The Devil

The Devil is missing. Neither a Devil nor a Tower survives in the Visconti-Sforza decks, the oldest substantially complete tarots we have, and there is no way to establish whether they were painted and lost or never painted at all. Given how many other cards from those decks do survive, the absence of exactly these two is at least suggestive, and it is regularly cited in arguments about how the trump sequence was assembled. It settles nothing, and anyone stating confidently that the early tarot had no Devil is going beyond the evidence.

What is certain is that the card's modern appearance is Victorian. The horned, winged, goat-headed figure with a torch, a reversed pentagram on the brow and a pair of small chained figures below descends from a drawing Eliphas Levi published in the 1850s, his Baphomet, which he composed from several sources including the accusations made against the Knights Templar. That figure was then absorbed into occult tarot and became the standard Devil. The earlier French card shows a horned figure on a pedestal with two smaller figures bound to it, which is the same structure but not the same creature.

The Golden Dawn assigned the card the letter Ayin, the sign Capricorn, and the twenty-sixth path from Tiphareth to Hod. Ayin means an eye, and the connection usually drawn is to appearances and to seeing wrongly, which suits the card better than horns do.

So a modern Devil card is a fifteenth-century composition wearing a nineteenth-century face, and the face is the part everybody recognises.

The most useful observation about this card in practice is a detail of the picture, and it survives in both the older and the newer versions: the chains on the two small figures are loose. They could be lifted off. Whether or not any card-maker intended that, it is what generations of readers have made the card mean.

The dominant reading is bondage the querent is participating in: a habit, an appetite, a relationship, a job or a story about themselves that constrains them and that they are, at some level, choosing. The card is not usually read as external oppression. That is what other cards are for. What distinguishes this one is complicity.

A second reading, more common in contemporary practice than in older books, resists the moralising entirely and takes the card as embodiment, appetite and the physical world, desire treated as information rather than as a fault. Crowley's version pushes hardest in this direction. This reading is a genuine minority position and it is worth knowing it exists, because a reader who only has the condemnatory version will hand out unnecessary shame.

A third reading is material: money, contracts, and things that bind because they were signed.

Waite's reversed meanings run to the beginning of a release, the loosening of the chain and the recovery of will, which is the one place where the reversal convention gives a genuinely different and useful card. Readers who do not turn cards mark the same shift by what follows the Devil in the spread.