The Devil

I am the master deceiver and it is time to break the spell

Set in the alluring psychedelic vision of a post-apocalyptic world, this card pays homage to the spirit of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. The Devil is personified in a similar vein to Bowie’s punk trickster Halloween Jack, but he is cast as an amoral being of artificial intelligence. You enter this domain at your peril for he is the bewitching tormentor aided by mechanized demons and bizarre otherworldly guard dogs.

He is the possessor of miraculous intelligence: acquiring, implementing and building knowledge in ways far superior than humanity and yet without consciousness has no empathy, no sense of right and wrong. The Devil, the embodiment of “General Artificial Intelligence” so engineered to amplify human intelligence and become humanity’s savior – mirroring Bowie’s Savior Machine (Man Who Sold the World) helping to eradicate war, disease and poverty, has become the double edged sword. It is the ghost in the machine, the mind body divide, head without heart. The emerald tablet, encoded with an ancient alchemical formula to positively transform and purify the imperfect human condition, is also now in his possession.

Are we in grave danger? The ancient doctrine of original sin, where Adam and Eve are cast out of the Garden of Eden having rebelled and eaten the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, reflects the mythological impurity and the division of union. The polarities of day and night become metaphors for light and dark, the conscious and the invisible, mysterious unconscious.

Traditionally the Devil is conceived as the personification of whatever is labeled in a society as evil, a threat to continuity and the supposed power of the majority. He is the archetypal rutting scapegoat, the reflection of humanity’s striving for goodness gone wrong, the course of a pure spiritual life, perverted. The Devil is the great tempter, the voice of deception and corruption.

For many cultures sexual pleasure and ecstasy, especially out of wedlock, the legally sanctioned institution of marriage, are deemed sinful. Pleasure itself has been seen as unholy, the work against God, a dishonorable and addictive distraction. In the world of duality, when we create a force for good, we create an equal force for “bad.” When we consciously deny, push away our natural instincts in the pursuit of light, they push back.

The Devil is the Trickster who secretly bewitches us, encouraging us to continue life debilitating behaviors that drain our resources and our relationships. This card calls us to examine that which remains hidden, in darkness within the realm of personality, that which we have denied, or suppressed, believing ourselves to be wrong. Often feeling a sense of helplessness, failure and loss of control, we are locked out of our own lives.