Despite its origin in Christian culture, the Tarot deck has been called the Devil’s Picturebook and dismissed by the orthodox as a tool of the Devil. But what is the Devil? In the Rider-Waite deck, Major Arcana XV shows the Devil as a bondsman who holds the human soul in chains. The Devil is seen as representative of the carnal, physical aspect of existence or “the god of this world.” In the Book of Thoth, the Devil card is symbolized by a horny goat and male sex organs awaiting release. The symbolism of most decks likens the Devil to Satan, a biblical name of the Devil which became most commonly used in the New Testament.

Though the Devil has been known by many names, people generally think of the “Satan” Devil as shown on the famous tarot card. We may look into the holy books of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam to understand Satan better. In these books, Satan is portrayed as the accuser, a tempter who lures mankind away from the path laid out by Jehovah. According to these stories Jehovah (or Allah) is the one omnipotent god that we are supposed to be worshiping, yet other gods exist to deceive us. If these stories are to be taken at face value, one must conclude that the Devil is the dark side of God, for he would not exist without the will of God.

Looking deeper and going into the Gnostic scriptures as old occultists used to study, we find that the one God is a god of many faces, including Satan’s. According to these buried ancient scriptures, the original God contained everything; therefore everything, every being is an emanation of God, even the lowest scum. Although Jehovah and Satan both represent the carnal aspect of existence, their personalities are polar opposites. A ruthless god of passionate jealousy, vengeance, and mercy, Jehovah commands his people to live according to a strict set of laws designed in opposition to nature according to His desire for us to transcend nature. Satan on the other hand represents the law of the jungle. The Satanic Devil card depicts the call of the wild, which also reveals the world itself, the physical world, to be a prison for the human spirit. The whole concept of the Devil centers around Man’s struggle with nature.

Aleister Crowley, AKA the Beast666, the wickedest man in the world – the designer of the Book of Thoth liked to identify himself with Satan. Many people to this day think he was the anti-Christ, though Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan considered Crowley an excellent poser. While Crowley put a heavy emphasis on the spiritual importance of Tarot, LaVey’s church was founded in celebration of carnal nature, and he suggested that Tarot as a spiritual tool was not important for his followers to know. These men’s attempts to brand themselves as Satan’s prophets were unique enough to get themselves known, making them arguably his best earthly representatives. LaVey’s concept of devils is that they are not actually devils, but gods of the past demoted, as mankind had imagined newer gods to take their place. He devised a form of worshiping these elder gods as symbolic personifications of natural forces.

From any perspective it is evident that Major Arcana XV represents the brutal law of nature, and that whether we are happy with it or not, it binds us.