The Devil: Taking that walk on the wild side

Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

“We may be human, but we’re still animals.” — Steve Vai, musician

This week, I was going to write about both The Devil and The Star, but I have the distinct feeling that there is simply too much to fit into a single article: I find both cards fascinating, and I think it would do each of them, and you, an injustice to try and fit them together when they both seem to be calling out for separate attention.

And so on to our first port of call, The Devil. The Devil is the fifteenth card in the major arcana, preceded by Death (XIII) and then Temperance (XIV), and followed by The Tower (XVI) and then The Star (XVII).

To recap: each card in the major arcana is a visual representation of an archetype; and collectively, they describe the archetypal journey that we take through life. Wikipedia’s entry on “Jungian archetypes” explains these ideas in more depth:

Archetypes are, according to Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, innate universal psychic dispositions that form the substrate from which the basic symbols or representations of unconscious experience emerge. ‘The archetype is a tendency to form such representations of a motif – representations that can vary a great deal in detail without losing their basic pattern … They are indeed an instinctive trend ‘. Thus for example ‘the archetype of initiation is strongly activated to provide a meaningful transition… with a “rite of passage” from one stage of life to the next’: such stages may include being parented, initiation, courtship, marriage and preparation for death.

After we go through what the alchemists call a period of calcination (where we are figuratively strung up and all that no longer works is burned away), represented by The Hanged Man, we enter a period of transformation, marked by Death. Then there is integration, heralded by Temperance, where we seek a more balanced and authentic mode of existence. Which brings us to The Devil, when the call to integrate brings us face-to-face with our wildish nature. Why does this happen? Because, for many of us, our wildness is something to be ashamed of. Many of us lead sanitised existences that ask us to kerb the instinctual side of our natures — and so we try to deny it in one way or another. The problem with this approach is that the wildish nature cannot be tamed; it will find an out. Perhaps the best way to live side-by-side with it, then, is not to view it as unacceptable, but as in integral part of who we are.

The Devil is an invitation to look at our instinctive nature square in the face and acknowledge its existence and the role it plays in our lives.

We’ll look at how this idea of the wildish nature is expressed in both of the tarot cards that I introduced three weeks ago: the first is The Devil from the Crowley-Harris Thoth Tarot; and the second is The Devil from the Rider-Waite Smith Tarot. Both say essentially the same thing, but take a different slant on the matter.

The Devil (XV) – Crowley-Harris and Rider-Waite Smith

Most of the imagery in the Crowley-Harris version of The Devil isn’t what I would call subtle. Where there is a finesse to the imagery in, for example, Art (Temperance) or The Star (which we will visit next week), The Devil exudes in-your-face sex. I think that’s rather the point. The more we deny The Devil a place in our lives, the more noticeable and dramatic its manifestation and its effects. There is no being coy about it here. Like the phallus that spans the picture, it stands up and demands attention.

What interests me most about this card, however, is the goat looking out at us from its vantage point at the centre of the card. When I was using this card as the basis for an examination of the shadow, I first remarked that I felt that the goat looked creepy and lascivious — a rather humbling projection of an aspect of my own wildish nature. However, when I started to open up to the reactions that it brought up in me, its expression started to change. The word that came to me (which Amanda Painter and I briefly discussed in the comments section of the previous article on The Devil) was “jaunty”. It began to seem downright whimsical. Simply by admitting to my reaction, I had transformed something so that I was able to see the goat from another point of view — one that wasn’t borne out of revulsion, but which was rather more engaged and amused.

If you look up animal symbolism, goats are, among other things, associated with sexuality, and specifically masculine sexuality… and, as I’ve mentioned, the masculine connotations here are hard to ignore. Masculine sexuality (which can be embodied by all genders) is active as opposed to receptive. It is pursuer rather than pursued. The goat looks at us directly. It initiates the exchange. We, as spectators and participants, can choose to engage with the gaze, to ignore it, or to refute it. At its most basic, I believe that when we engage with the goat’s gaze, we are engaging on some level with our own masculine sexuality. Is it something we accept or reject? Are we ashamed or self-possessed (literally possessing that part of ourselves)?

The rest of the card doesn’t hold my attention as much — to me, it simply describes the same thing in different ways. For a particularly good commentary on some of the images, you can refer to the post made by Charles on 10 November.

Finally, another layer resting above the more obvious imagery makes itself known: I observe that the goat has a third eye. It starts to look serene, almost yogi-esque. It is at this point that it transcends the sexual nature of its surroundings. Sexuality can be demonized, and it can also be idolized. We tread the middle path when it is an accepted and functional part of us, no more or less important than the rest.

The Rider-Waite Smith version of The Devil, although equally visually striking to me, symbolises something broader and more subtle than its Crowley-Harris counterpart.

Now, instead of The Lovers (card VI in the major arcana, an image of which you can find here) standing together freely while receiving a blessing from an angel in the light of the sun, they find themselves chained to a pillar, on which is perched the devil itself, the background plunged into impenetrable black.

Unlike The Lovers, the two figures here are not entirely human, with tails and horns. Where they were once associated with, but detached from, the natural forces around them, in The Devil, they have become consumed by them. The Devil’s torch looks like it has ignited the tail of the male figure. He is allowing the devil to feed him its particular energy. I write “allowing” because if you look at the chains in the image, they are far from restrictive. They hang loosely around the man and woman’s necks and don’t seem to be weighing them down considerably. And yet they are not walking away. They are in thrall. They are also visually overpowered by the figure behind them.

The creature that confronts us does not exist in real life, although each element of its body is drawn from something either human or animal: I see goat, bat, lion, human, bird. It is an aberration. “Aberration”, according to Wiktionary.com, is “[t]he act of wandering; deviation, especially from truth or moral rectitude, from the natural state, or from a type.”

What stands out for me here is “deviation, especially from truth” — which brings us back to an idea that I posited earlier, when talking about the Crowley-Harris version of The Devil. We live in a world of polarity. As far as I can see, everything that exists in incarnate form has an opposite. Perhaps our task is not to validate one thing above another, thus throwing the balance out, but rather to walk a middle path, which then leads us beyond the purely physical. That ‘middle path’ is represented by the angel in The Lovers. It is not of this world, but is present when opposites are held in equilibrium. That path, or portal, becomes lost when we disown either polarity. Like The Devil, our world becomes dark and narrow.

Our wildish nature is not ‘bad’. Nor is it ‘good’. It exists. And it exists alongside many other elements in a world that is multifaceted and defined by contrast. Acknowledging, working with and transmuting our wildish nature — and every other part of what it is to be human — is an integral part of what alchemists refer to as the Great Work, where we transform the baser elements of life into gold. In The Devil, we have struck Fool’s Gold, a humbling and yet often necessary part of our Fool’s Journey through the major arcana.