Major arcana

The Devil

Trump XV of the twenty-two. Drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the deck first published in London in December 1909.

Waite on its symbolism

The design is an accommodation, mean or harmony, between several motives mentioned in the first part. The Horned Goat of Mendes, with wings like those of a bat, is standing on an altar. At the pit of the stomach there is the sign of Mercury. The right hand is upraised and extended, being the reverse of that benediction which is given by the Hierophant in the fifth card. In the left hand there is a great flaming torch, inverted towards the earth. A reversed pentagram is on the forehead. There is a ring in front of the altar, from which two chains are carried to the necks of two figures, male and female. These are analogous with those of the fifth card, as if Adam and Eve after the Fall. Hereof is the chain and fatality of the material life.
The figures are tailed, to signify the animal nature, but there is human intelligence in the faces, and he who is exalted above them is not to be their master for ever. Even now, he is also a bondsman, sustained by the evil that is in him and blind to the liberty of service. With more than his usual derision for the arts which he pretended to respect and interpret as a master therein, Éliphas Lévi affirms that the Baphometic figure is occult science and magic. Another commentator says that in the Divine world it signifies predestination, but there is no correspondence in that world with the things which below are of the brute. What it does signify is the Dweller on the Threshold without the Mystical Garden when those are driven forth therefrom who have eaten the forbidden fruit.

A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911, Part II, § 2: his whole entry for the card, as printed.

Waite says the two chained figures 'are analogous with those of the fifth card, as if Adam and Eve after the Fall'. The man and woman he describes 'as if Adam and Eve' are on the Lovers, the sixth card; the fifth is the Hierophant. The 1911 wording is kept because this is a quotation.

What Waite says it means

These are the divinatory meanings printed in 1911, quoted as he wrote them. They are reported here as what one named book says, not as a claim that a card means anything or predicts anything.

Upright: Ravage, violence, vehemence, extraordinary efforts, force, fatality; that which is predestined but is not for this reason evil.
Reversed: Evil fatality, weakness, pettiness, blindness.

A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, London, 1911, Part III, § 3. Out of copyright.

Where it sits in the trumps

The twenty-two trumps run from The Fool, numbered zero, to The World at twenty-one. Waite moved Strength to eight and Justice to eleven, swapping the order older decks use, so a Marseille deck numbers those two the other way round.

A birth date can be reduced to one of these twenty-two. How the birth card is worked out →