Major Arcana · XV
♑︎ Capricorn · ע Ayin · Thoth: The Devil
Look at what has a hold on you: a habit, a fear, a craving, a bargain. The chains are looser than they look.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Card image: Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite tarot, 1909 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).