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
A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card Il Diavolo. Papus joined it to the fifteenth Hebrew letter, Samech.
See also
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
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
Last reviewed September 27, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research