For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The Devil ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of the Devil portrays a Satyr, a creature which is half man and half goat dancing to the music of the pipes which he holds in his left hand. In his right, he grasps two lengths of chain, each attached to a collar around the neck of a naked human figure The figures - a man and a woman - wear tiny horns like those of the Satyr. Although their hands and feet are free to dance, they are held by their chains of fear and fascination for the music. Around them loom the dark walls of a cave.

The goat in myth was associated with lechery and dirtiness, and was considered an unclean and lustful animal. But the goat also symbolizes the scapegoat, the person or thing upon whom people project the inferior side of themselves in order to feel cleaner and more righteous. Thus Pan, the Devil, is the scapegoat within which we blame for our troubles in life.

The dark and doorless cave implies that Pan dwells in the most inaccessible realm of the unconscioous. Only crisis can break through the wall into his secret chamber. The dancing figures are free, if they so wish, to remove their chains, for their hands are not bound. Bondage to the Devil is ultimately a voluntary matter which consciousness can release.

Major Arcana ~ The Devil

Here we meet the great god Pan, whom the Greeks worshipped as the Great All. In myth, Hermes fathered Pan on the nymph Dryope. The child was so ugly at birth - with horns, beard, tail and goat-legs - that his mother ran away from him in fright, and Hermes carried him up to Olympus for the gods’ amusement. Pan haunted the woods and pastures of Arcadia, and personified the fertile, phallic spirit of wild, untamed nature. But he could also occasionally be friendly to men, guarding flocks, herds, and beehives.

He took part in the revels of the mountain-nymphs and helped hunters to find their quarry. On one occasion he pursued the chaste nymph Syrinx to the River Ladon, where she transformed herself into a water-reed to escape his unwelcome hairy embraces. There, since he could not distinguish her from all the rest, he cut several reeds at random, and made them into a syrinx or Pan-pipe From Pan's name we derive the word panic, because he amused himself by giving the lonely traveller sudden frights He was despised by the other gods but they exploited his powers. Apollo the sun-god wheedled the art of prophecy from him, and Hermes copied a pipe which he had let fall, claimed it as his own invention, and sold it to Apollo. Thus the brilliant sun-god received both his music and his prophecy illicitly from the goatish, ugly and untamed god of nature.

On an inner level, Pan, the Devil, is an image of bondage to the crudest, most instinctual aspect of human nature. Because the god was worshipped in caves and grottoes, attended by fear, his image within us suggests something that we both fear and are fascinated by - the raw, goatish, uncivilized sexual impulses which we experience as evil because of their compulsive nature. Since the dawn of the Christian era, the god Pan has been appropriated into the figure of the Devil, complete with goat-homs and leering grin, and he is despised by ‘spiritual’ folk as Apollo once despised him in Greek myth. Plutarch recounts how, during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, a mariner sailing near the Echinades Islands heard a mysterious voice call out to him three times, saying: ‘When you reach Palodes, proclaim that the great god Pan is dead.’ This was at the same moment that Christianity was bom in Judaea. But the presence of this card among the Major Arcana of the Tarot suggests that Pan did not die. Rather, he has been relegated to the nethermost recesses of the unconscious, representing that which we fear, loathe and despise in ourselves, yet which holds us in bondage through our very fear and disgust.

The problem of shame about the body and the sexual impulses, particularly those impulses which psychoanalysis has done so much to bring into the light in this century - incest fantasies, fascination with bodily functions and excretions, the feeling of being dirty and wicked, goatish and hairy, ugly and inferior - is the problem which Pan, the Devil, personifies. Even the most sexually ‘liberated’ man or woman can experience this secret shame about the body. We may find something noble and romantic about the raging lion in the card of Strength, or the wilful horses of the Chariot. But it is more difficult to perceive nobility in Pan. Yet in myth he was not evil, merely untamed, amoral and natural.

It is the paralysis of the humans who are held enthralled in terror and fascination which creates the problem. The card of the Devil implies blocks and inhibitions, usually sexual, which arise from our lack of understanding of Pan. Although he is ugly, he is the Great All - the raw life of the body itself, amoral and crude, but nonetheless a god. The energy which is expended in keeping the Devil in his cave, shameful and hidden, is energy which is lost to the personality, but which can be released with immensely powerful effect if one is willing to look Pan in the face. Thus the Fool must leam to confront with humility the basest and most shameful aspects of himself, or he will remain forever in bondage to his own fear. Then, in order to hide this shameful secret, he must pretend that he is superior and projects his own bestiality on others, leading to prejudice, bigotry and even persecution of individuals and races who seem to him ‘evil’.

On a divinatory level, the card of Pan, the Devil, implies the necessity of a confrontation with all that is shadowy, shameful and base in the oersonality. The Fool must free himself by gaining knowledge and lonest, humble acceptance of Pan, for then he can release the creative oower which is held in chains by his own panic and self-disgust. Thus le comes to the heart of the labyrinth and faces his own darkness in the essential darkness of his body, in order to become what he always was - merely natural.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]