The Devil

Origin and iconography

The Devil is missing from many surviving Visconti-Sforza Tarocchi sets of c. 1450 and may have been removed by later owners; reconstructions show a horned demonic figure dominating two smaller human figures in chains. The Tarot de Marseille of the 17th century renders him as a bat-winged hermaphroditic devil with antlers, a torch in one hand and a sword or staff in the other, with two smaller demonic figures chained to the pedestal beneath him. The colours are vivid red, black and yellow, and the figure stands rather than sits.

Pamela Colman Smith's 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith Devil is among the most precisely composed in the deck. The horned figure of Baphomet, drawn from Eliphas Levi's 1856 illustration, sits atop a black half-cube. He has bat wings, eagle feet, a goat's head with a reversed pentagram between the horns, and an inverted torch in his left hand. Two naked figures, a man and a woman with small horns and tails, are chained loosely by the neck to the cube. Their chains are visibly slack; they could remove them. The Thoth deck of Crowley and Harris (1938-1943) replaces the demon with a great-horned goat representing creative force.

Upright and reversed meaning

Upright, the Devil signals voluntary bondage. He marks compulsive patterns, addictions, financial entanglements, relationships that the seeker stays in for reasons they no longer endorse, and contracts whose terms have grown more punitive than originally accepted. The card also describes the legitimate force of desire, materiality and embodied pleasure when these have not yet hardened into compulsion. He is not always a moral warning; sometimes he names the appetite that the seeker has been pretending not to have. Honesty about wanting is the first step out.

Reversed, the Devil can describe the loosening of a chain, the moment of recognising the bondage and beginning to remove it. He may show liberation underway: a habit broken, a contract renegotiated, a denial finally named. He can also, in some readings, describe the deeper grip of a pattern that has gone underground rather than left. As a phase, the reversed card invites you to look at what you have been blaming on circumstance and to see where you are still complicit. The chain in the Rider-Waite image is loose, and the trump returns upright as awareness deepens.

In readings

When the Devil appears in your spread, look at where you are bound and consenting to it. In love readings he often marks intense erotic attractions, codependent patterns, jealousy, or relationships that survive on chemistry while ignoring incompatibility. With The Lovers he describes a couple bound by appetite rather than alignment; with The Tower he prepares the explosion that will finally break the chain.

In professional readings the Devil signals contracts that have become traps, financial dependencies, workplaces in which power is misused, and golden handcuffs that hold the seeker through compensation rather than meaning. He often appears around debts, creative blocks rooted in fear, and ambition that has soured into greed. In a Celtic Cross he may occupy positions of immediate obstacle or hidden influence. Spiritually he asks you to face the shadow with curiosity rather than horror. In a Marseille reading his torch held downward is the cipher: the light has been used against itself.

Symbolic depth

In the Golden Dawn system the Devil is assigned to the Hebrew letter Ayin, the eye, and to the path connecting Tiphareth to Hod on the Tree of Life. His astrological attribution is Capricorn, the cardinal earth sign of structure, ambition and worldly mastery, ruled by Saturn. The number 15, by Pythagorean reduction, returns to 6 (1+5), linking the Devil to The Lovers as their shadow image: union turned into bondage when consciousness withdraws.

Mythologically the trump draws on the Greek Pan, the Egyptian Set, the medieval Christian devil, and the Levitical scapegoat. Eliphas Levi's 1856 Baphomet, on which the Rider-Waite image is based, was a deliberate composite of pagan and Hermetic symbols meant to depict matter not as evil but as misunderstood. Carl Jung read this archetype as the Shadow, the disowned material that returns until faced. In Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, the Devil corresponds to the encounter with the Tempter or with the demonic that must be acknowledged before the climactic shock of The Tower.

Also known as

• Le Diable
• Il Diavolo
• Baphomet
• Key XV
• The Adversary