Today's Tarot: The Golden Devils Inside You
Life is a cycle that repeats itself. The images of the tarot’s 22 major arcana cards depict the cycle of the human experience in 22 different stages. Each card represents a phase of life through which we are led to discover ourselves. There is The Fool’s expansive field of possibility, The Priestess’ gestative contemplation, the generous grace of The Star, the stability of The Emperor, the chaotic disassemblage of The Tower God (AKA The Blasted Tower), the Devil’s playful invitation to explore our shadow and find the creativity that hides there, and more.
When we look at the tarot and reflect on our response to its images, we are contemplating our relation to the aspect of ourselves that we perceive in each card. We are observing how we relate to that phase of the human experience. If we see the skeletal figure of The Nameless Card--also called “Death” in other decks--and find that it provokes fear, then we might have some resistance to the drastic sweeping of change which it illustrates. If we are excited by The Empress, then maybe her capacity for creative vision is touching upon our own desire to create something we’ve been dreaming of. If we feel a neutral sense of disconnection from The Moon, then it could be reflecting a buffer that exists between us and our deeper, more mysterious emotions, as they are depicted in the strange manifestations of The Moon.
The tarot shows aspects of existence that we all experience, but each of us navigates those aspects differently. It’s a cycle that repeats itself countless times throughout our lives. Each of us has our own special set of attachments and inner blockages that lead us to encounter the same challenges over and over again. This is why we often find ourselves confronted with a familiar mess that has manifested itself in our lives before. Frustrated that this infuriating or disheartening event has occurred again, we scream at the sky, “Why does this always happen to me?!” This is one example of life’s cycle, and a particularly aggravating aspect of it, repeating itself.
When we are met with such an obstacle unfolding for the umpteenth time and fucking up all of our business, it’s probably because it’s attempting to show or teach us something that we haven’t yet been recognizing and incorporating into our daily lives. Thankfully, each time we go through the cycle, we can change our response to its events. If we change our response, we will change our experience.
Let’s say you have been meeting The Devil—and whatever they represent to you—on your path multiple times and every time you meet them and their corresponding phenomena, you find your tail tucking itself between your legs as you scurry away. You want desperately to evade whatever The Devil is attempting to show you. But you’ve been around the block several times now. You’ve encountered and fled from The Devil, which is an unintegrated part of yourself, so many times that you feel stuck, thwarted. You realize that this pattern of fear-fleeing and unconscious growth-avoidance is going to repeat itself ad infinitum so long as you continue perpetuating the same response.
So what can you do?
It’s not uncommon that people will have a recurring dream in which they are being chased and hunted by a seemingly hostile entity. Some of these people, who have been written about in dream literature, shared this experience with a therapist. The therapist then suggested that, in the dream, they stop running, turn around to face their perceived assailant, and ask them, “What do you want from me?” In most cases, the entity is actually trying to help them, trying to bring into the dreamer’s awareness some useful, creative, yet dormant, aspect of themselves. [Sidenote, if you’re interested in learning about this and other methods of dream exploration, check out Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the Inner Self by Robert Waggoner.]
It’s as if there’s some gold (your potential, your strength, your creativity) buried in your subconscious. In the dream, the pursuant entity has uncovered this metaphysical gold and is trying its darnedest to return it to you. Whatever that golden part of your being is, it was buried under a mound of fear or shame, probably due to some unfortunate lesson that you were taught in childhood or elsewhere in life. Because there’s an air of conditioned fear surrounding that gold, you want to run for the hills whenever its scent creeps up your nose. The more you run, the more you try to avoid or fight whatever it is, the louder it’s going to get. It’s going to get louder because it’s doing all it can to get your attention. If you leave a wound unattended, the pain is going to worsen until you finally tend to it. That, or the wound gets infected and your limbs rot off altogether.
A screen from the movie El Topo (1970).
Back to the aforementioned example of The Devil. The Devil can be seen as a representation of your shadow, the sticky, icky webs and snarls in the back of your mind, the silent creepers at the bottom of the ocean of your heart. It’s everything we perceive as being ugly, shameful, and painful within ourselves. Because of the fear that encases those murky components of our being, we end up separating ourselves from them. Of course, we can’t really separate ourselves from our shadow, but we try. We unintentionally enter a state of denial in order to protect ourselves.
But The Devil and our shadows are persistent! If we try to shove them away, they’ll find a way to reveal themselves in our daily lives. These manifestations of the shadow might appear to be external circumstances that have no roots within our own psyche. They might seem to be things that simply “happen to us”. If we meet someone who is openly demonstrating the aspect we repress within ourselves, then we are sure to be frustrated with that person. For instance, if we are neglecting our ability to assert ourselves in life and we then meet someone who is being overtly confident, we’re likely to be pissed off or feel defeated.
How can we discern the moments in which our shadow (our unattended inner wounds) is trying to reveal itself to us? Usually, anything that provokes fear, resistance, and emotional pain or discomfort is touching upon the shadow. In these cases, this pattern of pain will continue to repeat itself until we become curious about its correlations to our own psyche and then change our response to it, just as the dreamer pivots to ask their chaser what they want.
I don’t want to give the impression that it’s bad to avoid the shadow. It’s not about what’s good or bad. It’s about how we’re approaching life and responding to it and the effects that are stimulated by our approach. If the pain buried inside is severe or traumatic, then it may be useful, even necessary, to protect ourselves from it until we have the desire, resources, and support begin working with it. There’s no need to shame ourselves for avoiding the shadow—I do so on a daily basis—, but so long as we do, we will continue to encounter the same pattern of pain again and again. For me, the cycle of the shadow’s unveiling seems to follow a similar process:
I experience a specific pattern and manifestation of pain in my life.
I avoid or fight the pain because, well, it’s painful.
Eventually, I get sick of the pain.
I start to question the pain and contemplate what I might be doing to perpetuate or worsen it.
Then I ask myself two questions: What is the pain trying to show me? What change is it behooving me to make in order to be more free?
Those ordered steps look neat and linear, but it usually unfolds in a much messier way with lots of bouncing back and forth, plenty of stumbling around in the dark. Teetering between evasion and revelation, from one moment to the next. It’s not a smooth and perfect process, but it doesn’t need to be. What matters most is that if just try to make small efforts here and there, continuing to move in the direction of more freedom, things will begin to change. Like a slow, steady and sometimes confused turtle, we’ll eventually be able to look back and realize that, hey, we have made some progress and we have shed some unneeded skin. Okay. So maybe turtles don’t shed skin, but after I wrote the previous sentence, I Googled it and—you know what? Turtles do shed parts of their shell throughout their lives. There’s certainly some metaphorical value there, no?
Each time we go through life’s cycles, we will still find the same elements, but our experience of them will shift. If we start to observe our pain and make some inner tweaks, then each time we see The Devil on the road, they will be a little less disconcerting and a little friendlier. And if we can learn to play and dance with our inner devils, what freedom there is!
On my blog, you can find more writings on art and alchemical thinking, interviews about creativity, psychologically-oriented reflections on tarot, and more. You can check out past posts in the categorized list below.
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Art
- Jul 2, 2018 About the Folks Who Think You Stink (Notes on Performance and Life)
- Jun 22, 2018 The Freedom and Fear of Being Yourself (Notes on Performance and Life)
- Apr 3, 2018 Public Alchemy: Notes on Street Performance
- Dec 1, 2017 Why the Tutu?
- Sep 14, 2017 Art is a Portal
- Aug 17, 2017 Put the Potatoes on Your Face
- Dec 28, 2016 How to Make Magical Oranges
- Dec 19, 2016 Wakey Wakey, Inner Kiddo
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Interviews
- Jul 18, 2018 Artist Interview: Kayle Karbowski
- Jun 4, 2018 Artist Interview: Sally Nicholson
- Apr 23, 2018 Interview: Yogi Ron Katwijk
- Mar 1, 2018 Artist Interview: Lawrence Blackman
- Feb 21, 2018 Artist Interview: Samantha Blumenfeld
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Magical Thinking
- Jun 21, 2023 Magick for Reshaping Life and Transmuting Trauma
- May 18, 2023 Magick is a Sentient Entity: Using the Imagination to Co-Create with Magick
- Dec 4, 2020 The Healing Voice: Wounds, Addiction, and Purgation
- Aug 5, 2019 Celebrating Your Misery
- Jun 21, 2019 White Peacocks, Constipation, and Emotional Liberation
- Aug 23, 2018 Melting a Snowball of Misery
- Jul 2, 2018 About the Folks Who Think You Stink (Notes on Performance and Life)
- Jun 22, 2018 The Freedom and Fear of Being Yourself (Notes on Performance and Life)
- Apr 16, 2018 Questions for Limitations
- Apr 3, 2018 Public Alchemy: Notes on Street Performance
- Jan 5, 2018 Chaos' Playground: Finding Gold in the Shitstorm
- Dec 1, 2017 Why the Tutu?
- Sep 14, 2017 Art is a Portal
- Aug 7, 2017 Three Reasons to Destroy Yourself (Or Not)
- Jul 6, 2017 Nerves and Tutus
- Feb 19, 2017 Why Does Heartache Happen?
- Jan 15, 2017 Following Fear
- Dec 28, 2016 How to Make Magical Oranges
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Tarot
- Oct 24, 2019 TAROT QUESTION #5: Why does my skin crawl with wonder and fascination as such important relationships in my life are connected by the eyes?
- Oct 11, 2019 TAROT QUESTION #4: How long will it be until I have a new job?
- Sep 25, 2019 TAROT QUESTION #3: Why can't I find more hours in a day?
- Sep 3, 2019 TAROT QUESTION #2: Do abusers know they're being abusive, or is that just their sense of reality?
- Aug 25, 2019 TAROT QUESTION #1: Why is the Present Moment So Much All the Time?
- Aug 18, 2019 Today's Tarot: Shifting Pain by Surrendering to It
- Aug 13, 2019 Today's Tarot: The Golden Devils Inside You
- Aug 12, 2019 Today's Tarot: The Moon of Self-Loathing
- Jun 27, 2019 Today's Tarot: Snot, Beauty, and Tea for Pain
- Feb 28, 2018 Today's Tarot: The World is in the Seed
- Aug 26, 2017 Tarot as a Tool for Reality Construction
