The Devil
Tarot card meaning, upright and reversed
What it means
Upright
The Devil is read as bondage that is partly chosen: habit, addiction, materialism and the hold of what we want. Waite listed ravage, violence, vehemence and fatality: what is fated, which he added is not evil for that reason.
Reversed
Reversed, it is read as loosening the chains: seeing a pattern and stepping out of it. Waite gave weakness, pettiness and blindness.
In love
Unhealthy attachment, shadow work in relationship, passion.
In work
Workaholism, materialism, trapped in job.
What is drawn on the card
A horned, bat-winged figure sits on a black block, a reversed pentagram on its brow, one hand raised and the other holding a torch pointed down. A naked man and woman stand chained to the block by the neck, but the chains are loose enough to lift off. Waite modeled the figure on Éliphas Lévi’s Baphomet (1856).
As Pamela Colman Smith drew it in 1909. Our paintings follow these scenes.
- Hebrew letter
- Ayin
- Sign
- Capricorn
The letter and sign are 19th-century occult attributions (Golden Dawn), not part of the card’s origin.
Where the card comes from
The Devil is one of the four cards missing from the oldest surviving deck. The Visconti-Sforza cards, painted in Milan around the 1450s and 1460s, survive as 74 cards in New York, Bergamo and a private collection; the Devil, the Tower, the Three of Swords and the Knight of Coins are lost.
- Tarot began as a card game in 15th-century Italy. The earliest record is from Florence in 1440, and the game is still played today in France, Austria and Bologna.
- Reading the cards for fortunes is documented from Bologna around 1750, with ordinary playing decks.
- In 1781 Antoine Court de Gébelin wrote that the cards came from ancient Egypt. There is no evidence for it, and he wrote before anyone could read hieroglyphs (1822).
- The Hebrew letters and astrological signs on each card are 19th-century French and English occult attributions; the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (founded 1888) fixed the set most readers use.
- The scenes follow the 1909 Waite–Smith deck, designed by A. E. Waite and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. The Innerverse cards are our own paintings of those scenes.
Sources: Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (1980); Morgan Library & Museum, Visconti-Sforza tarot, MS M.630; Court de Gébelin, Le Monde primitif, vol. VIII (Paris, 1781); A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911).
Draw your own card
The Devil is one of 78. Draw one card or a three-card spread in the Innerverse, read with the same art and the same sources, free.
Or make it daily: one card each morning, with a private note →Want the whole deck? All 78 cards and the guidebook.
Traditional readings, presented as tarot readers have held them. They are a record of a practice, not a prediction.