The Devil
Trump XV of the tarot: a horned, bat-winged figure with two chained people at his feet. A. E. Waite read it as ravage, violence and fatality.
Meaning
Waite's Devil is the horned goat of Mendes with bat-like wings, standing on an altar, with chains running from a ring on the altar to the necks of a man and a woman. The goat-headed form came from Éliphas Lévi: in the eighteenth century, Waite wrote, the chief figure was a naked creature with a fantastic head-dress and bird's claws, and "since 1856 the influence of Eliphas Lévi" had changed the face of the card.
Waite's meanings
Waite gave the Devil "ravage, violence, vehemence, extraordinary efforts, force, fatality; that which is predestined but is not for this reason evil"; reversed, "evil fatality, weakness, pettiness, blindness".
In older decks
In a nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum the card is Il Diavolo. Papus joined it to the fifteenth Hebrew letter, Samech.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsThe TowerTrump XVI of the tarot: a tower struck by lightning, with people falling from it. A. E. Waite read it as ruin and unforeseen catastrophe.
- In Christmas symbolsKrampusA horned, hairy devil with a long red tongue, a chain and a bundle of birch twigs, who comes with St Nicholas on the evening of 5 December in Austria and neighbouring Alpine lands. The saint rewards the good children; Krampus threatens the naughty ones.
See also
Bat, Black cat, Baphomet, The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
The same shape elsewhere
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 30, 2026. How we research
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