15-The Demon – Upright Salem Deck

Your Chosen Card – The Demon Upright Salem Deck

When upright, the Devil suggests that you have an opportunity to pursue activities that provide intense pleasure and satisfaction. This card often appears when we are contemplating a project requiring an almost obsessional devotion to achieve a material ambition. The Devil cautions us to maintain balance in our lives as we eagerly pursue this goal and not to allow excessive attachment to material temptations to lead us astray.

Unfortunately, the Devil card has become linked to views of dour theologians who believe that bodily pleasure is sinful in the eyes of the deity who ironically created the human body with all its capacity for enjoyment. The Devil card teaches us that seeking pleasure in life is perfectly acceptable, so long as it is done with moderation (which is why Temperance, card XIV, precedes card XV, the Devil). When this card appears in a reading, it’s time to lighten up and delight in activities that you may have avoided because of a rigid sense of obligation or morality. The Devil whispers in your ear: ‘If it feels good, do it.’ Thus, if there is a cherished worldly ambition you have held back from pursing, now is the time to go for it. The Devil simply cautions you to maintain a spiritual perspective so that you can avoid becoming ensnared by your material ambitions and adopt a twisted view of the world. Along these lines, a recent survey of a thousand parents in the UK found that despite the popular notion that money, professional success, and material possessions are essential for a happy life, 95 percent of them stated that the key to happiness lies in ‘spending quality family time together.’ 39

Keywords Upright: Loosening the ties that bind, breaking free of rigid morality, enjoyable material attachments, making healthy choices, having fun, enjoying sex, confronting temptation, delighting in what gives you pleasure, adopting a spiritual perspective, confronting one’s inner demons, casting off the chains of religious dogmatism, leading the life that you desire, intense devotion to a worldly ambition.

Key XV: The Devil (the god Pan)
Myths/Archetypes: Pan, the sex-crazed goat-legged god of the shepherds. Bacchanalia. Adam and Eve. Baphomet. Cernunnos. Lucifer. Faust. Knight Midas. Alexander the Great. Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies. The religiously obsessed suicide bomber.
Dates of Capricorn: 21 December–19 January (tropical); 14 January–12 February (sidereal)
Astrology: Capricorn, the Mountain or Sea Goat (an Earth sign ruled by Saturn)
Numerology: 6 (Lovers) = 1 + 5 (Devil)

Hebrew letters: Ayin (an eye; a Hebrew word meaning to see, watch, experience, know; also primeval light, shade, a spring or fountain, as an eye producing purifying tears in response to pain or grief). In the Bible, Lucifer’s name means ‘bringer of light.’ The letter Ghah is also associated with the Devil card. According to Jeff Benner, the twenty-third letter of the ancient Hebrew alphabet, Ghah (‘a twisted rope’), was absorbed into the modern letter Ayin. 38 Ghah means ‘twisted,’ ‘dark,’ or ‘wicked,’ and refers to goats because of their twisted horns. In modern slang, ‘horny’ has come to mean lustful or sexually preoccupied. Perhaps the combination Ayin Ghah associated with this card suggests adopting a twisted view of the world. Coincidentally, Capricorn – the goat of astrology – is assigned to the Devil trump.

When The Demon is upright you can pretty much take it that life is going well but that’s when life takes us by surprise.  If The Demon is unclear it may help to choose a card from the Major Arcana to provide more insight into what it is The Demon is trying to tell you.  If you had a particular issue in  mind, or want to seek clarification on something else, you can also choose again to get more guidance.

This chosen card is part of your upright card reading for The Demon using cards from the Salem Tarot Deck. You will find many more tarot pages that will be of great help if you need tarot card meanings. Use the search at the bottom of the page. We have some amazing tarot books for you to browse. Please see below.


Here are some snippets from a few of my favorite books

Portable Magic
Book Details
Portable Magic: It will be found that with Tarot cards of the usual proportions for example, the standard Rider Waite deck the circle of the zodiac trumps is almost exactly the correct size to enclose the four Aces of the altar. The elegance of this relationship is at once apparent when the circle is laid out around the cross. No space is wasted within the circle, and the ritual layout of the cards is rendered as compact as it could possibly be made, so that it takes up the least area on the working surface for a given deck of Tarot cards. A deck of large cards will require a bigger working space than a deck of small cards, but the efficiency of the layout is preserved in either case.

Tarot Books

Complete Book of Tarot: Ruled by taskmaster Saturn, Capricorn comes tenth in the zodiac. Capricorn the Mountain Goat or Seagoat, an active initiatory cardinal sign, is associated with the Devil, trump XV. The Queen of Pentacles falls largely under Capricorn, a sign whose natives are characterized by these traits:

Elements of the Psychic World: Eventually the rumour mill stopped turning and the exhausted Addams wrote about her experience in her book The Second Twenty Years at Hull House. In it she suggests that the story appealed to immigrant women who felt outsiders in America and the devil baby story was something they could relate to.

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Elements of the Psychic World: Eventually the rumour mill stopped turning and the exhausted Addams wrote about her experience in her book The Second Twenty Years at Hull House. In it she suggests that the story appealed to immigrant women who felt outsiders in America and the devil baby story was something they could relate to.