There it is—the Devil card—in every Tarot deck. The goat-man on his pedestal is traditionally an ugly monster leering without your best interests at heart. He holds loosely draped chains around two naked humans, man and woman. They can easily throw off the chains, but they don’t want to . . . but they might want to rethink that. The Devil card stands for the epitome of materialism, addiction, and instant gratification. Shallow, me-first, greed. He has a few of us under his spell, willingly, hasn’t he?
The explosion of art and revised imagery in Tarot decks burgeoned in the Seventies. One bold re-do of the Devil shows an earth-loving, sensitive figure: Pan, the Greco-Roman shepherd-god of nature—but here he is no goat. Instead, a dancing, smiling man with dreadlocks, playing a flute. He’s the feminist friend, the equal who understands women, the artist who makes them swoon with his pipes, the utterly sensuous, slow hand.
Was the menacing Devil a construct built to replace the Wild Masculine? To make you loathe the body because its urges might land you among pitchforks and flames? Pan—meaning All– was all Earth, until demoted to the essence of panic. This implies the goaty guy thrived on getting people in a dither. But what if he was just being himself, until the new folks took over? Another deck with beautiful photomontages offers the Devil as a need to cut loose, lighten up, and always keep a sense of humor. This wink-wink version of the Devil aligns with the poet William Blake’s adage that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”
The Devil as archetype can be a shadow figure, a hungry exuberance that is unwelcome in civilized society. Carl Jung defined the Shadow aspect of personality as those socially unacceptable traits we disown and push into the unconscious, where they fester. Our Shadow selves are not necessarily immoral, but we hide them out of shame because as children we learned they were unacceptable.
Have you ever been around a horny male goat? He wants what he wants, flirting with the female of any species, an insistent force (and he smells. Badly). Best keep him penned up, or there will be panic. And you: keep those chains on. The ones that post-modern Devils control with more subtle chaos: ads that trigger your itch for this, that, and another. Social-media insinuations about how you’re never good enough, so buy the next thing and you might be. If the devil made you do it, simply ascertain your stuff-of-the-moment is affordable yet not too cheap, but above all, keep cash-—its acquisition and its hoarding—incessantly on the brain, and worship the goats who made it to the top of the hill where it appears they never want for a thing.
INSTANT NOODLES 