Tarot · Major Arcana
The Devil
Key XV - Earth
Correspondences
- Element
- Earth
- Planet
- Saturn
- Sign
- Capricorn
- Number
- 15
- Yes / no
- No upright, Yes reversed
Traditional Golden Dawn attributions. The yes / no value is a convention for single-card questions, not a prediction.
Upright
A pattern, habit, or attachment has more of a hold on you than you have admitted.
The Devil. A pattern, habit, or attachment has more of a hold on you than you have admitted. Fifteenth: the bind that is chosen. Chains loose enough to lift off, worn because the alternative currently costs more than the chains do. Under Saturn, it works by limit, weight and time. Nothing here is quick and nothing here is free, but what it builds does not fall over. Being Earth, it resolves only in material terms: time, money, body, or work actually done. Its keyword range runs through bondage, unhealthy attachment, materialism, the shadow self, and restriction.
Reversed
Real chains are being noticed at last, and the first steps to freedom are becoming possible.
The Devil reversed. Real chains are being noticed at last, and the first steps to freedom are becoming possible. Its sign is Capricorn, which climbs: structure, endurance and long ambition, paying now in order to hold ground later. Reversed here, it is loosening rather than failing. The grip of this is coming off, and the reversal reads as release rather than denial. Its keyword range, to be read here as difficulty, delay, or a lesson not yet learned: breaking free, reclaiming personal power, releasing limiting beliefs, confronting the shadow, and loosened chains.
About the Tarot
A 15th-century Italian card game that was turned to fortune-telling only 350 years later.
The upright and reversed meanings here follow the mainstream Rider-Waite-Smith reading tradition. A reversed card is treated as the same force blocked, turned inward, or overexpressed - not simply as its opposite.
Full history →Meanings are a guide to a symbolic tradition, offered for reflection and entertainment. They do not predict the future or describe real people or events. See the Terms.