The Devil

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.

Most of what is said about the Devil card today was added after the 15th century. In the late 18th century Court de Gébelin and others claimed that tarot came from ancient Egypt, a claim that Michael Dummett called a very successful propaganda campaign and for which there is no evidence. In the 19th century Éliphas Lévi tied the card to Baphomet, the idol the Knights Templar were accused of worshipping in their 14th-century trials; scholars generally take the name to be an Old French form of “Mahomet”. Lévi linked the card to Mercury and to the Hebrew letter Samekh. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, at the end of that century, changed this to the letter Ayin and the sign Capricorn, the attribution most often repeated now. Waite himself, in his description, rejects Lévi’s reading and calls the figure the “Dweller on the Threshold”. These are the views of later occultists, not of the Italian card makers.