Satan. Lucifer. Beelzebub. Mephistopheles. He has many names but most of us just call him the Devil.

“A devil is the personification of evil as it is conceived in various cultures and religious traditions. It is seen as the objectification of a hostile and destructive force.”

— Wikipedia

The Devil, along with Death, the Tower, and the 10 of Swords, is probably one of the cards that a querent will not be happy to see in a reading. It is one of the cards used for a certain effect in Hollywood depictions of fortune telling. But the Devil card doesn't always mean that a goat-legged creature has come to chain you up.

The Devil card from the Smith-Waite tarot deck

The Devil card corresponds to the zodiacal sign of Capricorn, the goat-fish, and like the half-goat chimera of the Zodiac, the goat-legged Devil is ruled by old man Saturn. In fact, on the Devil card from the Smith-Waite deck, you can see the glyph of Saturn on the upraised hand of the beast. Saturn constrains, and the couple on the same card are not free to move. They are chained to the Devil’s plinth.

The Devil is subtle. It invokes fear for the same reason that the biblical Devil does. He knows what we really want and what we would really do if we weren't constrained by the necessity of good behaviour in polite society. For this reason, the Devil can often have to do with taboos, shame, and our personal closets of skeletons.

The Devil card from the Morgan-Greer tarot deck

Two themes that often come up in modern interpretations of the Devil card are materialism and addiction. These themes can link back to the earthy, physical nature of the sign of Capricorn, which for better or worse is known as a fiscally driven sign with sensual proclivities. There is nothing wrong with that and I would also say, there is nothing wrong with the Devil. The Devil simply reflects aspects of our human nature that we would rather shelve away.

“Our shadow is only that part of ourselves that we have not integrated. It is only evil when it remains unconscious. When we are unaware of this part of ourselves we can project these negative traits on others, then, thinking that we are good and the others are evil, we can do our worst. The Devil, therefore, can enlighten us by illuminating our flaws.”

— Robert M. Place

In our capitalist world, we are often forced to meet our needs in whatever ways we can. The Devil card can be a helper in readings and can lead us to the places that our needs come from. If we are hurt from experiences of lack or abuse, we may seek to meet those needs with material things or to assuage the emotional pain with substances or harmful activities that provide a fleeting sense of well-being. Far from being a moral failing, these are actions that come from our basest needs that haven’t been met in formative times of our lives.

The Devil pendant alongside some campy devil images from the book “The Devil’s Mischief”

The Devil may look scary in the same way that movie monsters are scary - they are of our own creation and that is what gives them the power of fear. If we can face the Devil in the light of day, we will often see a smaller and significantly less intimidating version of the same beast that casts a huge shadow. The real power in the Devil card is the chance to see ourselves not as the beast himself nor the people chained to his pedestal but as the light in the dark.

In the design for the pendant I drew on the classic Baphomet imagery from the Smith-Waite tarot. The bat-winged head of the goat is crowned with an inverted pentagram or five-pointed star to signify the perversion of man’s “natural” state. Below, the chains refer to the two figures whom the Devil has under his spell. On the reverse, again the inverted pentagram with the alchemical symbol for earth incorporated and above, the zodiacal glyph of Capricorn. (This glyph seems to have a few variations and I’m working on my own interpretation.)