The Devil

The image

Smith's Devil squats on a black, half-cube pedestal against a black background. He has the horns and head of a goat, the wings of a bat and the legs and clawed feet of a bird of prey. An inverted pentagram is set between his horns. His right hand is raised with the palm open, and his left holds a lit torch pointed downward. Chained by the neck to a ring on the pedestal stand a naked man and woman, each with small horns; the woman's tail ends in a bunch of grapes, the man's in a flame. Their chains hang loosely.

History

No Devil card survives among the Visconti-Sforza decks, though it was surely part of the early sequence. The Tarot de Marseille's Le Diable shows a winged, horned figure with breasts and a face on its belly, standing on a pedestal to which two small horned imps are tied by cords. French occult writers expanded the figure, and Éliphas Lévi drew his famous goat-headed Baphomet, with a pentagram on the brow and arms raised and lowered, as an image of the astral light and the balance of opposites rather than of Satan.

Smith's Devil is clearly modelled on Lévi's Baphomet. The Golden Dawn attributed the card to Capricorn and the letter Ayin, and Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) calls the figure the Dweller on the Threshold, standing outside the mystical garden from which the first couple were driven. Smith's two figures echo the man and woman of the Lovers, now fallen into bondage. For the wider religious history see the history of Satan and the Devil.

Symbolism

The inverted pentagram is read, in the nineteenth-century occult scheme, as matter dominating spirit. The torch pointed downward suggests fire directed toward the lower nature, and the half-cube is an incomplete foundation. The grapes and flame on the human tails show the desires that bind them. The open hand has been compared to a parody of blessing, mirroring the Hierophant.

Capricorn, the goat, is ruled by Saturn, planet of limits, time and material form. Ayin means "eye", which readers connect with appearances and with seeing through them. On the Tree of Life the Golden Dawn placed the card between Tiphareth and Hod. Fifteen reduces to six, the number of the Lovers, underlining the link between the two cards.

In a reading

The Devil prompts questions about what the querent feels unable to leave. With the Eight of Swords it emphasises a sense of being trapped; with the Tower that follows it, the sudden breaking of false structures; with Strength, the power to master compulsion gently. Readers present it as a challenge to awareness, not a verdict.