Heart and Arrow

What this is

A heart pierced by an arrow, set at the head of the seventeenth folio. It is the emblem of love struck and felt, of desire that has found its mark and cannot be ignored. Its verses speak of the beloved, of passion, and of the wound and gift that love both is.

What it governs

Presides over love, passion, the beloved, and the heart fixed on another. Folio 17. It rules the affections at their most piercing, where feeling becomes fate.

Its properties

Its colour is deep rose and warm red; its number seventeen; its metal copper. The quality is sincerity, ardour, the courage to feel openly and be marked by it. In shadow it is the wound that festers, jealousy, love that grasps and so loses what it holds, the arrow that pins rather than frees.

Where else it appears

The same note is the arrow of Eros that fixes love where it lands; the flaming heart of devotion pierced by sorrow and joy alike; Venus and her son with bow and burning torch; the heart-chakra opened by the shaft of longing. One pierced heart, many names for the same struck note.

Where you meet it on the Oracle

It surfaces as the Folio of the Day and as a closing folio, and it is the natural folio for questions of the beloved's faithfulness, of being loved, and of love's constancy. When it heads your day, lead with the feeling rather than the argument; the day favours sincerity over strategy. In a reading it confirms warmth where there is warmth and counsels honesty where there is doubt. Say what you feel.

Why it matters

It stands seventeenth because love is the question the oracle is asked most tenderly and most often, and the Heart and Arrow is feeling made unmistakable. It asks you to be honest about what you feel before you ask what another feels for you.

Correspondences

planet

Venus

element

Water

zodiac

Libra, Taurus

number

17

sephirah

Netzach

day

Friday

colour

Deep rose, red

metal

Copper

stone

Rose quartz

tarot

The Lovers