Well, it’s happened. My practice of Tarot reading has converted me into a satanist.
On the one hand Tarot has caused me to recognize that the God I was raised to worship (and to preach as a priest) is more like the devil depicted in Tarot’s 15th Major arcana card.
And on the other hand, the cards have helped me see that the devil represents a suppressed aspect of my dark side that (in the understanding of Carl Jung) contains a kind of gold I’m being called to mine. In some sense, Satan is my friend.
All of this has led me to reject the God of my youth (and to some extent of my priesthood) while embracing as a quasi-friend Satan himself.
Let me explain.
I
The Devil Card
To begin with, here’s the Devil as depicted in the Rider, Waite, Smith (RWS) Tarot Deck.
What do you see here?
Straight away, I notice that its number 15 stands for a trifecta of strife (3 X 5 – with 5 being the Tarot’s number of conflict). The card depicts conflict with (1) the world, (2) the flesh, and (3) the devil himself.
Next, I see that black is the card’s dominant color – representing one’s dark side, death, destruction, and negativity.
The main figure in the card is a satyric monster half man and half beast. His face is fear-inspiring with monstrous horns jutting from his head. His right hand is raised in a mudra which says, “what you see is what you get.”
An inverted pentagram (which in upright form represents virtue and good) forms the monster’s “halo,” but in its inverted form is just the opposite.
In the card’s depiction, the monster reigns over a naked man and an unclothed woman. The heads of both are horned – a clear connection to the horned devil’s mind. The female figure’s tail is tipped with grapes, a vineyard sign of pleasure and intoxication. The tail of her gender opposite is inflamed directly from the torch the devil holds inverted in his left hand. The man’s passions are on fire in the presence of the disrobed woman.
Both the man and the woman are chained by their necks to the pillar from which the monster presides. The chains are loose and could easily be removed. But evidently, the humans either don’t perceive this or don’t want to escape their bondage.
In summary, the card portrays the human body and sexuality as somehow problematic. Both are intimately connected with the Spirit of Evil, with enslavement, and ambiguity about the whole affair.
II
God As Enemy
Personally, the more I contemplate the card, the more I see Christianity’s traditional God rather than the devil. That God was presented as creator, lawgiver, judge, condemner, and punisher.
He was fear-inspiring, wasn’t he? After all, his principal concern was understood as connected with the “sins of the flesh.” And he made us all feel guilty (or at least uncomfortable) with sexual thoughts, words, and deeds.
All of that flew in the face of common-sense recognition of sex and propagation of the species as humanity’s second most powerful drive (after self-preservation).
It was as if devilish priests and theologians had transformed an unparalleled good into an unparalled evil to keep penitents under their control, coming to confession, and paying for the indulgences that Martin Luther and others found so odious.
III
Satan As Friend
Don’t be turned off by the idea of Satan as friend. It’s quite biblical. For instance, in the book of Job, Satan is portrayed as God’s counsellor. He’s a realist who for instance (in the Book of Job) bets the Divine One that if Job comes on extremely hard times, he will abandon his virtue and show his true colors as just another fair-weather saint.
For his part, Carl Jung saw the devil as representing aspects of God. The former as well as the latter is part of the Life Force. As a psychological phenomenon the devil embodies suppressed dark forces that are part of every human personality. In Jung’s sense, he’s the “Left Hand of God.”
Think of what we’ve been taught about the “Seven Deadly Sins.” Tradition has it that they’re pride, greed, envy, anger, lust, sloth, and gluttony. None of us wants to acknowledge that such forces are inevitable parts of our personalities. So, we spend a great deal of time pretending they belong to others but not to us. We spend our life force suppressing their influence on us. Inevitably though they bubble to the surface and express themselves periodically.
Jung calls us not only to face our inner destructive forces, but to embrace them. There’s gold in our dark side, he teaches.
What did he mean by that? Yes, he acknowledges that in the extreme any one of the Seven Deadly Sins can destroy our lives. But under conscious control, they can also enrich us with the gold they contain. For instance, properly acknowledged, accepted, and controlled
- Pride can be a source of self-esteem that preventing one from acquiescing to abuse by the disrespectful.
- Greed under control can cause workers to organize in pursuit of higher wages and safer working conditions.
- A productive amount of Envy can drive us to imitate the Christ, and saintly figures like Gandhi, King, Malcolm, Dorothy Day, Rosa Parks, and Mother Theresa.
- Justified Anger can lead us to demonstrate against the genocide now perpetrated by Zionists and the United States in Palestine.
- Lust can help us appreciate the gift of sex and the pleasure it brings.
- Holy Sloth can keep us from endorsing our culture’s worship of “productivity,” the rat race, and overwork. It can drive workers to organize for more time off, longer vacations, and family leave for new parents.
- Gluttony can help us become slow food cooks and appreciators of wines and spirits. It can turn us against fast food saturated with sugar and salt.
IV
Conclusion
So, the next time the devil card turns up in your Tarot reading, don’t be frightened. It can serve as a reminder that God is not primarily creator, lawgiver, judge, condemner, and punisher. All of that is diabolical. Instead, the Divine One is the total of all the energy in the universe and in the universe of universes. That includes the energy of consciousness even to the extent that She is aware of each one of us and can be addressed as Thou. She wants only the fullness of life for each of us.
On the other hand (God’s Left Hand?) Satan is in some sense our brother and friend. True, he is never satisfied with temperance, harmony, and balance (Tarot’s 14th major arcana card). However, there is gold in his Seven Deadly Sins. With controlled expression, they can drive us towards healthy self-esteem, just recompense for our work, the idealism of imitating the Christ, unwillingness to endorse genocide, an appreciation of sexual pleasure, the joy of doing nothing, and appreciation of the gifts of food and drink.
About Things That Matter 