Overview#

The Devil is a trump in tarot, commonly numbered XV and included among the cards known in occult use as the Major Arcana. Its appearance and meaning depend on the deck and the interpreter. Arthur Edward Waite’s account of the Rider–Waite–Smith image and Papus’s earlier occult analysis offer two identifiable readings.[1][2]

The card is a subject of visual and religious symbolism. Its title alone does not establish that a deck’s maker or user venerates Satan. Understanding its role requires attention to the surrounding card tradition and to the explanation supplied by a particular author.[1][2][3]

Playing cards and occult reception#

Tarot’s surviving history includes fifteenth-century Italian playing cards. The Victoria and Albert Museum describes their use in a trick-taking game and places their images within the religious, courtly, and classical culture familiar to players. It suggests that carnival processions may help explain some of the sequence’s imagery, including the Devil; this remains a proposed context.[3]

Later writers developed systems of divination and occult interpretation. The V&A places the growth of tarot fortune-telling in the late eighteenth century and describes its further esoteric development in the nineteenth. These readings form part of the cards’ reception, rather than establishing one original meaning for every historical pack.[3]

The Rider–Waite–Smith image#

Pamela Colman Smith’s artwork and Waite’s instructions produced the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, first published in 1909. Waite describes its horned, bat-winged Devil above a chained male and female pair, with a reversed pentagram on its forehead. The raised hand reverses the Hierophant’s blessing; the other holds a torch directed downward.[3][1]

Waite connects the pair with Adam and Eve after the Fall and interprets their chains through the constraints of material life. Their tails signify animal nature, while their faces retain human intelligence. He also describes the figure above them as itself bound. The arrangement therefore gives captivity a place at more than one level of the image.[1]

Waite also discusses Baphomet when assessing Éliphas Lévi’s interpretation of the figure.[1]

Papus and divinatory meanings#

In The Tarot of the Bohemians, Papus compares the Devil’s gesture with that of the Juggler, or Magician. He reads the inverted relationship as part of a system connecting the cards. The torch becomes a sign of destruction, and the cube placed above a sphere signifies the domination of matter over spirit. His listed meanings include destiny, chance, and fatality.[2]

Waite’s divinatory list includes violence, force, extraordinary effort, and fatality, while qualifying predestination as something that need not itself be evil. His reversed meanings include weakness, pettiness, and blindness. These are the meanings recorded in his manual; a reader should identify the source when presenting them as an established list.[4]

The contrast between a card’s image, an occult explanation, and a divinatory keyword is useful in studying divination. Each answers a different question: what is depicted, how an author interprets it, and what meaning is assigned during a reading.[1][2][4]

See also#

References

  1. Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part II, “XV. The Devil,” William Rider & Son, 1910, Internet Sacred Text Archive · Primary occult commentary on the image, including the chained pair, gesture, torch, pentagram, material constraints, and discussion of Lévi. The interpretations are attributed to Waite. (accessed 2026-10-08) ↩
  2. Papus, The Tarot of the Bohemians, translated by A. P. Morton, 1892, “15. The Devil,” Internet Sacred Text Archive · Primary occult commentary. Supports the comparison with the Juggler, matter and spirit symbolism, and destiny/fatality readings. These correspondences belong to Papus’s system. (accessed 2026-10-08) ↩
  3. Victoria and Albert Museum, “A history of tarot cards” · Museum discussion of early cards as games, a proposed carnival context, later divination and occult reception, and the Smith–Waite collaboration and 1909 publication. Its speculative carnival explanation is identified as such. (accessed 2026-10-08) ↩
  4. Arthur Edward Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part III, §3, “The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings,” 1910, Internet Sacred Text Archive · Primary source for Waite’s upright and reversed divinatory meanings. The list is not presented as a universal or empirically verified method. (accessed 2026-10-08) ↩
TarotThe DevilArthur Edward WaitePamela Colman SmithPapus

This encyclopedia covers traditions beyond the High Satanic Church. Church doctrine is identified as such when it appears.