The DEVIL - the Wild God comes to call
A Tarot offering for the Full Moon in Capricorn
What brings your Wild God to the table? Where does your instinct to desire overtake reason? Release you from the bounds of expectation? Overturn the strictures of sense and good form?
On this Capricorn Full Moon, I’m reflecting on the DEVIL—in his positive aspect. The one that doesn’t so much draw us into addiction, but frees us from rigid structures of dogma and demand. If your inner church-lady is clutching her pearls at the thought, consider that this DEVIL archetype pre-dates his Christian detractors in the ancient horned gods—Cernunnos, Loki and Pan—gods of chaos, vitality, animal instinct and mischief that reassert the value of free-will and invigorate the churning energy of the material world.
I see this archetype as conjured by Tom Hirons’s beautiful poem, “Sometimes a Wild God.”
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Arriving unexpectedly at the kitchen table, Hirons’s Wild God reminds the reader of their own feral nature:
The fox leaps into your eyes.
Otters rush from the darkness.
The snakes pour through your body.
Your dog howls and upstairs
Your wife both exults and weeps at once.The wild god dances with your dog.
You dance with the sparrows.
A white stag pulls up a stool
And bellows hymns to enchantments.
A pelican leaps from chair to chair.In the distance, warriors pour from their tombs.
Ancient gold grows like grass in the fields.
Everyone dreams the words to long-forgotten songs.
The hills echo and the grey stones ring
With laughter and madness and pain.
This Madness. This Pain. This Laughter. They must be akin to falling in love—or being gripped by love’s close cousin, lust. Perhaps that’s why in the Rider Waite Smith Tarot, the imagery in the DEVIL so closely mirrors that in the LOVERS. We are working with the sharp arrow of soulful longing with each archetype—the fiery impulse to step closer to the fullness of our Selfhood through union, expansion, and the alchemical process sparked by desire.1
There comes a time in all of our lives when we need (sometimes desperately) this divine stirring to help us break through the places where we are stuck in patterns of belief or behavior that no longer allow us to grow.
In the DEVIL, we run the risk of blocking our own expansion by attaching our soul’s desire to something external. We have to have this person, this accolade, this job title, in order to be whole, fulfilled, and to achieve the higher-state feelings of love and lovability that all of us crave. These attachments create the chains the differentiate the LOVERS from the DEVIL’s enslaved subjects.
But the antidote here is not to reject desire as a whole. If we ignore our instinctual wants we place ourselves at a much greater risk of needing to suppress them with truly detrimental addictions—distractions in the form of drugs, shopping, sex, scrolling—you pick your poison. This is the most common way to interpret the appearance of the DEVIL card in a reading: as an indicator of a habitual response to desire that misses the mark.
Consider for a moment that sometimes that ossified response is the rote responsible one. Work itself can be an addiction, as can the delayed gratification mindsets that put off pleasure for another moment, another day, and on and on indefinitely. Paired with Capricorn, the DEVIL reveals the places where even our best-intentioned plans can become too rigid and restricting to allow for the full blossoming of life.
Do you want to live a life with no midnight self-indulgences? No ill-fated love affairs? No impulsive side-quests?
Personally, I don’t. I’d rather love on my little demons when they come to call.
Love your Demons.
I’ll give you an example of what I mean:
A few months ago I was gripped by an obsessive desire to move to New York City. Through a rather serendipitous turn of events, my daughter and I had spent the better part of her spring break exploring the city while my partner joined his company for a work gathering. Junie and I wandered in and out of museums and stood in the bitter cold waiting for the house doors to open on Broadway with manic grins on our faces. We walked and walked—the rhythm of our footfalls dragging up snippets of ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” as one or both of us would start to sing the lusty tune on anonymous street corners. The crowds of diverse people, art exhibits and theatrical masterpieces made the whole thing feel like a landscape set for chance encounters between lovers—and I was the one falling fast.2
When we got home to Austin, I couldn’t shake the obsession. I started calculating housing costs and talking to friends who had lived in New York. I looked at school ratings and read blogs about relocating with children. I (half-dragged) my partner through a wildly variant list of hypothetical moving scenarios, while he anxiously reminded me of the destructive potential of moving a family of four half-way across the country to a city—that by all accounts—seems logistically formidable.
With excitement, I went to my Tarot deck and asked for a card to show me what was “going on” with this desire of mine to move.
You know which card I pulled.
Was my Tarot deck telling me not to move to New York? That my infatuation with the city was just that—a potentially hazardous simulacrum of true love?
I don’t know. We all have to move through the DEVIL to get to the WORLD—and I’m not ready to give up on the possibility of living in an urban environment once again in my lifetime. If not now—then someday.
But seeing the DEVIL come up here did make me think differently about the shape of my desire. Is it NYC itself that I crave? Or something else? Maybe the novelty of being around new people, expansive art, and inclusive, diverse settings could be accessible at home, too. I cannot make my city more walkable, but I can take more walks in new neighborhoods that I haven’t yet explored. I can help cultivate the inspiration-rich creative communites that captivated me.
Inspired by the energy of my NYC experience, I’ve begun deepening the relationships I’ve already built here in Austin—I started a new band with a musician friend and we had our first gig for Leander Pride Festival at Lioness Books just last weekend. I offered my first Tarot for Songwriting Workshop and welcomed more members into Arcana Craft’s diverse, inclusive Tarot Circle—where I continue to be awestruck by the creative pulse that unites so many of us in this central Texas enclave of the weird and wondrous.
My fantasies of the DEVIL (in the form of a luscious city scape) helped me break out of what had become a bit of a rut at home and allowed me to see my decision to stay in Austin, at least for the time being, as a choice rather than a necessity. And that, I think, is perhaps the most potent medicine that the DEVIL can offer us—choice.
The DEVIL gets an overly bad wrap that’s tied up with all of the misplaced assumption that if we gave any space to our desires we’d descend into sociopathy and dastardly deeds of all kinds. But the DEVIL, in his positive aspect, allows us to look at what we really want without shame or fear. In fact, we may even be able to enjoy the magnetic spark of desire as it visits us, while still standing firm in our autonomy. Because, ultimately, when it comes to deciding how to act on our desires, we are the ones in charge.
If you allow the DEVIL a “place at the table” as Hirons does, if you listen to the “fox in your neck,” the “snakes in your arms,” the vinegary voice of the Wild God will call back into life the parts of you left for dead. For the DEVIL’s lusty urgings are full of vitality, of the irrepressible urge to life itself.
Don’t fear your longings. Let them in. Let them howl. Let them change you.
Let your Longings Live.
Try this: Draw one card for each of the following prompts to see where the Devil wants you to feel into your desires.
Card 1 — Where is the Devil calling you?
Card 2 — What old beliefs or patterns might be blocking your expansion?
Card 3 — How can you lovingly embrace the desires of your heart?
How to work with me this summer—
Come to Tarot Circle! Follow Arcana Craft on MeetUp for announcements about FREE monthly Tarot Circle hosted by the Healing Temple ATX, as well as periodic online offerings on special topics.
Book a reading with me. I’m offering a limited number of one-one-one readings aimed at helping you to claim your birthright as “one who knows” and connect with your deep, intuitive compass, so that you can navigate through all of life’s waters with a sense of wholeness and confidence.
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You can read more about this in last year’s post for Gemini Season on the Lovers: “The Tarot wants to Ship You.”
The song that encapsulated my infatuation with NYC performed by Sam Tutty — see youtube video!