The Angel and the Devil

Images from the Giant Rider-Waite Tarot Deck, copyright 1971, U.S. Games Systems, Inc. Used with permission.

I had the pleasure of being a guest teacher at the Jamar Enlightenment Center in Palm Beach Gardens this month. It had been a few years since I taught a tarot class in a shop. I had forgotten how much fun that sort of class can be.

The class I taught was an all-level Major Arcana class, with a focus on the Waite-Smith images. When we got to Major Arcana 15, I talked about the Devil as the necessary gatekeeper on the path to spiritual enlightenment. I talked about the inherent choice offered by the Devil to stay attached or to break free. I also spoke about the Devil’s connection to Major Arcana 6, the Lovers.

One student looked at the Devil and asked a brilliant question. “Who is the third character in the Lovers?”

I was not sure what she meant, so I asked her to clarify.

“In this picture, there are two people and the Devil. Who is with the two people in the Lovers?”

I did not have to look at the card to remember that there is indeed a third character in the Waite-Smith Lovers, and that character visually dominates the image.
“It’s an angel”, I answered her.

This is why I love teaching tarot. Never, in the more than three decades of my study of tarot have I considered this aspect of these two cards. I have thought about their numeric connection, each being a Six. I have thought about the fact that in each image the two people are Adam and Eve. I have thought about ‘choice’ as a dominant theme in both cards. I have thought that each card asks us to contemplate our relationship to something or someone. Never have I thought about how there is an angel in the Lovers and a devil in the Devil.

I do not have a personal connection with either angels or devils. This realization about the Six cards in the Major Arcana made me want to dig a little.

Benebell Wen presented a fascinating presentation on the exorcism of demons for StaarCon 2021. Other than what I gleaned from that I know next to nothing about demonology. The mainline Protestant church of my youth did not acknowledge any sort of Satanic being, so the whole concept of demonic entities has been largely foreign to me.

I do talk a bit about angels in tarot readings because people ask about them. When people speak about angels, they mean varying things. For some, angels are their loved ones in spirit. For some, angels are God’s messengers on earth. For some, angels are the fearsome beasts of the Bible. For others, angels are the specifically named archangels.

The Christian Bible only names three angels, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. Michael and Gabriel are also recognized in Islam and Judaism. The Eastern Orthodox Church recognizes seven archangels. Many scholars point to Iranian Zoroastrianism as the origin of these named archangels.

There are names and classifications for demons in Christianity, Hindu, and occultism.

The book of Abramelin includes named demons.  The Abramelin was translated into English by Macgregor Mathers, one of the founders of the Golden Dawn. Of course, A.E. Waite, designer of the Waite Smith Tarot, was a member of the Golden Dawn.

In 1856, Éliphas Lévi drew the ‘Sabbatic Goat’ image. This image has been associated with Baphomet; a deity allegedly worshipped by the Knights Templar. Waite chose this image to become the Devil on his Major Arcana 15 card. This drawing was originally meant to represent a balance and integration of opposites.

This idea that this Devil image was not intended to be sinister, but rather to depict a balance of, and connection between, light and dark, human and animal, male and female, is an important point to consider. When we think of the Lovers we also think of that same balance and connection.

A.E. Waite did not name the angels in his tarot deck. Yet, many scholars assume the angel in Major Arcana 6, the Lovers, is Raphael, the angel associated with the element of Air.

Waite was clear that the Lovers image was to depict Adam and Eve before the Fall. We might say that the Devil is Adam and Eve after their banishment from Eden.

When we think of the Genesis myth in the context of these two cards, we again might think specifically of choices. In the Lovers, Adam is looking at Eve and Eve is looking at the angel. There is a choice between the physical and the spiritual. Once the choice resulted in banishment, new choices became available. In this new world of pain and toil, how should one live? In our life on earth, we are all yoked to many devils. Which devils do we chose, and how do we manage those realities?

When I think of an angel and a devil together, I have two immediate cultural references in my mind. One is a song by Dory Previn entitled “Angels and Devils the Following Day”. The song begins, “Loved I two men equally well, though they were different as heaven and hell. One was an artist, one drove a truck, one would make love, the other would…”

The song concludes with a preference for the devilish man over the angelic one, because the angelic one could not enjoy pleasure without suffering guilt. “And the one who was gentle hurt me much more than the one who was rough and made love on the floor”.

This very secular song offers me a way of considering the Lovers and the Devil, and their connection to one another. We might assume the Lovers to be desirable and the Devil to be undesirable. The Lovers might indicate a thoughtful choice, while the Devil might indicate an obsession. Yet, either could end up being hurtful, and either might turn out to be worthwhile. As with all of tarot, context is everything.

The other cultural reference is the “shoulder angel” who is always accompanied by a “shoulder devil”. We saw these characters in the cartoons we watched as children. The angel encouraged good decisions, while the devil enticed the character to give in to temptation.

This idea of a good angel and a bad angel is present in non-Biblical Christian writings as early as 150 AD. Perhaps most famous and influential is the play from the late 1500s, The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus.

There are similar paired characters in Islam, and in Japanese Buddhism.

This makes me think of an interesting meditation one could try when stuck in a decision-making process. One could, in meditation, think about the dilemma and consider Major Arcana 6 as the angel on one shoulder, and Major Arcana 15 as the devil on the other shoulder. What advice might each whisper into the ear?

Likewise, one could do a divination by using the Lovers to create one tarot spread position, such as “This is the advice of the Lovers”, and a second position created by the Devil, “This is the advice of the Devil”.

In those cartoons of our childhood, the Devil’s input is always ill-advised. We root for the character to listen to the angel at all costs. In tarot, there seems to be room for either character to offer wisdom, depending on the question and the situation.

It is easy to interpret Major Arcana 6 simply as a love relationship, and Major Arcana 15 simply as a negative attachment. Sometimes these simple card meanings will be appropriate in a reading.

Yet, these two cards offer opportunities for deep contemplation, meditation and magic, especially when we think of them as an angel and devil pair.