melancholy about his own situation:

I seek not gaiety nor mirth, not the bright voluptuousness of much sunshine and sparkling waters which please the young and gay. I am no longer young, and my heart, through weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth. Moreover, the walls of my castle are broken. The shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may."
- Bram Stoker, Dracula.

But as I listened, I heard as if from down below in the valley the howling of many wolves. The Count's eyes gleamed, and he said. "Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!" Seeing, I suppose, some expression in my face strange to him, he added, "Ah, sir, you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter."
- Bram Stoker, Dracula.

Helped by the enthusiastic reception for Stoker's tale, the vampire proved the most ubiquitous personage to emerge from the Victorian Gothic. This was in part because the vampire bite worked as an allegory of sexual submission that was sufficiently disguised to be within the bounds, just, of propriety. The genre promised readers, theatre-goers and, later, film audiences, a safe indulgence in illicit fantasies - what could be more thrilling?

Recent online catalogues of vampire films list no fewer than 340 between 1913 and now. Throughout these films, and the books that have also been produced in large numbers, it's the allure and sheer sexiness of the vampire that has been increasingly emphasised. From the thoroughly revolting and almost animal-like Nosferatu in Murnau's 1922 film, the 20th century vampire evolved first into a slightly kitsch but good-looking aristocrat with satin cape and slicked raven-black hair. Then, in the modern day, vampires multiplied in number and became the handsome, and even dashing, figures of Anne Rice's Louis, Lestat, Armand and their comrade "blood hunters". These characters are icons of an alternative lifestyle, noble figures with supernatural powers and an elegant, enviable taste in dress. We've turned the vampire into an immortal hero to be both desired and admired. How surprised Polidori and Stoker would have been.