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.