The Devil

‘It’s unfortunate that when we feel a stone

We can roll ourselves over ’cause we’re uncomfortable

Oh well, the devil makes us sin

But we like it when we’re spinning in his grin.

–

Love is like a sin, my love

For the ones that feel it the most

Look at her with her eyes like a flame

She will love you like a fly will never love you again’

‘Paradise Circus’ by Massive Attack (Del Naja / Marshall / Sandoval / Brown / Jackson)

Welcome to my Devil’s chains! The Devil is definitely viewed by many as a negative card, and while it certainly has some… not great connotations, I have a certain fondness for it. Generally viewed as representing self-destructive patterns of behaviour, addictions, and toxic relationships, there are also some more positive aspects to this card. After all, indulging isn’t always bad, and being wicked is certainly its own sweetly illicit kind of thrill. The trick – as Temperance has already taught us – is not to overindulge, not to let selfishness govern all our behaviours ’til we’re regularly hurting and manipulating other people (there’s a line in a book which has always stayed with me, something like, ‘it’s fine to do drugs every now and then; the trick is not to let drugs do you’). The people we see in chains and collars in the traditional RWS image – largely assumed to be our once innocent couple from the Lovers – are not straining against tight bonds held by a ruthless satanic overlord. Instead, their collars are loose enough to slip out of. They remain in these chains because they want to be controlled by their base, bestial desires. And this is the danger shown in this card, the slippery slope from initially flirting with the delicious dark edge of desire to the final agonising knife twist of self destruction and ruin.

“There’s a wickedness to being wild, a kind of beauty in letting go and chasing after our most profound, personal desires. But when we no longer have the option of saying no, when the ability to deny our impulses becomes impossible, any illusion of control is shattered. And although it can feel like freedom to give in to those seductive yearnings, now we find ourselves in a dark, dangerous place, uncertain of how we got there. The line is so thin between passion and power, and as we dance between sensations, we lose something precious: the skill of discernment”.

Meg Jones Wall, ‘Finding The Fool‘

Sympathy For The Devil

On the other hand, the Devil we generally see on Tarot cards isn’t really ‘Satan’ – as conceived of in modern Christian thought – but instead takes his roots from Pagan religions. The strongest influences on how he is usually portrayed are Pan – the god of fields, groves and wooded glens, perfect for passion filled trysts – and Dionysius/Bacchus – the god of wine, fertility, festivity, ritual madness, ecstasy, and theatre. Far from being seen as the wielder of chains, as Dionysus Eleutherios (‘The Liberator’) Bacchus was seen as the breaker of them. His intoxicating animalistic pleasures – wine, music, dance, carnival – were thought to free his followers from self-conscious fear and care, and subvert the oppressive restraints of governance and social order. While both legal and social rules can be helpful, often they are not designed to lift us up, but instead play into the hands of the powerful by keeping us worn down and obedient.

There’s a big danger of me slipping into one of my Criminology 101 lectures here, lol, but I definitely see a link between this message of the Devil card and my area of teaching. The field of Cultural Criminology focusses a lot on the sensual pleasures of crime. The thrill, the satisfaction, the physically pleasurable sense of being hyper focussed in the moment (not all up in your head or thinking about yesterday, tomorrow, just the urgent vital nowness), the joy of saying ‘fuck you’ to a society that’s never really cared about you and only ever sought to control you, and sticking it to the man. It’s a key point I always make with the students – when we work with the hard edge of crime, be it the devastated, broken victims, or the damaged, hurting offenders – it’s easy to get caught up in the horror and sadness and pointlessness of it. And there is certainly a lot of horror, sadness, and pointlessness. But if crime was all pain, misery, and death so many people wouldn’t do it. It’s also thrilling, exciting, fun, sexy. It also makes you feel alive. Bacchus’ dedicated festival (Bacchanalia), was not just an orgy of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll (or at least rock’n’lyre), but also a time when the usually strict social norms and structures were not just ignored, but actively turned upside down. Masters serving slaves, women seducing men, rich and poor mixing freely to dance and drink and fuck. The festival was ultimately considered so subversive by the Roman state that celebrating it was made a capital offence (outside of a boring-ass, watered-down, state-sanctioned version of it).

So sometimes the Devil card can also be about pleasure and abandon, of wild behaviour and unbridled desire. Sometimes it can be good to dance with Bacchus, to surrender control, to live in the moment. Too much restraint can hold us back and prevent us from achieving important goals. As Thirteen writes on Aeclectic Tarot, “we didn’t fly to the moon by being moderate, safe, or cautious, or by resisting temptation”. If we can harness the power of the Devil (instead of letting it harness us), we can use our innate desire for pleasure and power to achieve great heights. When we deny our desires, we will not achieve the (seemingly) impossible, nor push at the bounds of what is ‘accepted’. When we embrace them, we can reach for the moon. So, like all power the Devil’s power is frightening; but it’s also a key to freedom and transcendence.

In the Morgan Greer Tarot, the Devil card has a fly in the centre. In Norse mythology, the fly is associated with Loki, the trickster god. A slippery character to be sure, but one that also brings a thrilling edge of danger and fun. Loki’s energy quickens our senses, and makes our blood flow quicker. He brings excitement. Maddy Elruna argues that the upsidedown pentagram we see in the Morgan Greer and a lot of other Tarot Devil imagery is symbolic of putting our physical needs before the spiritual or the intellectual. And sometimes it can be good to do this, especially when we’re prone to getting too caught up in Eight/Nine of Swords energy, crippled by anxiety and all caught up inside our own heads. She asks: “what is wrong with enjoying good food, good wine, good sex?” Enjoy your body! Put its needs first for once! This brings me to adrienne maree brown‘s amazing work on what she calls ‘pleasure activism‘. She reminds us that pleasure often gets lost under the weight of oppression, and it is liberatory work to reclaim it: “oppression makes us believe that pleasure is not something we all have equal access to. One of the ways we start doing the work of reclaiming our full selves – our whole liberated, free selves – is by reclaiming our access to pleasure” [Also, in researching this post I’ve discovered adrienne maree brown has an Octavia E. Butler Tarot deck coming out later this year, and just… wow…].

There are certainly decks that lean into this sex, ‘horny little devil’ energy (see above!), and Bakara Wintner writes about this side of the card, “The seductive draw of The Devil is undeniable. Its message is that we are in bondage, and sometimes that’s really fucking hot. With the constant demands, pressure and responsibilities that accompany being a grown-up person, there is an innate craving to just give in to what feels good – to give up control or to wield complete control. To do so can allow for intense creative expression and sexual energy”. The Devil card calls to our primitive sides, to instincts concealed in our deep unconscious, to the dark recesses within that remain hidden and mysterious even to ourselves. Sometimes he can serve as a message to pay more attention to needs and desires that have been supressed for too long.

The Devil To Pay

Having said all that, I certainly agree that this card is primarily a warning not to overindulge, or continue to engage in physically and emotionally destructive behaviours that offer short-term pleasure at long-term cost. And the key message of the Devil is that we often don’t resist the pull of darkness because we don’t want to. The card can often be telling us to acknowledge and recognise that the power to change the unpleasant situation we find ourselves in is with us, not what tempts us. In Wild Card Jen Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt point out that “old habits die hard, and it can take years of work and support to break the most destructive cycles. But it is possible and maybe – just maybe – it is time. When the Devil appears he is asking you if you are ready to confront those parts of your life and yourself. He’s a reminder of your power to do so”.

I am particularly smug proud about my song choice for this card, because I feel the opening lyrics (‘it’s unfortunate that when we feel a stone / we can roll ourselves over ’cause we’re uncomfortable‘) perfectly tap into one of my favourite observations of the card in Jessica Dore‘s amazing take on Tarot through a psychological lens. In Tarot For Change, Dore argues that one of the problems with addictive behaviours is they shield us from confronting painful issues from our pasts or difficult truths about ourselves that we could otherwise start to heal from:

“When we avoid something, we experience temporary peace or relief from the thorniness of that thing. This reinforces the avoidance behaviour, but it also reinforces the belief that the thing we’re avoiding is dangerous. Peter Levine… writes that ‘whatever experiences you turn away from, the brain-body registers as dangerous’. A lot of times the things we’re avoiding are feelings, such as grief or anxiety. And so in avoiding grief or anxiety, we’re also investing in this broader belief that feelings themselves have the capacity to be dangerous – and that’s just not true… When we believe grief or loneliness or fears of social rejection are dangerous in or of themselves, and then fashion our whole lives around avoiding them, we think we’re free of the feeling when in truth we’re enslaved by it. Chained to and cursed to haul its weight around for eternity”.

‘Tarot For Change’ by Jessica Dore

Below are some of my favourite Tarot cards that tap into this aspect of the Devil card. Both Eric Maille and Célia Melesville have drawn their Devils as a distorted version of their Lovers, showing the complex relationship between desire, pleasure, and love on one hand, and co-dependence, addiction, and manipulation on the other. And I really like the Way Home Tarot‘s clever take on the card. All the lights and beauty and fun of the carnival, but look closer, look at the whites of their eyes, and you see those horses are in bondage.

Similarly, many of the Tarot cards I own focus on the tempting aspects of the the Devil card’s energy. For, as Bakara Wintner writes: “The Devil is not a monster that jumps in our path baring his teeth and snarling at us. If he did, then we’d be like, ‘Damn, I better get this under control’. Rather, The Devil makes us think that he is our friend. That he alone protects us, understands us, comforts us and keeps us safe. People are very attached to their Devil. You will often hear alcoholics say, ‘Alcohol wasn’t my problem: it was my solution’. The moment we start to question this is the moment we begin to invoke our own freedom”. I really like the way the Devil’s clever tricks are captured in the below Tarot cards. Addi Miyako‘s Devil isn’t some terrifying demon. Instead he is a very beautiful, sensual man. A lot of what is harmful to us in the long run looks so alluring at first glance. The smoke he’s blowing out forming the suggestion of horns is just so clever! As Miyako writes, “[rather than] make the horns more apparent, I wanted to give the feel that the horns are merely suggested – that we don’t always see what’s bad for us in its truest form”. And I love, love, love the concept of the Devil as angler fish that we see in Nawan Junhasiri‘s ‘Healing Waves‘ Tarot. So often we are blinded by bright, shiny things (like those poor clown fish) and realise too late that our pursuit of them has caused harm to ourselves and others.

Plus angler fish are just so hugely creepy!

‘I Myself Am Hell’

My mind’s not right.

A car radio bleats,

“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear

my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat. . . .

I myself am hell;

nobody’s here—

From ‘Skunk Hour’ by Robert Lowell

Finally, I think it’s important to consider the ways in which the Devil is us. Not just some external, seductive temptress. There is something within each of us which is our Achilles heel. We all have it, that one thing that eternally trips us up, and keeps playing out in our lives over and over, making us more miserable each time. And will continue to do so until we finally accept it and integrate it into our whole selves. It’s the Devil within.

As Sallie Nichols writes, “It is a truism of life that when negative aspects of ourselves are not recognised as belonging to us on the inside, they appear to act against us on the outside”. We need to acknowledge our demons, claim them and tame them. Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt explain that “the Devil speaks to the times when, actually, it isn’t entirely someone else’s fault. It’s a reminder that it’s not always true when we tell ourselves that things can’t change, that we’re stuck like this, that it’s beyond our control, that it is what it is. And that knowledge can be liberating. It can be the first step in doing things differently.” For as Wintner observes, “there are healthy expressions of the shadow self if we are willing to accept it and get to know that part of ourselves”.

I really like how Jamie Sawyer captures the idea of the Devil inside by showing her Devil as a shadow puppet created by the artist’s own fingers. In the Pholarchos Tarot we see the Devil as the mind eater, the dark force inside our heads that chews us up from the inside out. In explaining her design choices, the artist and creator Carmen Sorrenti quotes Jung, who writes “it is commonly said of the peacock that it has an angel’s feathers, a devils’ voice, and a thief’s walk”. In the LWB accompanying the deck she urges us to “sit with your devils, the ones that ring bells incessantly in your head and refuse to let you sleep – listen in – watch their deformed heads rage with a full spectrum of temptations… and with shame, malice, hubris, abandonment – cradle them like screaming babes, lest you think that monsters have dreamed you up. If you can wait it out without dismissal or acting out, without talking down or deceit, the gnashing of teeth may become the peacock’s tail. Not everything can be changed but naked engagement does more than we can know. The shackled potency might deliver you to yourself in a whole new light”. And finally, Ana Tourian‘s Devil shows a man in “an endless wasteland, shackled to the machinations of his own heart”. In the LWB she writes, “you see, the Devil is not an external perpetrator; it is the shadow of our own selves… [and so this] is a card that calls you to be active to achieve your freedom; to take action to free yourself from burdensome attachments. You need only to choose to do so”.

The Devil’s In The Detail

Here are some of my favourite Devil cards from across my decks, starting with more traditional takes, and ending with more obscure ones.

The Spiritual Tarot is a pretty new addition to my collection (I put off getting it for ages because it’s a £££ Japanese import and a Majors only deck), so I’m pretty enamoured with it right now. Loving the irreverent touches, like the pentagram tattoo. A very traditional (perhaps almost too unnuanced?) take on the Devil from the Stunning Tarot, but the aesthetics are on point. And there’s something so spectacularly unsettling about the creepiness – yet utter mundanity – of the illustration from the Aquarian Tarot. After all, the Devil is with us (and within us) every day.

All of the Mary-El Tarot art is visually arresting, and the Devil card is no different. Is this not the great unknowable face of the powerful darkness we all feel inside our souls? In the LWB Marie White quotes the Persian lyrical poet Hafiz, who talks about much the same psychodynamic processes as Jessica Dore: “Time is a factory where we everyone slaves away earning enough love to break their own chains”. Speaking of those psychodynamic processes, Jessica Bott’s decision to represent the Devil as the strangler fig in her flora-based deck is inspired. Whilst strangler figs suck up the nutrients from their host trees, causing them to eventually die, they can also help to support ‘their’ tree to survive devastating storms. I never have any idea what’s really going on in the Hayworth Tarot, because so far I’ve only listened to the first few episodes of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast on which the deck is based. But still. This card, with its echoes of curling devil’s horns, Dunian sandworms, and the deep pinkgrey folds of our ancient brains, is wonderful and arresting. I am particuarly taken with the similarity to the Sand Worm, and reminded of Frank Herbert’s words on his creation.

The elements of any mythology must grow from something profoundly moving, something which threatens to overwhelm any consciousness which tries to confront the primal mystery. Yet, after the primal confrontation, the roots of this threat must appear as familiar and necessary as your own flesh. For this, I give you the sandworms of Dune … the extension of human lifespan cannot be an unmitigated blessing. Every such acquisition requires a new consciousness. And a new consciousness assumes that you will confront dangerous unknowns – you will go into the deeps.

Frank Herbert

“God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; the vulture the very creature he creates.”

‘Moby Dick’ by Herman Melville

Addendum: Goats and The Devil

Given how many Devil cards feature images of goats, I was intrigued to dig a bit deeper into the links between goats and devilry.

Traditionally, of course, goats played a key role in the Jewish Holy Day of Yom Kippur. The Azazel goat (scapegoat) would have all the sins of the community symbolically placed upon it when the high priest laid hands on it. Once the sins ‘were placed’, the people would drive the goat out into the wilderness, thus driving out Israel’s sins into the desert. Deserts represent cursed places, devoid of God’s blessing – which often comes through the form of rain (imagery that is echoed in the Tarot with the classic rainbow of the Ten of Cups).

Additionally, goats were very prevalent in paganism: the Norse religions (where goats pull Thor’s chariot), Pan (associated with sex and fertility), and the Greek satyrs. The Pan/satyr link speaks to the association of goats with predatory sexual potency and energy (horny, lol!). The link between goats and non-Abrahamic religions was cemented in the figure of Baphomet – a goat-like man created in 1856 by Eliphas Levi as an occultic symbol of balance, seperate from the traditional view of God as the arbiter of justice and judgement. Interestingly, a number of sources note that Baphomet became expressly associated with Satanism when he appeared as a depiction of the devil in tarot decks (creating a somewhat circular logic)! The New Testament is also pretty down on goats. Matthew talks about ‘separating the sheep from the goats’ on Judgement Day, with the goats being told in no uncertain terms they are off to spend eternity with the devil while the sheep get to enjoy the kingdom of heaven. But why this Biblical anti-goat sentiment? It has been suggested that while sheep are dependent on their shepherd, goats have a reputation for self-reliance and stubbornness. This can be seen as a metaphor for depending on your own will, not the guidance of God. Also, much like the Devil of the Tarot, goats have destructive tendencies. As the old saying goes, ‘shepherds protect sheep from their environment, whereas goatherds protect the environment from their goats’.  All this has led to goats becoming strongly associated with satanism, evil, and the occult. For me one of the best actualisations of this link is in Robert Eggers’ ‘The VVitch’ with the exceptionally creepy Black Phillip. Enjoy:

Black Phillip, Black Phillip
A crown grows out his head,
Black Phillip, Black Phillip
To nanny queen is wed.
Jump to the fence post,
Running in the stall.
Black Phillip, Black Phillip
King of all.

Black Phillip, Black Phillip
King of sky and land,
Black Phillip, Black Phillip
King of sea and sand.
We are ye servants,
We are ye men.
Black Phillip eats the lions
From the lions’ den.

From ‘The Witch’

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