Ayin · XV The Devil

Correspondences

Letter

ע Ayin (עין), “Eye”

Value

70

Kind

Single letter (one of the twelve Singles, given to the signs of the zodiac)

Attribution

♑︎ Capricorn

Joins

Tiphareth (6) and Hod (8)

Tarot trump

XV · Waite: The Devil · Thoth: The Devil · Marseille: Le Diable

Golden Dawn title (Book T)

The Lord of the Gates of Matter; the Child of the Forces of Time

Lévi’s attribution (1855)

XVI La Maison Dieu

Case’s key word

Bondage

Colours

King: Indigo · Queen: Black

Gods (777)

Egyptian: Khem (Set) · Greek: Pan, Priapus · Roman: Pan, Vesta, Bacchus · Hindu: Lingam, Yoni

Animals

Goat; ass

Plants

Indian hemp; orchis root; thistle

Precious stones

Black diamond

Perfumes

Musk; civet; Saturnian odours

Magical weapon

The secret force; the lamp

The letter

Ayin, the eye (and the spring of water), is a silent letter, a guttural that has lost its sound in most modern pronunciation. Its value is 70, the number of the nations of the world in rabbinic tradition, and of the elders of Israel. Case gives it the faculty of mirth: the Devil is the comedy of appearances, which the enlightened eye sees through.

On the Tree

The 26th path joins Tiphareth to Hod: the heart’s light seen through the forms of the mind. Its 32 Paths name, the Renovating Intelligence, says that through it God renews all things. It is one of the three paths of the Portal grade.

The Devil in the Waite deck

Smith’s Devil is a horned, bat-winged goat-man (after Lévi’s Baphomet) squatting on a black half-cube, holding a lowered torch, with an inverted pentagram on his brow. Chained to his altar are a naked man and woman with small horns and tails; the chains are loose enough to slip off. Case’s key word is bondage: the illusion that we are bound by matter, a bondage that is self-imposed.

The Devil in the Thoth deck

Crowley’s Devil is Pan Pangenetor, the all-begetter: a goat with spiralling horns and a third eye, standing before the trunk of a tree that rises from the earth into the sky, with the winged wand of the Chief Adept in front of him. Below are two great spheres containing tiny figures, the seed of all life struggling to be born. Crowley calls him “creative energy in its most material form”, and refuses the Christian reading: the Devil is Pan. Elsewhere he wrote that “the Devil does not exist. It is a false name invented by the Black Brothers to imply a Unity in their ignorant muddle of dispersions.”

Where this path leads

• תפארת Tiphareth (6)
• הוד Hod (8)

Read further

• The Devil on Wikipediahistory and iconography of the card
• Sepher Yetzirah and the 32 Paths of WisdomW. Wynn Westcott, trans., 1887
• The Kabbalah UnveiledS. L. MacGregor Mathers, from Knorr von Rosenroth’s Kabbala Denudata, 1887
• Liber 777 RevisedAleister Crowley, 1909/1955
• The Book of ThothAleister Crowley, 1944
• The Golden DawnIsrael Regardie, ed., 1937–40
• A Garden of PomegranatesIsrael Regardie, 1932
• The Mystical QabalahDion Fortune, 1935
• The Pictorial Key to the TarotA. E. Waite, 1910
• The Tarot: A Key to the Wisdom of the AgesPaul Foster Case, 1947
• A Practical Guide to Qabalistic SymbolismGareth Knight, 1965

Also in the background throughout: Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (1974) and Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), for the Jewish tradition as historians understand it; Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah (1990); Kenneth Grant, Nightside of Eden (1977), for the Qliphoth; Robert Wang, The Qabalistic Tarot (1983).