The Devil

Quick answer

The core meaning of The Devil is The temptations of the material world. Upright, it usually points to Bondage, materialism, desire, addiction. Symbolizes being controlled by material; reversed, it may suggest Breaking free, awakening, releasing dependency, facing the shadow. May indicate .

Card imagery

A massive devil (Baphomet) squats upon a black cube, an inverted pentagram above his head. Below, a man and a woman are loosely chained (chains they could seemingly slip off themselves), having grown horns and tails.

Upright meaning

Bondage, materialism, desire, addiction. Symbolizes being controlled by material cravings or fear, and realizing that such bondage often stems from one's own attachments.

Reversed meaning

Breaking free, awakening, releasing dependency, facing the shadow. May indicate beginning to see the root of the problem and working to escape an unhealthy relationship or habit.

Love, Career, Money, and Growth

Love

In love, The Devil points to The temptations of the material world. Read it back against how the relationship actually behaves and what you are both choosing.

Career

In career matters, The Devil points to The temptations of the material world. Start by working out which resources you control and what your next move is.

Money

In money matters, The Devil points to The temptations of the material world. Do not treat a symbolic reading as an investment conclusion — go by facts, budget and your own risk tolerance.

Personal growth

For personal growth, The Devil points to The temptations of the material world. Write down the question it raises, then turn that into an action you can actually check.

Yes or No

Upright

No

Reversed

Yes

This is our own quick read, based on which way the card’s meaning leans. Traditions disagree about individual cards, and a “Maybe” needs to be weighed against the position in the spread and your actual situation rather than taken as a one-word answer.

Waite’s Original Text (1911)

Inner Symbolism (original)

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, Eliphas 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.

Original Upright Meaning

Ravage, violence, vehemence, extraordinary efforts, force, fatality; that which is predestined but is not for this reason evil.

Original Reversed Meaning

Evil fatality, weakness, pettiness, blindness.

Quoted from A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911), illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. The text is in the public domain.

Myth and symbol origins

The goat on this card is the Baphomet Lévi drew in 1856. It is not the Greek god Pan.

Esoteric correspondence

A sourced traditional claim, but constructed inside an occult system

The "Goat of Mendes" comes from Lévi

Waite's text says it outright: the Horned Goat of Mendes, bat-winged, standing on an altar. The figure is the Baphomet of Mendes that Eliphas Lévi drew in 1856, fusing the ram-god of the Egyptian city of Mendes described by Herodotus with the Baphomet the Templars were accused of at their trials. The sign of Mercury on the belly, the reversed torch, the inverted pentagram on the forehead — all of them are parts of Lévi's design. Put plainly: the devil on this card is only a little over a hundred years old.

Source Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911, The Devil; the Baphomet plate in Eliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, 1856

The chains are loose, and Waite is the one who says so

The man and woman before the altar are chained to a ring, and Waite says they are "analogous with those of the fifth card, as if Adam and Eve after the Fall." But he goes straight on: their faces show "human intelligence in the faces," the figure enthroned above them "is not to be their master for ever," and "even now, he is also a bondsman." The loose collars, liftable at any moment, come from exactly this passage.

Source Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, 1911, The Devil

Capricorn: the goat's other identity

The Golden Dawn assigns the Devil to Capricorn (Hebrew letter Ayin, literally "eye"). The sign's own glyph is a goat, so the correspondence settles onto the image with no friction at all — but keep the order straight. Lévi drew the goat-headed devil first, and the system attached it to Capricorn afterwards, not the other way round.

Source Golden Dawn Book T zodiacal attributions

Modern reading

Popular only since the twentieth century; unrelated to where the card came from

Pan: the most frequently misidentified figure here

Plenty of material says this card depicts the Greek god Pan, standing for instinct repressed by civilization. Pan does have the legs and horns of a goat, and Christian imagery did borrow him in constructing the look of the devil. But the direct source of the figure on this card is Lévi's Baphomet, with an entire apparatus of nineteenth-century occultism in between. "Repressed instinct" is later still — it comes from the psychologized readings of the twentieth century.

Source Modern popular reading; Pan belongs to Greek myth, a different lineage from Lévi's Baphomet

Written by BESTAROT, not quoted from historical sources. Each claim is tagged by how well it is evidenced; modern interpretive layers are useful for reading, but they are not the card’s historical origin.

Study the theme: Myth and Symbol Origins (Academy chapter 6)