The Four Loves

It’s Valentine’s Day! As an Aquarius Venus I don’t participate. 😌 But I love culture, and ritual, and as a seeker on the path of magic I of course love to ponder the nature of love.

Legendary writer, theologian and fellow Aquarian, CS Lewis, focused on ‘The Four Loves’ for a series of broadcasts in 1958 and this remarkably engaging insight into the examination of the nature and variety of human love by ancient cultures may be of comfort to those who say they are ‘loveless’ this Valentine’s Day.

Of course, we aren’t EVER. Even in solitude we have self-love and love of the divine. ‘Agape’ is a keyword of Thelema, Aleister Crowley’s legacy religion, and while I’m not a card-carrying Thelemite (sadly in my search for a mystery school the local Ordo Templi Orientis didn’t get back to my enquiries, and I’ve yet to find an A∴A∴ mentor) I have a deep admiration for the underpinning values of the Thelemites. Love is the law, love under will. What a motto!

Anyhow take a look at the overview of the Four Loves and if you’re honest with yourself, I’m sure you’ll decide that if you take your obsessive focus off Eros, you’ll see that your life is actually rich in love. 🥰

Top Left: Storge (Affection) Earth

• Definition: Natural, familial love; the affection between parents and children or lifelong friends.

• Key Traits: Comforting, familiar, unconditional.

Top Right: Philia (Friendship) Air

• Definition: Deep friendship; the bond between people who share interests, values, and mutual respect.

• Key Traits: Voluntary, intellectual, trust-based.

Bottom Left: Eros (Romantic Love) Water

• Definition: Romantic or passionate love, often associated with desire and deep emotional connection.

• Key Traits: Intense, exclusive, emotionally powerful.

Bottom Right: Agape (Divine Love) Fire

• Definition: Selfless, unconditional love, often linked to God’s love for humanity.

• Key Traits: Sacrificial, boundless, unearned.

You may notice with your beady magician’s eyes that I have allocated an Element to each of the four loves - these are not noted in CS Lewis’s writings, but nevertheless the correspondences to the elements that we see in qabalah, tarot, astrology, etc seemed to lend themselves quite plainly to the loves. The more correspondences that we spot and identify between areas of life and fields of magic, the deeper the levels and layers of interpretation we can express when it comes to magical practice.

For example, in a Tarot reading about love, in wands are dominant we may glean that the love in question is Agape. For cups, we may signify Eros. A better understanding of the correspondences we can make in our human experience, makes for a deeper understanding of our own intuition and the nudges that we get from the divine.

However you use the four loves, I hope that today reading about them will grant you a greater sense of the presence of love in your own life. We are all made of love, and if we substitute ‘love’ for ‘power’ in the opening statement of the Pattern on the Trestleboard as I believe Ann Davies once did, we get the following;

‘All the love there ever was or will be, is here, now.’

What a comforting idea! Happy Valentine’s Day, and may your heart remain full.