The Devil squats in darkness on a half cube. Two chains lead from a ring in the half cube to loop around the necks of a man and a woman. This is the nightmare version of The Lovers. To make sure we don’t miss the connection, nearly all modern decks make The Lovers key 6 and The Devil key 15 (1+5=6).
A quick review of The Lovers card reminds us that it is about how to make wise choices. The man, or conscious mind, opens himself to, or is in communion with, the woman, or subconscious mind, who is looking up and communicating with the Angel Raphael. In other words, we can make much better decisions if we are in touch with the universal consciousness, or higher beings, or the divine, or whatever we choose to call it. This is why, when faced with a problem, a wise person will not only look at it logically, but also “pray on it”, or “sleep on it”, or wait for a sign, or a hunch, or a feeling.
Now the Devil is “the prince of this world.” (John 12:31, 14:30) He is master of the material, but has no power in the spiritual realms. That is why he’s only sitting on half of the cube of the universe. The inverted pentagram on his forehead suggests that his spirit is focused on the earthly realms, and his open hand suggests that nothing is hidden, what we see is all that there is. With his left hand he inverts the torch of enlightenment. Satan’s job is to keep us bound to his half of the cube and unaware of the other half. The man and woman in key 15 have horns and tails. The grapes of spiritual ecstasy and the flame of spiritual passion are on the tips of their tails, as far from their heads and hearts as it’s possible to get. It is obvious that, like their master behind them, they are bound to the material world. But unlike their master, their chains are easy to remove. However, it doesn’t look hopeful. Look at the man’s pose. He’s trying to reason with the woman, or subconscious. And the woman is looking blankly ahead, because the subconscious does not 
respond to logic. I can almost her him saying, “Now dear, just think about it, how could magic possibly work? How could prayers have any affect? How could god or even angels exist? You can’t see them, or hear them, and the times they do appear to work are just coincidences. You know, like that thing about monkeys and typewriters and the complete works of Shakespeare.” And so they are incapable of “seeing” the monster behind them. Or maybe she knows it’s there but she can’t tell him because he isn’t listening. Charles Baudelaire once wrote that: “the devil’s best trick is to convince us he doesn’t exist.”
But don’t feel too superior to the bestial man and woman. We are also creatures of The Devil’s realm and we are not anxious to leave. This world may be full of tears and pain and heartache, but it is also bursting with natural beauty. We create marvelous works of art—painting, sculpture, music, and books—to entertain and enlighten. Food, drink, shelter, and sex–the very things we need to stay alive and propagate our species—are all sources of intense pleasure and pride. And besides, we know what this world is like, but we have only vague promises about “the other side.” It could be really good, or really bad, or just the end of everything. We wear those chains gladly, yes indeed we do. And as far as I’m concerned, why not? We are here until we die, why not try to enjoy it?
And this is exactly what the Devil would say. But, unlike me, he won’t tell you that we are all spiritual beings inhabiting a physical body, that we are indeed children of both “earth and starry heaven”* and require communion with the divine as much if not more than we require food and drink. The Devil knows that the best lie is a half-truth.
But it is difficult to be open to the divine with all the beauty, joys, cares, and worries of this world flooding our senses. Jesus said that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25). I would suggest that by Jesus’ standards, every middle class American is a “rich man”; and that by “the kingdom of God”, Jesus meant “a rich and nourishing spiritual life.” Money solves so many problems and makes life so much easier that it fools us into believing that we can have total control of our lives. We are so busy making money so that we can have control and lots of stuff and then enjoying all the ease and good stuff that we worked so hard to get that we have no time to be still and find that small, still place within in us that links us back to the cosmos and feeds our souls in a way that no physical food or pleasure can. Jesus and every other religious leader that I know of assures us that instead of accumulating possessions, our lives should be spent laying up “treasure in heaven.”
And even more problems develop when we decide we want more money, but the only way to get it is to cheat someone else out of his. Or when we think that we could make better use of a piece of land than the people who are presently living on it. Or when we decide that one shot of that designer drug was awesome and we want another and another and another until we can’t afford it anymore and we don’t care who we step on, just so we can get more. When we act on desires like these the Devil wins; not only because they inflict pain and misery, but also because each of these acts makes us deaf to the angel on The Lovers key and blinds us to the stuff that really matters—love, faith, hope, and the divine.
To be continued…
*Part of a beautiful Orphic Hymn which was found in tombs in Crete, Southern Italy and other places around the Mediterranean. The Hymn was finely inscribed in Greek on thin gold leaf, rolled up and placed in a metal cylinder that hung on a chain around the neck of the deceased.