The Tao in the Tarot

by Sarita Armstrong

  Card 15: The Devil/Lucifer (Yang)

  In his guise as the Emperor our Elite Traveller experienced the practical use to which his energy and expertise could be put. Travelling through the specifically Yang cards, he learnt as the Charioteer that the more he gave the more he received. In the Wheel of Fortune he understood the way the world goes round, and the revolution of the Hanged Man taught him a new way of thinking. Now our traveller is filled with his energy and power, and if he has not fully learnt from the combination cards he will still be asking himself just what he can do with it all. How to use it to his best advantage? How to work with it to get the most out of it? This is only natural for a left-brainer but he needs to have learnt more than that.

  He has to understand that it is not really his own energy - he only has it on trust from the Magician. He is the receptacle that holds it. He should treat his power, energy and gifts as though they are honoured guests for whom he is just the humble host. If he does not treat his guests correctly they will either walk out of the door again or they will turn nasty!

  The Devil represents the misuse of knowledge, power and energy. It is the creative principle of the Magician turned destructive; the misuse of the Magician's wand; the Emporer turned tyrant; the loss of control of the Charioteer.

  It may seem strange that this card should be our introduction to the spiritual journey, which one imagines should be all light and loveliness. We think this way because in our culture the Devil has been denied acceptance in our concentration on God. He has been shut out and therefore he has been able to grow unheeded. If we are to start on the spiritual journey we must be aware of the unseen powers outside our personal subconscious, as well as the unpleasantness that may lie within it. The card for the Devil and its parallel card of the Tower both represent this. The Devil represents the outer Yang temptations (whilst the Tower represents the inner Yin traumas). And yet at this stage we must be aware that both may be either inside or outside our minds, and either may apply to a man or to a woman.

  We cannot continue to concentrate only on the good in our spiritual journey. We have to face the fact that opposites exist even on this level; in fact the opposites exist in greater intensity for we are, after all, on a higher octave. If we search for God we must also look out for the Devil. We need to understand the nature of evil because in order to beware we must be aware. The Devil will find us anyway if we open Pandora's Box, the lid of which is usually kept firmly closed by the weight of materialism sitting on top of it. God and the Devil live together in that box, which is why we need the quality of temperance and purity of soul to prevent us from being beguiled by either of them!

  Every great teacher who retired from the world to meditate was tempted by the Devil. Siddhartha was tempted before he became the Buddha. Jesus in the wilderness was tempted. The greatest temptation of all is to use the spiritual knowledge one has gained for material benefit: "All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt …" 1 The final temptation is pride, the one that says you are the guru and all those that follow you adore you. It is closely associated with power - the antithesis of true love - power over others. Many cult leaders, having gained a little spirituality have fallen for this final temptation, to the detriment of thousands of genuine seekers.

  To pass safely through this point on our journey our Elite Traveller needs to have fully comprehended the combination cards. He must have received into himself the blessing of the Hierophant. He will have received inner Strength and realised that it is very different from worldly power. He will have Balance, and finally he will have gained purity and clarity and a sense of the mystical with Temperance.

  True knowledge of who or what the tempter or temptress is, can also be a way to overcome it. The embryo of the Devil appears in a woman when she closes off her receptivity (as in the parallel card of the Tower) and it appears in a man when love is replaced with the desire for power over others; when the desire to be loved rather than to be loving overcomes all other necessities.

  In the medieval Tarot card, the Lovers appear in chains on the Devil's card because sex is a very powerful force much used in satanic rituals. In our materialistic world sex is often connected with sadism, paedophilia, rape and murder. It may be old-fashioned to be critical but the fact remains that there is a great power source here being misused. There are meditations to raise the kundalini force to a higher level. That same force can be used to pervert. Fear and physical pain create great energy: this is also a tool of Satanists. If we look at the Major Arcana cards in the circle (see Figure 1), it is not by chance that the Devil stands opposite the Lovers/Beloved and the Charioteer.

  Another aspect of this card is that we have come to the point in our journey at which our spiritual energy is valuable to those with evil in their hearts. So long as we lead an ordinary life we may never encounter anything out of the ordinary. But once we step out on a different path we must be aware that we shall meet up with an equally knowledgeable set of opposites. Life is like that.

  There is also a completely different way of looking at this card for if we look more carefully at the nature of the traditional devil in our culture we find he is simply an old god who has been superseded by a new hierarchy, and very often the older god is closer to the original ideas of light and love than the one taking over. The very ancient nature-god Pan was turned into a ridiculous figure, firstly by adherents to the newer hierarchy of ancient Greek gods and goddesses and then by the Christian Church; depicted for his nature-loving ways as half-man, half-beast, with the cloven hoofs of a goat, horns, slit-pupils in his eyes, and rough hair all over his body. He is the form of devil depicted on the Waite Tarot card and was much used by Satanists in the last few centuries, for which reason he became an actual evil entity. Then we have ‘Old Nick’ developed from St. Nicholas who was himself converted from an antique mid-winter god, but he too is still around in the form of that genial Father Christmas. We have the Magician himself, demoted into a simple trickster who made the milk turn sour or tripped you up when least expected, though he never took off as a really nasty devil. There are many other little devils, black with red eyes and forked tails waiting at the gates of hell, or taking on the form of whatever the culture of the day requires. None of these are evil in themselves, only in the way they may be used for power.

  The greatest devil of all has to be Lucifer, whose name means ‘Light-carrier’, who just happens to be our old friend the sun god: Ra, Apollo, Helios, Mithras. The new Almighty Lord God of All could not put up with such great competition so had to turn him into a fallen angel, for there was no other way to hide the strength of his light. One is never quite sure what Lucifer did to merit his fate but we are told he vied with the Almighty for pole position so had to be thrown out. “For I the LORD thy God am a jealous God”,2 said Jehovah, the new solar power. It is quite possible that Lucifer is not a fallen angel but a falling angel, as he brings the light of the sun from above down to earth for the benefit of mankind.

  The Exhortation: Beware of the Power and the Glory!

  The Devil is twinned with

  Hexagram 12 P’i: Stagnation, Obstruction

  Upper Trigram: Ch’ien: heaven, male, creative, (sky, cold, light). Father; Larger Yang.

  Lower Trigram: K’un: earth, female, receptive, (heat, dark). Mother; Larger Yin.

  SYMBOL This hexagram symbolizes heaven and earth cut off from each other. To conserve his stock of virtue, the Superior Man [Elite Traveller] withdraws into himself and thus escapes from the evil influences around him. He declines all temptations of honour and riches.

  This hexagram addresses itself specifically to the misuse of the Magician’s wand. It is actually the antithesis of the hexagram Peace, which represents the Hierophant, who is able to reflect the light into the world. Here in Hexagram 12, Stagnation, Obstruction, for the Devil the opposite is the case. Stagnation occurs because in this case the two trigrams are in an immovable position. In the hexagon-star symbol (Figure 4), it is as though the two in
tertwined triangles have actually separated, with the upward pointing one moving upwards and the downward pointing one moving downwards, the bases of the triangles forming two solid lines against each other. (This actually forms a square: symbol of the material world rather than the spiritually mobile hexagon-star).

  Stagnation (obstruction) caused by evil-doers … The great and good decline; the mean approach …

  This passage indicates that the celestial and terrestrial forces are without intercourse and that everything is out of communion with everything else. High and low do not mingle and the state boundaries within the empire have been obliterated … Mean men are at the centre of things, superior men at the fringes. The way of the mean waxes, that of the Superior Man [the Elite Traveller] wanes … This hexagram symbolizes heaven and earth cut off from each other. To conserve his stock of virtue, the Superior Man [the Elite Traveller] withdraws into himself and thus escapes from the evil influences around him. He declines all temptations of honour and riches.

  The need to withdraw into oneself to conserve the merit one has already gained as the first step on this new octave reminds me of the Hermit being the necessary first step on the second octave. In both cases it is a need to withdraw from evil influences. But the last sentence of the quotation from the I Ching is the most important if we are to move forward and overcome the temptation to use what we have gained for material benefit; for power, for glory, for wealth, as well as for the subtle boosting of our own pride, because it makes us feel so very good! All these temptations are the start of the slippery slope back to the Material Sequence.

  Nevertheless, the moving lines in this hexagram (see appendix 1), show that the card for the Devil has great energy and stands in the position of Lucifer the Light-carrier, for it is from here that we move on with the guiding light of the Star to Hexagram 30, Flaming Beauty, for the Sun (see Figure10 The Movement of the I Ching Hexagrams around the Spiral of Tarot Cards.).

  Card 16: The Tower (Yin)

  Just as the Devil relates to the active Yang principle of evil, so the Tower relates to the Yin, inward-turning of the psyche where all our repressions lurk, ready to burst through with destructive force. Women’s way is to look inwards, to look inside ourselves and search our souls for what has gone wrong in our lives or with our selves. This is the start of our spiritual journey but we can search our souls to the extent that we dig up all sorts of unpleasantness hidden behind that essential mind-barrier. If we dig too deep or too hard, if we pick at too many sore places, we will just make ourselves worse and in the end we will be overtaken by that which has lain buried for so long, for it has been able to fester unobserved until we looked behind the barrier. If we really search our souls we may find the antithesis of all we like to portray on the outside. There is a little devil in the soul of every saint!

  In my image, the Tower is in the form of a high wall with the appearance of sturdiness, but a closer look will show it is quite poorly constructed and bits are even falling off the top. The arrow-slits in the castellated wall reveal a lovely golden light, and if we were to look around the corner of the wall we would see a garden and people dancing there. The bright places are there, but the person in the image cannot see beyond the gloom of the tower’s walls for she is too busy stirring around the contents of her cauldron.

  As the Devil related to the misuse of the Magician's wand, so the Tower relates to the denial of the High Priestess's gentle beauty, our true inner nature. It is the aggressive woman working through her animus. This may be fine for a while – perhaps a necessary learning process for a woman – but in the long term it will lead to a shutting off of the light in her. It is hard to write about such things without appearing moralistic in a world where anything goes, and this is not about keeping women in the home - there are plenty of dragons there - nor is it about women at work, where plenty manage to maintain their equilibrium in the workplace. It is about what is going on inside the soul and being able to maintain an inner harmony even in difficult circumstances. Harmony is the essence of every religious teaching, every philosophical ideal, and every human being's underlying need.

  The Tower shows us what happens if we are not in harmony with our own inner nature. This also has to be faced when we set out on the spiritual path. We may be tempted not so much by a self-evident evil, but by un-named subtleties that are hard to define and therefore possibly even more dangerous. The more unpleasantness we have hidden inside us, the more we have to build protective walls. Having built the walls around ourselves we end up cut off from our fellow human beings, and cut off from our own selves so that we do not notice what has happened. The danger arises when a person accustomed to hiding behind a pleasant mask looks behind their mind-barrier and may be taken over by what has been lurking there unnoticed for so long.

  I mentioned that the Devil can apply to a woman as well as a man, and the attitude represented by the Tower can apply to a man as well as a woman. But it is the inward-looking, emotional tendency of a woman’s heart and the inverted power-struggles that are brought about in the mind of a woman that is being addressed in this card. Our Elite Lady-traveller through the Yin cards of the Tarot has discovered as the Empress that all her offspring leave her without a “thank you” and don’t even want to look after her in old age, yet she loves them still and the loneliness in her heart only makes her yearn for them more. As the Beloved she discovered that her Charioteer was not the man she thought he was, though she still longs for his attention. She experienced the scorn of others as the Hermit, and learnt that the little Deaths of her life had to be faced alone. Hopefully through it all she has maintained the memory of the High Priestess’s love and light in her heart, which will have given her a feeling of her own inner worth, though she knows it is not recognised even by her nearest and dearest.

  It is not surprising that in the Tower we find her shut off from others and at the same time trying to break down the barriers to search her own heart and mind as to why this should be so. Her emotional debt is heavy and the more she ponders the more emotional she becomes. But one emotion will not overcome another: one cannot kill hate with love. Hate has to die for love to come in. You cannot get rid of jealousy with sorrow, nor hurt with anger. Jealousy and hurt must ebb away and for this to happen, calm and thoughtful understanding is required. She needs to use her intellect in a logical way to understand why things happen to her; why life is the way it is, and to accept that life just is like that! Joyce Cary’s “Credo” reminds us that:

  “The truth is that life is hard and dangerous; that he who seeks his own happiness does not find it; that he who is weak must suffer; that he who demands love, will be disappointed; that he who is greedy, will not be fed; that he who seeks peace, will find strife; that truth is only for the brave; that joy is only for him who does not fear to be alone; that life is only for the one who is not afraid to die.”1

  The calm understanding of these principles can only occur through the correct absorption of the Yang aspects, which happens through the combination cards. She will have received the blessing of the Magician and found the support of the Emperor through the Hierophant. Her Charioteer will have given her Strength. Through an understanding of the Wheel of Fortune she may have learnt the Justice of the situations she has suffered. Finally she will somehow need to learn to loosen the immovable knots that have built up in her as she clings on to what she is sure is right. She will discover how to do this by using her intelligence to show her the correct understanding of Temperance and the flow, the giving and taking, the essence of movement that it represents.

  The man in the Devil had to use his gentle, feminine side to care for his light and nurture it. Here the woman in her Tower must learn to use her masculine intelligence and intellect to understand why she has become the way she is.

  Many women reach back to the Earth Mother stage of the Empress but then they get stuck at that point, manifesting in a plethora of nurturing and self-sacrifice; exuding a love of nature without understandi
ng the nature of Nature. Witchcraft too is a by-product of this stage, manipulating in all sorts of subtle ways. To make the final step to connect with the High Priestess any fear of serpents and the wide deep ocean must first be overcome. Only then are we ready to move on via the Star to the alchemical wedding of Moon and Sun.

  The Exhortation: Lighten your luggage!

  The Tower is twinned with

  Hexagram 50 Ting: A Sacrificial Vessel/Cauldron

  Upper Trigram: Li: fire, brilliance, beauty, (sun, dependence, lightening). Middle Daughter; Lesser Yin. Summer.

  Lower Trigram: Sun: wind, wood, bland, mild. Eldest Daughter; Lesser Yang.

  SYMBOL This hexagram symbolizes fire upon wood. The Superior Man, [Elite Traveller] taking his stance as righteousness requires, adheres firmly to heaven’s decree.

  Whereas the medieval Tarot card shows us a frightening image of a mind in disintegration, Hexagram 50 is much more positive and actually provides us with a method for coping with our inner traumas.

  A Sacrificial Vessel - supreme success! ... The ting [bowl] is symbolic (of the peace and beauty presaged by the combination of the two component trigrams). Wood and fire combine to cook (the sacrifice). The holy sage cooks in performing sacrificial ceremonies to the Supreme Lord (of Heaven); he cooks more lavishly to nourish the holy and the virtuous … The yielding enters and ascends (to the fifth place) where it responds to the firm - hence supreme success.