The Devil is out of the deck

A venerable teacher is going to speak to an advanced circle, including myself, on trump XV of the Tarot: the Devil.

He explains that the Devil card is missing from the deck.

I open a locked inner section of a cabinet, turning a key in a drop-down door. I keep my personal Tarot in this secret place. I want to offer the teacher the fifteenth trump from my own deck to illustrate his talk.

My “deck” is a beautiful hand-crafted book whose covers open on leather hinges. The cards in this deck are intricate black-and- white drawings, with some patches of color.

I remember the Devil in this deck as an elegant figure in a hooded red robe. No horns or chains.He looks like a handsome Renaissance prince, seated in a walled garden. The background is black and white. The intricate architecture of the design reminds me of the drawings in the Dream of Polyphilo.

I leaf through the book to find the Devil. The cards are held within the pages by little corner pockets like those you might find in an old-fashioned photo album.

The Devil card is missing. I check again. It is definitely gone.

With a start, I realize that the teacher must have been speaking of my deck. The teacher will give his talk on the fifteenth trump, with or without the card.

dream reentry

I traveled back inside the dream, to hunt the Devil. I found him riding a black horse through a field of grain.

I followed him into a church or cathedral. He was utterly at home here. He suggested that it is he who is worshipped in many churches, under different names.

The library room from the dream took on great solidity. The table with the huge books revealed carved dark legs, and a carved bookstand that seemed to be fixed to the table-top. Some of the books on the table are chained because if they are not kept under restraint they may go flying off by themselves.

The cabinet of polished wood with the locked compartment where I found my Tarot deck also contains glasses and goblets. The key to the lock is gold and resembles the Vatican keys.

I study the people in the library room. Some of the women are familiar; there are men I do not recognize. The teacher is wearing a fine pleated purple robe, with a soft Renaissance hat. I do not see his features clearly, but I have the sense he is my older or wiser self.

I know now that the Devil who is out of the deck is a prince of the church. He is often on the loose!

Research:

No Devil in a hand-painted Tarot deck has survived. This is one of the four cards missing from the Visconti-Sforza “wedding deck” (the others are the Tower, the three of swords and the Prince of Coins).

This is an "old" report, which appears (with the little sketch) in a hand-written journal entry dated December 8, 2001. I am planning to offer new classes in "Tarot for Dreamers" in 2012, so I am especially interested in how I have been dreaming Tarot since I was a teen.

In the City of Devils

Kaunas, Lithuania

This is the only city in the world, they boast, that has a Museum of Devils. It began with the private collection of the landscape artist Antanas Žmuidzinavičius, who painted in classical style and appears from his portraits to have been a cheerful, apple-cheeked fellow. Yet he was fascinated by how Old Nick is depicted, especially in folk art; a sculptor friend contributed a carving of a devil fleeing in terror from Antanas, who is pursuing him to add him to his collection. The artist liked the number 13 and eventually assembled 20 times 13 images: 260 devils.

Popular motifs are the devils of addiction, riding drunks and leering around the edges of drinking cups. The splayed body of a devil makes an ashtray, inviting the cigarette smoker to keep puffing. Here's a devil forcing a bottle down a drinker's throat. A cute commentary instructs us that alcohol originated with she-goat urine. It's okay to have one drink for God, then one for yourself, but after that your drinking is for the devil and your throat (for starters) is going to burn.

The devils in the core collection are twisted and ugly, but generally fairly stupid - there are many images in which a smart fellow tricks a devil - and not especially scary. However, there is one piece that evokes a dark time when it seemed that most of Europe was possessed by true devils. This is the 1975 sculpture by Kasys Dereskevičius titled "My Lithuania". It depicts the devil Stalin flogging the devil Hitler across a field of the dead (see the graphic above).

On the top floor of the museum are devil images from far and wide. Slavic countries are strongly represented, but there are also Rakshasas from India, Tibetan "wrathful deities", and capering skeletons from Central America. Foreign visitors are politely informed that if they have a devil they'd like to unload, they may leave it here. As I walked the museum, I felt more and more acutely that something essential was missing. While most of the devils were shown with little horns, these were not actually horny devils. Not a single one had even the faintest suggestion of sexual equipment. Finally I had to ask one of the curators: "Why don't the devils of Kaunas have sex organs?"

Blushing and smiling, she said, "But some of them do. Even very big ones."

"Then where are they?"

She explained that the sexy devils are kept in a storeroom under lock and key. Because of the school groups that tour the museum. How very silly, I thought. Children are curious about sex, just as they are curious about death, and well-meaning adults do no good at all by trying to push either theme under the tablecloth. It's even possible that we create devils, and magnify their power, when we try to repress or deny primal forces and feelings. "The Devil's greatest art,"said Baudelaire, "is to make us believe that he does not exist." I found it impossible to believe in the devils on display in the Kaunas museum (except for Hitler and Stalin) but it was possible to not-quite-disbelieve in the devils locked in the basement.