The Devil Tarot Card Meaning

The Devil upright

This card touches first on fear, lies and ignorance, from which come doubt and pessimism. It shows what stops, limits or constricts your creative energy and your actions, and it can point back to guilt from childhood. You may feel stuck or trapped in a situation. Yet the card's bonds are loose and could be taken off: what holds you back comes mostly from the idea that nothing else exists. Over time, you may come to see your painful situation as normal, and even resist change. You may also see the world in a materialistic way: believing there is nothing beyond what can be seen and touched, and pursuing only personal desires for money, sex or power. A part of you may be denied, unacknowledged or hidden: this is what psychology calls the shadow. You may be tempted by desire, greed or pride, or become obsessed with a relationship or a coveted object. You may also become a slave to your desires instead of acting as you judge best. With the Lovers, the card indicates a relationship born of love that has become a trap. You may also feel strongly drawn to people you don't love, followed by a feeling of powerlessness and shame. Behind all this there is often a lack of love and a sense of isolation and separation. The card also speaks of instinct, the lower unconscious and impulsiveness.

They don't rule you forever: you free yourself from them gradually. Still, you have to take into account the animal part of you, which claims its rights, and treat it fairly. This part lets you live materially and equips you for life's needs. It becomes a problem when its impulses lose their balance with one another. The card shows you things as they appear, not as they are. It represents everything that gives you a poor opinion of your own worth. A force that was meant to serve you as a tool can become your mistress: a habit, a belief or a system that you have made absolute ends up capturing you. You may get caught up in fear, the wish to possess or the fascination of power. In practical terms, the card speaks of strength, ardor and extraordinary effort. It evokes a very strong impulse, ambition, temptation, obsession, a secret plan about to be carried out, hard work, stubbornness, rigidity, a painful discontent, and endurance. It is linked to Capricorn and Saturn, which give a sense of self and duration, and represents creative energy in its most material form.

Your strengths

You have ardor. Without it, a person stays cold and powerless over others, and it is what lets you act outside yourself and influence.
You know how to work hard and hold out.
Your pride can become dignity, the pride that refuses all degradation.
Your anger can become courage and energy to act.
You can be provident and thrifty, and honestly love gain, which spurs your work.

What holds you back

You are afraid, you doubt and you expect the worst.
You feel limited in your actions and in your creativity.
You fixate on the material and may break social or sexual taboos.
You are tempted to get around the rules to serve your own interests.
You try to win by imposing excessive power, or you give up your will to others, or you want to dominate them.
You fear that a cruel outside force wants to harm you, and you may look for a culprit among those you judge with prejudice and hatred.
You may act against your own interest and tease or irritate others.
You may give in to addictions or compulsive behavior.
You may act out of jealousy, envy or resentment, and sometimes hurt on purpose.
You avoid everything you judge bad, which limits you too.
You lack humor about yourself, you are dogmatic and you see only the surface of things.
You may succeed by dishonest means, by cunning or fraud.
You claim a superiority you don't have in order to command, and if you think too highly of yourself, you risk being deceived.
You may exert a hidden influence on others, by acting on their unconscious, or stir up their appetites and passions.
You may bind yourself to a trap whose fastenings you no longer see, because you find your situation normal.

What helps

Becoming aware of what holds you back: as long as you don't see it, it commands you, and as soon as you recognize it, liberation becomes possible.
Looking at what you are going through squarely, including the dark forces, instead of ignoring them.
Governing yourself by curbing your lower tendencies, and commanding your own body.
Treating your instincts as an unavoidable partner, fairly, rather than as an enemy.
Practicing moderation in everything: it is only the lack of agreement among your impulses that becomes destructive.
Turning your pride into dignity and your anger into courage.
Giving yourself the rest you need to recover, and even resting in advance before an effort.
Choosing your food and enjoying its taste, without living only to eat.
Being provident and thrifty, without miserliness.
Having a firm, pure, unselfish will, and giving only legitimate orders.
Not trying to command invisible forces for small gains, and being content to govern yourself.
Seeking inner peace before facing the deep forces within you: it is what lets you deal with them safely.
Understanding that the appearances that frighten you or give you a poor image of yourself are not your true nature.

Love

A relationship begun in love can become a trap, and you may be drawn to people you don't love, with shame afterward. You may become obsessed with a relationship, with an attraction that is bigger than you.

The Devil reversed

The upright Devil shows what limits, holds back and locks in your power to act: fear, lies, ignorance, doubt and pessimism. Reversed, it speaks of a movement to break free of that grip. This is the card that goes furthest into extremes: at one end, evil wins out, you are blind to yourself, you give in to temptation and follow all your appetites. At the other end, you turn away from what chains you and set out on a path of spiritual understanding. You can easily swing from one end to the other, as when you go too far in one direction and tip over into the opposite.

In the sense of liberation, you are trying to shake off a misery or a restraint, real or psychological. You no longer accept your situation and you move toward more freedom. On the upright card, the chained figures stay calm, which shows that people accept a bad situation, come to find it normal and can even fight against change. Reversed, the card indicates that you are becoming aware of your chains, because you cannot remove them before you see them. It is at exactly this moment that you feel your unhappiness and the limits of your life most strongly. People going through a liberation, such as leaving their parents' home, going into psychotherapy or living through a difficult divorce, often feel far unhappier than before, when they accepted their situation without seeing it. This period can be decisive for your growth: if you get through it, you come out happier and with a more developed personality. It can also feel unbearable enough that you go back to your chains.

You can say no to temptations, set aside what binds you and leave an unpleasant situation. If you see that your fears are unfounded, you free yourself from unjustified inhibitions and from patterns of manipulation and dependence. More often, you become more aware of your destructive behavior and your abuse of power. You also gain access to a guarded, hidden treasure: your own creativity and spontaneous joy.

The reversed card can also be the opposite. You may feel superior to the weaknesses of others or be excessively upright, moral and virtuous. You may look for excuses rather than see how bad a situation is. If you refuse to see this dark side in yourself, you project it onto others and see them as false leaders, manipulators or troublemakers. The weaknesses and misdeeds of public figures can also disillusion you. Inwardly, this can be lived as nightmares, a fixation on sin or inner panic. This energy can also come out as gaiety and comedy, the kind that deflates evil and exposes false pride and unworthy prejudice.

Placed in the past, the reversed card often means the change has happened but the sadness, anger or low mood remains, sometimes hidden from your awareness, and keeps influencing you. You often have to deal with the demons of the past, even those you got past in practice long ago. Your psyche never lets go of anything and forgets nothing. Placed in "hopes and fears," the reversed card touches on the passage from a closed situation to an open one, and shows that the security of staying shut in sometimes outweighs freedom. You can both want this change and fear it.

For a woman, the reversed card describes the moment when her inner adversary, her dark side, accuses her of being guilty and sets her impossible tasks that awaken all her fear of not measuring up. If she has grown enough, she recognizes in him the guardian of the threshold to her own creative abilities and makes him an ally.

Your strengths

You are able to turn away from what holds you back and to free yourself from what binds you. You can leave a job that wears you down, where you feel owned by the company. You can become aware of your destructive behavior. You can free yourself from false inhibitions and from relationships of manipulation or dependence. You can laugh at what is false and pretentious. You can find your creativity and spontaneous joy again.

What holds you back

You have accepted your situation for so long that you find it normal, and you may resist change.
You feel unhappier at the moment you become aware of your chains, and you may go back to them because the period is too painful.
You keep within you the sadness, anger or low mood of a past ordeal, even when you have settled it in practice.
You look for excuses instead of seeing how bad the situation is.
You feel superior to the weaknesses of others or too upright and virtuous.
You project onto others what you refuse to see in yourself.
You feel inadequate in the face of the tasks your dark side sets you.

What helps

Facing your chains: you can only remove them after you have seen them.
Getting through the difficult period of liberation, which is decisive for your development.
Examining your attitude toward change, because an ambivalence between desire and fear often appears, and recognizing it helps you build what you truly want.
Using and transforming the knowledge and energy tied to each past experience.
Recognizing in your dark side the guardian of your creative abilities and making it an ally.

Work

You can leave a soul-destroying job where you feel owned by the company or tied to it to pay your bills. At work, you can hope for success and fear it at the same time.

Love

In relationships, many people fear the love they seek or half hope to be rejected. A difficult divorce is one of the liberations that first make you unhappier.

What the card shows

What the image shows

The card shows a hybrid creature, mixing human and animal, standing on a pedestal, with two chained figures in front of it. This creature is a goat with bat wings, standing upright on an altar. It represents the Baphomet of the Templars, which comes from the goat of Mendes and the god Pan. It is androgynous: it has a goat's head and legs, a woman's chest and arms. Like the Sphinx, it unites the four elements within itself.

One hand is raised and open, the reverse of the Hierophant's gesture of blessing (card 5). In the other hand, it holds a large torch pointing toward the ground. An inverted pentagram sits on its forehead. The sign of Mercury is marked on its belly. Its pedestal is not a perfect cube like the Emperor's throne: it is flattened.

A ring is fixed in front of the altar, and two chains run from it to the necks of a man and a woman. They recall the two figures on the Hierophant card, like Adam and Eve after the fall. They have a tail, a sign of their animal nature, but their faces remain human. They are tied to a half-cube, which stands for partial knowledge of the material world. Their faces are calm: they accept a bad situation.

What the details mean

The heavy, hairy body evokes earth and matter. The bat wings, wings of the night, stand for the hidden forces that move and transform the forces of the material world and of instinct. The eagle's talons point to Scorpio. The sign of Mercury on the belly shows the control that the conscious mind exerts over this force. The raised hand carries the sign of Saturn. Its gesture says that nothing is hidden and that what you see is all there is: this is the first error, the one from which the others come. This gesture can also be read as a vision that no longer hides anything. The inverted pentagram shows a human being's powers turned upside down, when she misunderstands herself. In the version where it is drawn, the spiral horns stand for the movement of a force that runs through everything.

What the card means

The Devil is the card of appearance: the letter that corresponds to it means the eye and also outward aspect. The card shows things as they seem, not as they are. The word "devil" comes from a Greek word meaning slanderer. The card stands for everything that gives you a poor opinion of your own worth. It shows fear, lies and ignorance, which lead to doubt and pessimism. It shows what stops, limits and constricts your creative strength, and it can point to guilt from childhood.

It also speaks of servitude: the human being becomes a prisoner of her own lower powers and lets them govern her instead of governing them. It points to the fascination, enslavement and inversion that act on consciousness. It shows what captures you: fear, the desire to possess, the fascination of power, the illusions that paralyze your drive. Collective thoughts, nurtured passions, repeated desires and emotionally charged beliefs can become forces that demand to be served. What should have been a means becomes a master. The one who dominates the two figures is not their master forever: he is chained too, held up by the evil he carries within him.

The card speaks of instinct and selfishness. The Devil pushes every being to bring everything back to itself, as if it were the center of everything. The desire to be and the instinct for self-preservation come from him: we owe him our material existence. He possesses us at birth, but this possession is not final, because we are meant to free ourselves little by little from the tyranny of our instincts. His disorders are never final.

Finally, there is no independent principle of evil. The Devil stands for the power of materialization that seems to divide the single life into separate lives, and this same power ends up freeing you once you understand what it is. The will that does evil comes from ignorance.

When the card appears in a spread

It can indicate a narrowly materialistic view, or a misery and depression in which you feel chained, with the illusion that no other way out exists. It speaks of enslavement to your desires, instead of acting as you think would be best. It can point to an obsession that controls you, or a strong attraction to people you do not like, with the helplessness and shame that follow. With the Lovers card, it shows a relationship born of love that has become a trap. In its milder forms, you act "devilishly," you do what harms you, you cross taboos, you fixate on the material or you bend the rules to your advantage. In its harsher forms, you seek gain through excessive power, you give up your will to others or want to dominate them, you fear a cruel force that wishes you harm, and you pick scapegoats. At the root there is a lack of love and a feeling of isolation.

Reversed, the card shows that you are trying to free yourself from a misery or a servitude, real or psychological. You no longer accept your situation and you are moving toward freedom. It is precisely at this moment that you feel your unhappiness most, because you have to become aware of the chains before you can remove them. This period can be decisive: if you get through it, you come out happier and more grounded. Sometimes it becomes too painful and you go back to your chains. In the past position, the reversed card says that the change has happened, but that the sadness, anger or depression remain, sometimes hidden.

Your strengths

You know how to appreciate everything that exists, even the harsh.

What holds you back

You let your desires and fears govern you instead of deciding for yourself.
You believe that what you see is all there is, and that you have no other way out.
You doubt yourself and become pessimistic through fear, error or ignorance.
You carry guilt that dates from childhood.
You accept a bad situation as normal, to the point of resisting change.
You give in to attraction to people you do not like, and afterward you feel shame.
You may give up your will to others or want to dominate them.
You may feel isolated, from a lack of love.

What helps

Recognize your chains: as long as they stay invisible, they rule, and once they are seen, release becomes possible. Treat your instinct fairly, without fighting it as an enemy. Be moderate in everything, and take the rest you need. Act with a pure will, without selfishness, and with legitimate commands. Pay attention, observe, interpret correctly and make good plans. Look first for inner calm before going toward the deep forces. Use and transform the knowledge and strength contained in every experience, including those of the past.