The Devil
Symbolism of the Dark One
Compared with the Smith-Waite-Rider Deck, I’ve followed tradition fairly closely.
Unity of Opposites
I had to start with a scary one. The Devil, Major Arcanum XV, is a polarizing figure to say the least. In different contexts of tarot reading, this card can be interpreted as self-empowerment or oppression, deviance or liberation, enlightenment or addiction. In fact, all of those opposing ideas about the Devil fit neatly into the figure of Baphomet, the visual template for this card.
For me, these oppositions resolve into another meaning for the card: confusion, chaos, and entropy. The Devil is very post-modern, baby, and he's also very into what Alexai Yurchak and Adam Curtis call hyper-normalisation. Paraphrasing here: the powerful cheat the people, the people know they're being cheated, and the powerful know we know, but we're all too overwhelmed to make much fuss about it. In the spiritual torpor, the Devil reigns.
Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?
Thus I arrive at entropy, the measure of disorder in a system, and the force that's driving us all to the heat-death of the universe. In his chest, the Devil as I drew him has a little dissolving red-orb ember-star and chaos swirls, unmade, in the background. I don't know about you, but for me universal dissipation is a pretty existentially terrifying idea, so I had to put it in. And yet, without entropy, there would be no stars, planets, oceans, whales, newts, wallabies, or my aunt Beverly. It is the great atomic burning of the sun that lights all our days.
If you're a psychoanalytic type you could say the Devil is the Shadow Self. He is violence, betrayal, lust, jaywalking, and every other damn mischief that we forbid ourselves. The problem with these urges: they erupt all the more catastrophically the deeper we try to bury them. We may protest our shadow and say, "Not today, Satan!" But there is no dispensing with the Devil.