The Devil is one of the most feared Tarot cards. With good reasons too. This is a card about darkness, violence, evil, hatred, being chained, and curse.
Whenever this card appears, someone must be cursing you! Even if he is not cursing, he must be using other wicked methods to ruin your life. He is your enemy, he is the reason of your misery, and everything is his fault! Or so you thought.
It is not that someone else causes our misery, it is our belief that someone else is responsible causes our misery. The Devil depicts vividly how twisted we view our enemy: we think he is not a human, he is a demon. And what do we do with a demon? We hate it, we blame it, and we kill it if we can.
For example, a wife might think her husband is solely responsible for her feeling hurt, poverty, and general unhappiness. She will think she wasted her time on him so she can’t marry a better man, and so making her happy becomes his responsibility. Then she would blame the husband every day.
Throughout history, the most violent and cruel men don’t believe they are cruel, instead, they believe their enemy is evil, and they’re right to do whatever cruel things to them.
In daily life, physical violence is rather rare, but emotional violence is not. Like, blaming your partner all you want just because you feel hurt. Most people don’t realize that they’re hurting someone’s feeling or hating someone, when they are thinking about how this someone makes them miserable.
All demons in real life believe they are the victim. Otherwise they would stop themselves.
In a reading, this could mean that you believe you are the victim. You may be complaining how your boss is an asshole, how your partner hurts you, how everybody is happy and only you are miserable. In these situations, you are not aware that your complaint could ruin someone else’s mood, and they are not always justified.
This card could also be interpreted as that actually you can change your situation, if you begin to believe that you are responsible for it.
But most can’t do it. How can they? If they believe they are responsible, they would be admitting that they are the devils of their lives, they wasted their good times, they ruined their marriage.
It’s a horrible thing to believe. So most would rather stay ignorant and repeat their self-destructive patterns.
But not everybody is stopped by this fear. Somehow some people have the courage to admit that they’re not the victim. By doing so they can finally get out of the hell that they are once in.
I have experienced great anxiety ever since adolescence. I used to blame my family. But slowly I came to take responsibility of my own emotions, I came to understand how violently hurt I felt, and I learned to accept it and calm myself down. It’s way more painful than just blaming somehow else, and way more fulfilling than anything I’ve ever done.
Sometimes self-growth is achieved by facing your own demon. And sometimes this is the only way.