The Devil card is another of those cards that should be addressed right away when you are doing a reading. Even if the person you are reading for knows nothing about the Tarot – or maybe because they know nothing, a lot of assumptions are made when this card falls in front of them. It frightens them immediately. The Rider/Waite/Smith deck shows a rather imposing devil figure with ram’s horns, donkey ears, bat wings and clawed feet. His face is pink and his right arm is raised with the astrological glyph for Saturn in the palm – the planet of limitations. He is perched on a one-dimensional cube. There are two figures before him – a man and a woman – with cloven feet, horns and tails. They are chained loosely to the cube. This card’s symbolism suggests the perverse gratification humanity receives through material attainment rather than spiritual fulfillment. All evil in the world is enacted because somebody wants something someone else has – money, position, relationship, property, land, ideals, ideas, innocence, power. It is fueled by greed, jealously, desire, pleasure, escape, hate, or fear. Human beings are addicted to the material world. It is hard for us to identify with what we cannot experience with our senses – the spiritual. This addiction manifests on many levels but it is all tied to Materialism, Today’s Journey Tarot’s title for this card. Key 15 shows a party where the host is on a sofa preparing drugs for his guests – who are obviously in various stages of inebriation. It expresses the futility of excessive gratification in modern terms that we can all understand at a glance.

Teresa Sue McAdams, co-creator of “Today’s Journey Tarot”, co-author of “Today’s Journey Tarot, A Traveler’s Guide”, co-author of “Tarot Meditations, A Journal for Self Discovery”, and author of “Lessons, The Wisdom Within Each Moment”

www.todaysjourneytarot.com