22/8 The Devil #13

TEMPLE artefact #005

The Devil #13 final version

#13 THE DEVIL

KEY WORDS – MATERIALISM. BONDAGE.  

The Devil is Trump 13 of the Major Arcana.

Our Devil attempts to reconcile two approaches to this card – combining the Devil of Rebellion and sexuality with the Devil of Materiality and Carnal Slavery.

In traditional versions of the card, we see a Devil figure towering over two humans – usually a man and a woman – whom he holds in chains.

At its most basic level of interpretation, this image demonstrates the control that the temptations of the material world have over us.

The man and woman are enthralled and separated by their passion for material pleasure and physical gratification – money, sex, intoxication, power. The card is symbolic of bondage to the material, a state as far from the spiritual as can be imagined.

The genderless spirit is split in two – male and female, like the two points of the pentagram or the goat’s horns, the Devil’s two-fingered gesture. Diablo, Dual, Double, Devil…   divided consciousness. In this sense, it is a card of Restriction unable to release into the Absolute.

Crowley, on the other hand, identifies the Devil with Freedom. For him, the card depicts Baphomet, the Goat of Mendes, Pan Pangenitor, the thrusting priapic life force. In the Thoth Tarot, the Devil is personification of the generative creative impulse, unfettered like a goat leaping across the mountaintops of desire!

We will do our best to honour and preserve both seemingly contradictory takes.

The composition is based on a pentagram with two points upraised in the Satanic manner.

Our Devil has the sinister, knowing face and the hooves of the Panic Goat but he dresses in top hat, tails waistcoat and striped trousers, like the cartoon stereotype of a fat cat capitalist. His legs are arranged so they roughly align with the lower point of the pentagram.

His arms are arranged in the classic posture of Baphomet. Right arm upraised, Left pointing down. Our version has him holding a CONTRACT in his upraised right hand. He’s making the Heavy Metal sign of the horns, so that his two middle fingers cover the ‘TR’ in ‘CONTRACT’ so we read ‘CON’, ‘ACT’.

In his right hand he holds a chain leash, loosely, not really taking it too seriously – there is a sense, in this card, that the whole thing is a bit of a performance for everyone involved.

He sits on a three-legged stool on top of a CUBE representing the material world with its colors red black blue and yellow.

The Devil has a GREEN left eye and RED MONOCLE on the right – green for female red for male.

The man and woman sit, as if ashamed, covering their eyes with their hands with knees up to their chests, inside what looks like Joe 90’s BIG RAT brain reprogramming SPINNING CAGE. They are chained but they’re bored passivity suggests they have CHOSEN to be and don’t seem to mind.

The man and woman are versions of the golden man and silver woman from the Sun card, here in jaded bondage to materiality, before their liberation into utopia.

They have the impression of prisoners in cages but also represent the potential of sperm coiled in the testicles. Repeating lives on the spinning wheel of rebirth or the possibility of transcendent forms of materiality.

BEHIND the Devil there is a tall blue candle which dominates the background – inside its yellow flame is a dancing sexless figure of pure unfettered desire. Wax spills down suggestively.

The arrangement of the CANDLE and the two spheres make a cock and balls reminiscent of the Crowley Thoth card.

The Devil’s upraised wings suggest the shape of a vagina, helped along by the burning red curtains either side – the creative generative energy – the rosy cross, the sacred heart, the bargain - sex is death – materiality is mortality - but for the fire we’ll pay any price and lose ourselves in the flickering flame -

Colours are the elemental primaries of EARTH – BLACK. WATER – BLUE. AIR – YELLOW. FIRE – RED.

At the top where the flame rises, we see the lower two thirds of the planet SATURN with its rings. The tops of the Devil’s wings go between rings and globe. Saturn is the signature planet of this card.