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 explains how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc
By Sarah Taylor
Choices, choices, choices: the empowerment to make them, the options they offer you, and where they will take you. This is a potent reading where the decisions that you make, and what you explore, have the potential to bring you into conscious contact with your shadow. At the heart of the reading: the invitation to greater self-awareness through integration.
The Devil — fifteenth card of the major arcana, which hold within them our inner archetypal development — is a visual depiction of our shadow nature. It is when we encounter The Devil that we come face to face with what connects us to the darkness — something that has the potential to hold us prisoner, but which also offers us a pathway to freedom.
The Devil is born of us, rather than the other way around. He is created when what we find unacceptable in ourselves, both positive and negative, is locked away in the unconscious because we aren’t able to own it as a part of us.
I believe that The Devil is a visual depiction of what psychiatrist Carl Jung referred to as the shadow — something that Eric refers to often in his astrology articles and reports. In Jung – A Very Short Introduction, Anthony Stevens refers to the shadow as such:
… [T]he whole shadow complex is tinged with feelings of guilt and unworthiness, and with fears of refection should its true nature be discovered or exposed. However painful the process [of confronting the shadow] may be, it is necessary to persevere because much Self potential and instinctive energy is locked away in the shadow and therefore unavailable to the total personality.
We cannot approach the shadow directly. Rather, we experience it in our dreams, or it is projected out into the world, and then returns to us through relationships — especially our relationship with a partner or partners — and our experiences. Its presence is inferred.
When I look at the Two of Wands and The Devil side-by-side, I see both the capacity and the capability to take matters in hand — to take the world in hand — in order to acknowledge our shadow nature and to begin to own it. It is appropriate that the figure in the Two of Wands is turned away from The Devil: as I mentioned, the shadow is not something that stands in front of us, clear as day, so that we can analyse and interpret it. However, the two wands are indicative of the man’s dual nature: the wand in his left hand, held together with the world, represents the part of him that looks outside. The wand behind him seems to be the gateway to The Devil, marking space between the figure and what lies out of his immediate field of vision. The figure is well-dressed and in a position of authority, looking as he does out at the sea from the rampart of a large building. He is master of his domain; he has the means to hold the energy of both outer and inner.