The Devil You Know

In popular culture, the Devil in tarot has been viewed as a sign of fear and woe. He doesn’t need to be.

by Konstantina Buhalis // Illustration by Jon Garaizar

Fighting your trepidation, you look down at the table. You notice the lace tablecloth, the candles burning bright, the burning incense that assaults your senses. You dare to look at the cards laid out before you, and you notice it immediately—the devil. Upright. Fear creeps up your spine as you watch the smoke from the candles and incense intertwine and dance into the air. 

Diavolos, Shaytan, Diavol, Devil—he goes by many names. He is Card XV of the Major Arcana in the traditional Tarot deck, such as the Rider-Waite-Smith. 

Upright, the card represents bondage, enslavement, fear, materialism, temptation, and toxic relationships. Reversed, the card represents divorce, freedom, and breaking the cycle of addiction. And in both forms, the devil card is hedonistic—it represents both the darkest forces within and the ability to break free from our patterns. The card can symbolize love and relationships, whether the earliest and most joyfuls stages of a honeymoon or the sudden and irreversible end of a relationship.

Kim Higgins writes in the Complete Guide to Tarot:

The Devil is rarely a positive card, but it does have a few redeeming qualities. Sometimes it can represent the querent’s ambition and desire for greatness, as well as their desire to move on from one achievement to the next, never stopping or pausing for breath. One thing’s for certain with such a querent: they won’t rest on their laurels! 

If positively aspected in a reading, this card can indicate a time of great desire and action in the querent’s life, a lust for life, and a willingness to take risks and enjoy life to the fullest, which will serve to further their goals and improve their circumstances. This querent wants to make the most of life while they can and while they have the means and desire to.

Visually, the art of the Devil card is almost self-explanatory. It depicts a beast with taloned feet and a human torso, a head with horns, and two demons—male and female—chained to the pedestal that the devil sits upon. The demon pair are chained to the struggle to fight against temptation and the looming sense of evil, as so often depicted as lurking everywhere.

But in both tarot and mythology, the devil maintains a sense of mystery, evoking the deepest primordial fear and intrigue within us. Cultural and artistic depictions of Satan range from the nightmarish—beasts, serpents, and unholy creatures too terrible to do more than glimpse—to the enchantingly beautiful. Without distinguishing between the horrors and the pleasure, drawing the devil card becomes a source of contention and relief when contemplating matters of the heart and mind.

“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” asks Black Philip in The VVitch, a film in which he first takes the form of a black goat and then, later, an enchantingly handsome young man, seducing the young and rebellious Thomasin into gleeful debauchery with promises of butter and pretty dresses. These promises may seem juvenile to modern audiences, but the Devil is ever flexible, and such things fit squarely into the needs of a 17th century Puritan girl. Earthly delights and sins of the flesh are inherent aspects of humanity, and although like Thomasin we are often taught to reject our impulses—to, for example, eat too much buttered toast and buy a new Vivianne Westwood pearl necklace—we indulge and binge.

In the popular Biblical tradition, the devil is understood to have introduced free will to Adam and Eve in the Garden Of Eden, seducing them with both knowledge and self-determination. He later comes to Christ in the desert during a time of self-denial, and presents the same offer: freedom of will, to seize the power he commands and turn it to his own purposes, claiming the cities of the world and the powers of the heavenly host. We see this same offer for self-determination and freedom in the tarot, in which the card upright and reversed reminds us that we have the freedom to escape our bondage—or to be swallowed in it and forgo our free will. 

(This same nature has made the devil of the tarot a figure of humor in many pop culture-influenced depictions. As drawn by Kaylee Pinecone in an illustration based on the video game series Animal Crossing, the devil is re-imagined as the character Tom Nook—clad in sweater vest and trousers, standing on the roof of a house, his arms bent, with sacks of bells (the game’s money) floating above his palms, dispensing gifts and collecting rent in equal measure. Both liberator and oppressor.)

In 1966, Anton LaVey started the Church of Satan, an institution based on the power of the individual. Though LaVey dressed as the devil, complete with horns, he didn’t recognize the devil as a real being, but rather the battle with egoism. 

LaVeyan Satanism teaches self-deification, also called “egotheism”—meaning, in other words, that you are your own god. One of the Nine Satanic Sentiments of the Church of Satan reads, “Satan represents man as just another animal who, because of his ‘divine spiritual and intellectual development,’ has become the most vicious animal of all.” This principle in essence insists that intellectual development is in and of itself satanism, because you are seeking information that contradicts the teachings of the church and allows critical thinking to exist.

The devil card, then, is the battle’s most basic state: a battle of the ego and wits. Not a function of evil, but one of true freedom. 

* * * * *

If the card isn’t inherently evil, then why is it feared? In a word, temptation. For every notion of metaphysical purity and altruism, there is also an opposing metaphysical force, one that we understand leads us into temptation or into joyous, self-destructive power.

But is it the temptation that we fear? Or the power of free will? In tarot, the Devil asks us to look critically at our life and question whether the choices we’re making are conducive to longevity or based merely on short-term triumphs. This act of self-reflection holds its own special sort of terror; the terror of responsibility and accountability, of free will and self-determination.

When we look critically at the devil card, beyond the act of divination, we find ourselves in the nucleus of consciousness and how we interact with the world. Our lives change daily, as do our desires and dreams, and the Devil represents that deep and resident truth that we can always divorce ourselves from the forces holding us down or keeping us from permanently destroying what we have built.

Tarot, in its many decks, ultimately acts as a guide to help us critically think about our lives and allows us to articulate our thoughts and feelings to create changes for ourselves. The devil is one of the most important cards for this act, and in reality, is nothing to be afraid of. It’s a tough love act, representing the harsh realities that we are avoiding or are about to enter. 

Human nature is to suffer and struggle, but we don’t have to continue those cycles in our lives—therefore the devil does not represent evil in the traditional ecclesiastic sense, but rather the evil of remaining stagnant.