by Sasha Graham
The Devil’s white beard evokes Hermit wisdom but in a beastly, animalistic, inverted fashion. His intellectual superiority is used as a weapon against others. The female’s tail sprouts eleven grapes, suggesting intoxication and the loss of control. Waite tells us the couple is “Adam and Eve after the Fall.” This is the time period after Eve has tasted the forbidden fruit. The chains reflect the “fatality of the material life,” yet the rusted neck chains are large enough to remove. The man and woman could free themselves at any moment. The power of escape is theirs. Have they locked themselves in his dungeon willingly? Are they handing their power to the Devil? Do you give your power away to others?
Graphically, the Devil card takes all visual cues from Éliphas Lévi’s illustration of the Devil in his book Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual. The Devil is archangel Uriel. His wings are bat wings, agents of darkness. Waite tells us he is “standing on an altar,” implying holiness. The Devil’s lesson must be learned. His uplifted palm matches the Magician’s hand and additionally evokes the Hierophant’s sign of benediction, also seen on the Ten of Swords. The symbol of Saturn, the planet of boundaries, embeds the Devil’s palm. An inverted pentacle upon the forehead suggests distortion of the natural world. The esoteric function of the Devil is laughter. The Devil, in certain circumstances, reflects a riotous good time. After all, the Devil wants to indulge your every desire, whim, and fantasy. He appears in film and literature under the guise of temptation, offering you money, fame, sex, and pleasure. But when is enough enough?
Profane
Issues of power and control. Addiction and negative behavior. Being a slave to your desire. Abuse and neglect. A fear shutting down all possibility. Giving your power over to another. Treating others with anger and disrespect. Focusing on the negative. You must find an exit strategy. Ignoring personal responsibility. Leave the current situation. Confronting frightening aspects of yourself in order to foster new growth. Shadow work. Facing what frightens you. In a yes-no question, the answer is yes, only if you are willing to assume complete responsibility for your actions.
Waite’s Divinatory Meanings: Ravage, violence, vehemence, extraordinary efforts, force, fatality; that which is predestined but is not for this reason evil.
Reversed: Evil fatality, weakness, pettiness, blindness.
Asana
The Devil card aligns with yoga’s crow pose, or bakasana. Crows are shapeshifters, transformative creatures who, like bats, reflect darkness and shadow realms. The Devil sprouts bat wings while balancing on top of his cube. Crow pose is a similar arm balance, and yogis often employ mind over matter to achieve this difficult pose.
The Devil card and crow pose remind us to examine our constant struggles and interior wars. Is your darkest demon nothing more than a habit? An illusion? Ideas, assumptions, and self-limitations are only real if you believe them. What can you discard? What false truth do you abide by? Set your bats and crows skyward. Free yourself from the cycles of the past. Embrace the shimmering present and the glorious possibility and freedom it contains.
The Tower
Lift up your ideals, you weaklings, and force a way out of that thunderous clamor.
Pamela Colman Smith49
Sacred
Lightning strikes a great tower. Smoke and brimstone billow as two figures fall to a merciless, jagged death. Brilliant illumination reflects the rocky landscape. Transformation occurs in the flash of an eye, demonstrating genius of the mind and the power of thought. Immediate understanding radiates through body and soul. The Tower card is the ultimate aha moment. Truth breaks through the carefully constructed story you’ve been using to protect the ego. Earth-shaking knowledge rushes forth with tsunami-like speed. Life will never be the same.
You’ve danced with the Devil and lived to tell, but universal forces aren’t finished yet. The lightning marks a moment of no return and unexpected upheaval. It is the ultimate masculine orgasm, an energetic opening of epic proportion. Goosebumps erupt across the skin as the tectonic plates of life shift. It is the bolt of illumination, the moment that everything changes. Something you’ve heard a million times makes sense in a new way. Understanding and certainty lock into place. The Tower reflects ultimate freedom, which is terrifying to behold and evolutionary to embody.
The Tower reflects the shattering of false pretenses. These falsities are destroyed by acceptance of the shadow self and destruction of the Dweller on the Threshold. Waite reminds the reader not to take this card literally: “I do not conceive that the Tower is more or less material than the pillars which we have met with in three previous cases.” He is referring to the pillars of the High Priestess, Hierophant, and Justice. These pillars are not real but metaphorical. Therefore, the Tower is not an actual card of physical catastrophe in the reader’s life. The card does not forebode being struck by lightning, hit by a bus, or falling out a window. Waite says it is “a ruin of the House of We,” meaning the ego is destroyed. All that remains is the active observer.
Waite says the card favors “the materialization of the spiritual world.” The occultist’s lifestyle and worldview are altered forever as the spirit world is made manifest. Nothing can ever be the same once the occultist peeks beneath the veil. Waite asks the reader to examine the two figures falling from the Tower as analogies: “one is concerned with the fall into the material and animal state, while the other signifies destruction on the intellectual side.”
The red-caped former figure “is the literal word made void.” Nothing is as it seems or can be taken at face value. The crowned, blue-gowned figure is “false interpretation.” The Tower thus reflects the moment when the individual realizes the world is not real, it is but an illusion. They have misjudged the nature of reality and the self. He claims it “may signify also the end of a dispensation,” suggesting the old order has fallen and a new world begun.
Literary giant W. B. Yeats penned Is the Order RR&AC to Remain a Magical Order? in 1901 amidst Golden Dawn disarray. The order was splitting into numerous factions. Yeats eloquently made a case for Golden Dawn unification or irrevocable and dire consequences. Inside the pamphlet, Yeats starkly describes the order’s work. His text specifically describes the Golden Dawn’s symbol of the lightning bolt in conjunction with the Tree of Life. He states the “ascent to the Supreme Life,” the movement up the Tree of Life, creates a “double link.” The double link enables occultists to move up the tree. The link is a gate that swings both ways. He describes great supernatural beings, “teachers and wise ones,” and energetic bodies moving down the tree and through the gate. The downward motion of wise ones “is symbolized by the Lightning Flash.” He says, “We receive power from those who are above us by permitting the Lightning of the Supreme to descend through our souls and our bodies.” The lightning bolt is the illumination of wise ones permeating the occultist’s body as if electrified by the energy of a Jesus or Buddha figure. He says, “The power is forever seeking the world,” meaning spiritual power, wise ones, and supernatural entities always seek to manifest in the material world. These energies want to break through and be known and shown. Yeats’s fear is that splintering factions risk alienating other members and vying for their own power, thus perverting the creatures who wish to become manifest. “It consumes its mortality because the soul has arisen to the path of the Lightning.” He finishes his statement referring to the power grab inside the Golden Dawn saying, “The soul that separates itself from others, that says ‘I will seek power and knowledge for my own sake, and not for the world’s sake,’ separates itself from that path and becomes dark and empty.”
The lightning flash for Yeats is not simply a symbol of knowledge destroying the occultist’s old world as he moves up the tree but is the acute energy of divine beings permeating the occultist’s body and soul, therefore the world at large. Sadly, Yeats’s eloquent words were not heeded. The Golden Dawn ultimately disbanded. The Tower remained a potent symbol for Y
eats. He purchased and lived in a tower from 1921–1929. It is now called the Yeats Tower. He continued writing and working long after the Golden Dawn fell into disarray and leaves a vast legacy of art and literature behind him.
Symbolic
Esoteric Functions: Indignation and Grace
Hebrew Letter: Peh
Astrological Association: Mars
The symbol of a circle (crown) knocked off a square (tower) by the lightning bolt is an eloquent reminder of the destruction of what never fit to begin with. Catastrophe brings ultimate catharsis, resolution of the unbalanced balancing itself. The lightning is an arrow. Specific and direct intelligence aimed from an unseen archer above. Mars, god of war, carries the astrological association for the Tower. The Mars symbol is a circle with protruding arrow as seen by the lightning bolt. The body of the lightning bolt is an energetic symbol of Tree of Life emergence and return. It zigzags just as energy and the occultist move up and down the Tree of Life from left to right pillar and back again. The Hebrew letter Peh is assigned to this card, meaning mouth. The mouth is the place where sustenance is taken in and words, feelings, thoughts, and emotions flow out. It operates like Yeats’s metaphorical gate. The three flaming windows reflect trinity and the supernal triad. Twenty-two Yod flames reflect divine fire, operating as seeds and sparks of creative life falling to the earth.
Profane
A flash of insight. A breakthrough of epic proportions. Light-bulb idea. The shattering of illusions. Truth revealed. A shakeup. Unexpected results. Everything you know changes in a second. Upheaval stemming from things that never fit to begin with. A breakdown. A turning point. There is no going back from this moment. In a yes-no question, the answer is yes, and mayhem ensues.
Waite’s Divinatory Meanings: Misery, distress, indigence, adversity, calamity, disgrace, deception, ruin. It is a card in particular of unforeseen catastrophe.
Reversed: According to one account, the same in a lesser degree; also oppression, imprisonment, tyranny.
Asana
The Tower card aligns with yoga’s tree pose, or vrksasana. Tree pose requires the yogi to balance on one leg while lifting the arms to the sky, invoking the shape of a tree and the Tower. Doing so, the yogi becomes stable in the three worlds (lower, middle, and upper). They are rooted in the ground, stretch though the material world, and reach toward spiritual ascension. To master tree pose and the Tower card, the middle and lower self must remain stable, no matter the storms, havoc, and chaos at the top.
The Star
Keep an open mind to all things.
Pamela Colman Smith50
Sacred
The Star is divine light we can engage with directly. We look to the stars; the stars twinkle back. Inspiration from above infuses the body, the brush, the life with purpose. The Devil and the Tower rattled us to our core. The Star soothes with calm clarity like calm settling over a wildflower field after a thunderstorm has passed. The Star foreshadows the innocence of the child seen in the Sun card and the brilliance of the world to come as exemplified in the naked World dancer.
The loss of self-consciousness permeates every level of the Star card. Children are naturally unselfconscious. A “child’s mindset” breeds freedom. Children are free to employ innate trust in the space around them. Before the ego is developed, they see themselves as an extension of the world, not as a separate creature. This encourages wholeness of sight, sound, and experience. Self-consciousness consumes innate psychic energy. Releasing self-conscious notions frees the spirit. Engaging in vulnerability and revoking the ego, you are free to focus on the world around you. You concern yourself with the project or issue at hand rather than dealing with the ego, who prefers the forefront and demands attention by screaming look at me, feed me, see me and only me. The Devil and the Tower eradicated the ego so that when we meet the Star, we can engage in cosmic unity.
Glimmers of celestial radiance manifest in starlight, mini suns light-years away from where our feet touch the earth. Each is a pinpoint reminder of magic, life, and connection. The sun is the pure source of energy, life, and magic. To gaze into the face of our own sun would render us blind. To merge with starlight is to space travel across light-years. Stars are suns. Planets are reflections of those suns. Even mysterious Jupiter reflects back the light of our own sun like the moon.
Waite is direct in his expression of the card: “The figure expresses eternal youth and beauty.” The Star’s beauty is more than skin deep. To Waite, what she “communicates to the living scene is the substance of the heavens and the elements.” She is truly made of star-stuff. She is matter illuminating the far reaches of an infinite universe and four earthly elements: earth, air, fire, and water.
Waite tells is she is the “Waters of Life freely.” Waite’s phrase evokes religious baptism, as the Water of Life is a reference to the Christian holy spirit. Water is used to represent the life force. The Star is pouring forth the waters of life; doing so, she is “irrigating sea and land.” It is a reference to flow and the illuminating powers of life she reflects; of course there is no need to irrigate the ocean. Waite tells us the Star has “Gifts of the Spirit,” which are supernatural gifts bestowed unto ancient Christians to fulfill the church’s needs. The New Testament, Romans, contains seven Gifts of the Spirit, one for each white star in the Star card’s sky. The first gift is Prophecy, fitting with themes and ideas surrounding the tarot. The remaining six gifts are Serving, Teaching, Exhortation, Giving, Leadership, and Mercy.
Waite explains the figure is “the type of Truth unveiled. Glorious in undying beauty, pouring waters on the soul.” He finishes by saying she is “the Great Mother in the Kabbalistic Sophia Binah, which is Supernal Understanding, who communicates to the Sephiroth that are below.” She is the female nature of eternal compassion. The Star is like a champagne fountain whose inspiration flows freely. In doing so she reflects the nature of stellar energy. She pours divine, compassionate light on all the Sephiroth below her and the material world, imbuing it with grace and inspiration. The two streams of water are her energy pouring through the left and right pillars of the Tree of Life. The Star’s naked body is the center pillar of integration.
Symbolic
Esoteric Function: Imagination
Hebrew Letter: Tzaddi
Astrological Association: Aquarius
The Star’s nudity reflects vulnerability and trust. She is the symbolic center pillar. She hovers above the pool magically. Waite tells us “her right foot is upon the water,” and this is the Water of Life. These waters stem from the “Great Mother in the Kabbalistic Sophia Binah, which is supernal Understanding.” Waters are the heart and soul of compassion. Water reflects the life-sustaining amniotic fluid birth waters. The entire suit of cups is filled with this liquid. The great and lesser stars in the sky are never identified by Waite; however, the seven white stars do align with the number of “Gifts of the Spirit.” The golden-centered eight-spoked star, distant hills, flowers, and trees are all traditional Star card symbols stretching back through to Marseille decks to the Visconti-Sforza cards.
A bird takes residence in the tree behind the female figure. Its long beak evokes an ibis, the sacred bird of Egypt. The ibis is seen in Egyptian mythology as the head of Thoth (Hermes), the god of logic, reason, thought, and intelligence, adding additional sacred qualities to the Star card. Birds also signify the connection between the celestial realm and life on earth due to their wings and ability to fly.
The Golden Dawn system assigns the astrological sign of Aquarius to the Star. Aquarius is the water bearer. The water to her left breaks into five small rivulets, but the significance is never explained by Waite. The Hebrew letter Tzaddi means “fishhook” and thus aligns with the aquatic nature of the card. The esoteric function aptly describes the Star as inspiration and imagination.
Profane
Inspiration and renewal. Rejuvenation of the mind, body and
spirit. Endorphins releasing. The artist and the muse. Connection and intense creativity. Inner peace. You find contentment. Flowing cosmic connection. Celestial influence. Quiet after the storm. Emotional flow. Clarified hope. You are free. In a yes-no question, the answer is yes, but gently.