Upright
Spirals, temptation, bondage.
15. The Devil
Downward spiral?
Reversed
The ability to break the cycle or throw off your chains.
Element: Earth
The Devil does not, unfortunately, mean being counterculture and rad. (That’s more like The Hermit.) This Devil is a different kind of rad, asking us to look at what has us trapped in negative spirals and see if we can get out of it.
Because much of the Tarot contains classical Christian imagery, we’re looking at The Devil signifying temptation and bondage. You can tell from the card; The Lovers have been turned into demons and are chained to the devil’s throne. However, their chains are pretty loose. It seems like they could get out of this pretty easily if they wanted to, and escape back to their garden with a bonus tail in tow.
The Devil speaks to spirals: the circular, dizzying pattern of behavior that is associated with addiction, depression/anxiety, obsession, and toxic environments. Sometimes we fall into a spiral because it’s a habit, a fall-back, a tendency we have, or even a temptation. Things can look really alluring at first that turn out to be bad for us in retrospect. The Devil encourages us to look back and ask what is chaining us, and if it’s possible to get out of it.
When reversed, The Devil indicates that we have the power to break the spiral or throw off our chains. If we turn the figures on the card upside-down, the lovers dominate the frame and gravity pulls their chains off. This is the end of a difficult cycle, the exit to a spiral. Take it.