Sallie Nichols: The Devil in the Tarot
The time has come to face the Devil. As a major archetypal figure he properly belongs in heaven, the top row of our Tarot chart. But he fell … remember?
To hear him tell it, he quit his job and resigned from heaven.
He said: I deserved a better break; he felt he should have been given a raise and more authority.But that isn’t the way others report the story. According to most accounts, Satan was fired.
His sin, they say, was arrogance and pride.
He had an overbearing nature, too much ambition, and an inflated sense of his own worth.
Nevertheless, he had lots of charm and considerable influence.
His ways were subtle: he organized the angels to rebellion behind the Boss’s back, at the same time currying the Master’s favor.
He was jealous of everyone-especially mankind.
He likes to think of himself as the favored son. He hated Adam and resented his rulership of that tidy Garden of Eden.
Complacent security was (and still is) anathema to him.
Perfection made him reach for his firebrand. Innocence made him squirm.
How he did enjoy tempting Eve and busting up Paradise! Temptation was and continues to be-his specialty.
Some even say it was he who tempted the Lord to harassJob.
Since God is good, they tell us, He could never have played such devilish tricks had He not been conned into it by Satan.
Others argue that, since the Lord is omniscient and all-powerful, He must bear the sole responsibility for puttingJob through the third degree.
The argument as to who was responsible for Job’s suffering has been going on for centuries.
It hasn’t been settled yet and it may never be.
The reason is plain: the Devil is confusing because he himself is confused.
If you look at his Tarot portrait, you will see why.
He presents himself as an absurd conglomeration of parts. He wears the antlers of a stag, yet he has the talons of a predatory bird and the wings of a bat.
He refers to himself as a man, but he possesses the breasts of a woman-or perhaps more accurately, wears them, for they have the appearance of something stuck or painted on him.
This odd breastplate can be little protection.
It is perhaps worn as an insignia intended to camouflage the wearer’s cruelty; but symbolically it might indicate that Satan uses feminine naivete and innocence as a front in order to charm his way into our garden.
And, as the Eden story makes clear, it is through this same innocent naivete in us (as personified by Eve) that he operates.
That his breastplate is rigid and superimposed might also indicate that the Devil’s feminine side is mechanical and uncoordinated, so that it is not
always under his control.
Significantly, his golden helmet belongs to Wotan, a god who also was subject to womanish temper tantrums and sought vengeance whenever his authority was threatened.
The Devil carries a sword, but he holds his weapon carelessly by the
blade, and in his left hand.
It is obvious that his relationship to his weapon is so unconscious that he would be unable to use it in a purposeful manner, meaning symbolically that his relationship to the masculine Logos is similarly ineffectual.
In this version of the Tarot, Satan’s sword seems only to wound himsel£
But its blade is all the more dangerous because it is not under his control. Organized crime operates by logic.
It can be ferreted out and dealt with in a systematic way.
Even crimes of passion have a certain emotional logic that makes them humanly understandable and sometimes even prevent able.
But indiscriminate destruction, wanton murder in the streets, the berserker
who takes random potshots on the freeways-against these we have no defense.
Such forces, we feel, operate in a darkness beyond human comprehension.
The Devil is an archetypal figure whose lineage, direct and indirect,
reaches back into antiquity.
There he usually appeared as a beastly demon more powerful and less human than the figure pictured in the Tarot.
As Set, Egyptian god of evil, he often took the form of a snake or crocodile.
In ancient Mesopotamia, Pazazu (a malaria-bearing demon of the southwest wind, king of the evil spirits of the air) embodied some of the qualities now attributed to Satan.
Our Devil may also have inherited certain attributes from Tiamat, Babylonian goddess of chaos, who took the form of a horned and
clawed fowl.
It was not until Satan appeared in our Judeo-Christian culture
that he began to assume more human characteristics and conduct his nefarious activities in ways we humans could more readily understand.
That the Devil’s image has become more humanized in the course of
centuries means, symbolically, that we are more ready now to view him as a
shadow aspect of ourselves rather than as a supernatural god or an infernal
demon.
Perhaps it may mean that we are ready at last to wrestle with our own
satanic underside.
But human-and even handsome-he has not shed his enormous bat wings.
If anything, they have grown darker and larger than those worn by the Marseilles Devil.
This indicates that Satan’s relationship to
the bat is particularly important and requires our special attention.
The bat is a night flyer. Avoiding daylight, he retreats each morning to a
dark cave where he hangs upside down, gathering energy for his nighttime
escapades.
He is a blood sucker whose bite spreads pestilence and whose droppings defile the environment.
He swoops around in the dark and according to folk belief, has a penchant for entangling himself in one’s hair, causing hysteric confusion.
The Devil, too, flies at night-a time when the lights of civilization are
extinguished and the rational mind is asleep.
It is at this time that human beings lie unconscious, unprotected, and open to suggestion.
In the daylight hours, when human consciousness is awake and man’s ability to differentiate is keen, the Devil retreats to the dark recesses of the psyche where he too hangs upside down, hiding his contrariness, recharging his energies, and biding his time.
The Devil metaphorically sucks our blood, sapping our substance.
The effects of his bite are contagious, infecting whole communities or
even states. Just as a bat could cause unreasoned panic in a crowded auditorium were he to swoop down among the spectators, so the Devil can fly blind into a crowd, literally threatening to entangle himself in everyone’s hair, messing up logical thought and producing mass hysteria.
Our loathing of the bat goes beyond all logic. So, too, our fear of the Devil-and for similar reasons.
The bat seems to us a monstrous aberration of nature-a squeaking mouse with wings.
As with the Devil, his disparate parts defy natural laws.
We tend to view all such malformations-the dwarf, the hunchback, the calf with two heads-as the work of some sinister, irrational power. and the creature itself as an instrument of this power.
One uncanny talent shared by bat arid Devil is the ability to navigate blind in the dark. We intuitively fear such black magic.
Scientists have found ways to protect themselves against the bat’s dangerous, filthy habits so that they can re-enter the beasts’ cave and examine the inhabitant in a more rational way.
As a result, the bat’s peculiar form and repulsive
behaviour seem less frightening than formerly.
Even his mysterious
radar system is now discovered to operate according to understandable laws.
Modern technology has decoded its black magic to create a similar device
whereby man, too, can fly blind.
Perhaps, by a similar kind of objective examination of the Devil, we can
learn to protect ourselves against him; and, by discovering within ourselves a
proclivity toward satanic black magic, we may learn to conquer those irrational
fears that paralyze the will and make it impossible to face and deal with
the Devil.
Perhaps in the ghastly illumination of Hiroshima, with its aftermath
of twisted and warped humanity, we can at long last see the monstrous
shape of our own devilish shadow.
With each succeeding war, it becomes increasingly apparent that we and
the Devil share many characteristics in common.
Some say that it is precisely the function of war to reveal to mankind his enormous capacity for evil in such an unforgettable way that each of us will ultimately acknowledge his own dark shadow and come to grips with the unconscious forces of his inner nature.
Alan McGlashan views war specifically as “the punishment of man’s
disbelief in those forces within himself”l
Paradoxically, as man’s conscious life becomes more “civilized” his
pagan, animal nature, as revealed in war, becomes increasingly ruthless.
Commenting on this,jung says:
The dammed-up instinct-forces in civilized man are immensely more destructive, and hence more dangerous, than the instincts of the primitive, who in a modest degree is constantly living negative instincts.
Consequently no war of the historical past can rival a war between civilized nations in its colossal scale of horror. 2
jung goes on to say that the classic picture of the Devil as half man, half
beast “exactly describes ~he grotesque and sinister side of the unconscious,
for we have never really come to grips with it and consequently it has remained in its original savage state.”3
If we examine this “beastly man” as he appears in the Tarot, we can see that no one individual component in itself is overpowering.
What makes this figure so obnoxious is the senseless conglomeration of its various parts.
Such an irrational assemblage threatens the very order of things, undermining the cosmic scheme upon which all life rests.
To face such a shadow would mean facing the fear that not only we humans but Nature herself may have gone berserk.
But this strange beast within, which we project onto the Devil is, after
all, Lucifer the Light Bringer.
He is an angel-albeit a fallen one-and as such he is a messenger of God. It behooves us to get acquainted with him. ~Sallie Nichols, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, The Devil in the Tarot, Page 156-159
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