More than Materialism
Exploring the Devil Card Through a Buddhist Lens
(( Long post ahoy; this is mostly rambling but maybe it's interesting?))
Materialism is a little vague, isn't it?
Especially in today's day and age, when it's so often it's conflated with reality itself, the vastness of what materialism can encompass makes it difficult to know. The fact that it's one of the first meanings usually given for the Devil card is particularly interesting to me. If the material is taken as the whole of reality, what does the Devil card have to say about the nature of said reality?
I don't think it's too controversial to say that the material world can only really be known through the six senses (Buddhism sees the mind as a sense). We see it, hear it, touch it, smell it, taste it, and cognize it. Since we can't know reality apart from these senses, they shape what we take reality to be and thus are part of what the card comments on.
The chains bring to mind how limiting these senses can be. At any given time you can only experience what is in contact with your particular senses. There's no way to directly experience what someone else is directly experiencing - imagining it is an experience that is only in contact with (and honestly a projection of) the mind, not the full sensory experience someone else might be having.
Mental sensory experiences are their own beast. We can't know another person's love or hate of us directly as they experience it, we only experience the evidence of it through our own senses and create the story of it almost instantaneously. It's kind of isolating to really grasp this and culturally we create stories about "our nature" to obscure it - it's that deeply uncomfortable to realize this limitation in our ability to know others.
They're also limiting as a means of self regulation. If you rely on them as a means of managing your emotions, you constantly have to be going out and looking for material things to change your mood. I think for a lot of people this just seems normal or even enjoyable but for me, I find it exhausting. It also feeds attachment/craving for sensory things, growing it.
I like the metaphor I once heard Nyanamoli Thero (of Hillside Hermitage) use to describe this kind of craving. He said sensory craving was like being yanked around by a bunch of dogs on leashes. If you don't give into a craving - or just can't get what it wants - that's when you feel how hard that dog is straining, when you can truly feel how much craving sucks. And that's why we give into craving so much, it's the only way we know how to deal with the pain of that straining. We imagine it as a temporary relief or even a real satisfaction, because it's the best we've experienced thus far. But when seen in it's complete context, it's more akin to an addiction or a type of bondage - something I know all to well as an addict who spent many years imagining my addiction as alternating between "the norm" and something beautiful/ecstatic in part because I couldn't fathom any other way to live.
On the card, the chains split off and loop around the necks of two horned demons. I think people often take them to be humans who are trapped but the horns on their head aren't incidental. The woman is beautiful and has a tail of bountiful ripe grapes. The man is fit and has a tail made of fire. He stands on the side the devil keeps his own torch lit and ready. I see these two as the faces of the core lie that can come with putting the sensory/material world first: that what's "good" or "bad" - as each demon represents - is in the sensory and material objects themselves, that they have an essential nature.
And that lie really is hell.
If people, places, and things are have an essential - and thus unchanging - nature of being "good" or "bad", then all of life becomes some version of running toward or running away from which no possibility of rest at all. You've got to prove that you're "good" and align yourself with other "good" people and protect yourself from "bad" people - often by whatever means necessary. And there's always the threat that your "good" group will decide you're not quite "good" enough and now you're "bad" and they must protect themselves against your "bad" nature. You self soothe with what's "good" and constantly seek it out. You run from what's "bad" and are in misery when you're in union with it. In truth, this encapsulates a good chunk of what makes samsara so painful from the gross levels like war and illness to the subtle levels like constant self-criticism.
The inverted pentagram between the Devil's horns also speaks to me. While neopagans can spend all day debating the "real" meaning of symbols such as these, one tradition of religious satanism I studied for a while saw this symbol as one of individuation - separation from union/God - which was a core goal of the magic and ritual they engaged in. As a Buddhist now, it's connection to an essential "self" take on a different meaning.
In Buddhism, the delusion of a self is a kind of suffering. To believe you have a self that is essential, substantial, and largely unchanging brings about suffering by promoting identification with things that are ultimately incredibly fleeting - feelings, thoughts, sensations. With this pentagram at the top of the card, worn like a crown on the Devil's horns, it almost seems like this sense of self rules over this fascination with and bondage to the sensory world.
Another part of this card that really fascinates me is it's original meaning listed in the original 1910 accompanying book:
"15. THE DEVIL.—Ravage, violence, vehemence, extraordinary efforts, force, fatality; that which is predestined but is not for this reason evil. Reversed: Evil fatality, weakness, pettiness, blindness."
The term predestined - especially with it's distinction between a kind that is evil/entirely negative and that which is not - reminds me an awful lot of Karma. Karma isn't understood well in West and I hesitate to talk about it here, but I think it's potent enough with this card that I'll chance it. I think it's best to think about Karma in this case less like fate and more as a kind of habit or momentum. It's something built up over time and it's likely to continue on in the same direction. It can lead to positive, neutral, or negative destinations.
What does this have to do with the Devil card?
Hell is a habit.
It's a habit of seeing the material as the whole of reality. It's a habit of seeing that reality as dualistic and essential. It's a habit of misimagining the material as more than it actually is - objective, stable, safe, and directly shared in the experience of it. It's a habit of dealing with craving through endless repetitions of seeking and consuming. it's a habit of seeing one's self as undeniably painfully real.
Before someone can find the way out of this suffering, they have to begin to really see the limitations of their views, the results of their actions, and the unsatisfying nature of a focus on the sensory world. That's ultimately what I see this card as being about - those moments when you get a glimpse of the Matrix.
The Devil is, in a sense, "reality" for most people.
But everything is temporary.
