The Devil
The Forty Servants in Theory & Practice
Hello, good people of the internet, and welcome back to The Forty Servants in Theory and Practice, a series where I have a deeper look into the philosophy, use, and evolution of the Magick and Divination system: The Forty Servants.
Each entry will focus on one Servant at a time, offering background insight, design history, divination reflections, shadow aspects, magical applications, and how my personal understanding of each has shifted or deepened over the years.
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So, let’s go…
THE DEVIL
“The Devil shows us the beliefs we hold that restrict us and keep us from true freedom. He encourages us to realise that we have placed these bindings ourselves and can break free whenever we want.”
ARTWORK
Like a number of other Servants, such as The Media, The Fixer, The Desperate, and The Protester, the artwork for The Devil originates from the first, unpublished version of my comic The Great Work. When it came time to adapt the art for The Forty Servants, I didn’t want to mess with it too much because the original drawing already had pretty much the exact vibe I was looking for. I added colour, drew some highlights into the beard to give it a bit more depth, and made the black background a bit wider to fit the dimensions of the card properly. Other than those minor tweaks, the artwork remains more or less the same as the original comic panel.
It’s a dark, striking image, similar to The Monk in that it’s a character surrounded by darkness, but whereas The Monk retreats into this darkness, The Devil steps forward into the light. He wears a blood-red cloak and has the head of a horned goat, a classic esoteric nod to the Baphomet, the traditional Tarot Devil, and all the various iterations of the Devil throughout history.
His eyes are glassy and reflect ourselves back to us.
But the thing is, that underneath this outward appearance, there’s no actual tangible form underneath. I often feel that the cloak and the goat skull are being propped up by a broomstick, and one quick push would knock everything to the ground and destroy the entire illusion.
The Devil is the ultimate symbol of being tied to the illusory world, bound and restricted by our own rules, principles, proclivities, and preferences. This captivity is real, but it’s also voluntary and self-imposed, and we are often the last to realise we could have left the chains behind at any time.
THE SIGIL
The sigil for The Devil is essentially a classic devil’s pitchfork. It is drawn as a trident with the outside spokes bent inwards, trapping whatever is inside it. The person is the centre line, but they are bound by what they have surrounded themselves with.
The Sigil is a great tool for spotting the limits you’ve placed on yourself and then doing something about them. I find the easiest way to use it is to draw the sigil on paper, along with whatever the rule or restriction you want to get rid of (such as I am lazy, I am worthless, I’m not good enough, I’m not the type of person who…, I’m not allowed, etc.) and then burn it.
Or, when you find yourself acting on a restricting belief that you no longer want, visualise The sigil pushing this belief away from your body and far away from you. Think of it as a barrier that is now placed between you and this belief.
I have also used it as a focus for meditation, either by visualising it with my mind’s eye or by placing it in front of me and looking at it in a meditative state.
If you’re familiar with the older symbolism, there are a few other ways to read the shape. You can view it as a traditional witch’s Stang, with a centre line denoting where the candle or flame would sit. You could also read it as a symbol of someone putting their hands up and surrendering. Or as a deformed version of The Healer’s sigil, where instead of healing, it causes restriction and a top heaviness.
Sigil Quick Uses: Identifying self-imposed limitations, breaking bad habits and cycles, confronting addictive or compulsive patterns, examining limiting beliefs, reclaiming personal power, and ritual acts of release.
DIVINATION
When The Devil shows up in a reading, it is a clear indicator that you are being restricted, bound, or trapped. You are stuck in a situation, but these restrictions are not coming from an outside opposing force. These restrictions are self-inflicted. The Devil comes with the hard truth that the chains that bind us are often of our own making. The cage door is often wide open, but we are choosing to stay inside because it is familiar, or because we are terrified of the unknown outside of it.
Now, this is not to say that everything that has ever happened to us is our fault, or that we caused it, or that there are no outside opposing forces working against us. There are, and The Opposer represents those forces. The Devil isn’t about victim-blaming, or spiritual bypassing, or being a needlessly harsh critic of your own failings. It’s just acknowledging that we are often the ones who are holding ourselves back by our views, actions, rules, and beliefs about how the world works, and our position in it.
Have a look at the beliefs and rules you have around the current situation or question you have asked. Are they helping or hindering the situation? Are they even true? Are they yours or someone else’s rules that you’ve picked up along the way? Often, it’s a case that we have a deep-seated rule about life, but when we really look at it, we find that it’s originally our parents’ rule, or a rule of some significant authority figure, that we have just integrated into our ruleset. A lot of the time, we don’t even agree with these rules, yet we still play them out because they are left unexamined.
All your life, you have been told that some things are “wrong” or “sinful”, but have you ever really stopped to think if you actually agree with these rules?
The Devil asks you to question whether the morality you’ve inherited is really your own. Every perspective has a different view of the universe, different circumstances, and different functions, and to assume one particular set of moral rules fits everything is worth letting go of. The Devil calls for you to let go of inherited guilt, borrowed ideas around sin, or worrying what the neighbours will think, and instead look honestly at what you actually believe and become your own moral compass.
But the core message is always one of empowerment, never condemnation. The Devil is not here to punish you; he wants you to be free. The whole reason he points so insistently at the chain is that he wants you to notice it’s not locked. His appearance in a reading is genuinely good news, even when it doesn’t feel like it as it means you have more power over your situation than you’ve been allowing yourself to believe.
Remember, as I mentioned above, one push and the whole illusion breaks.
SHADOW REVERSAL
Reversals in The Forty Servants don’t signify the opposite of the normal energy of the Servant, but more a dysfunctional version of it, or a detrimental misuse or misunderstanding of the qualities.
With most Servants, the reversal points to a dysfunction, but The Devil is interesting because his upright meaning is already about confronting dysfunction. So his shadow goes somewhere more specific: it’s the refusal to confront the shadow at all. It’s being so completely run by a pattern, a compulsion, or a darker aspect of yourself that you can no longer see it operating. The chains have become so familiar that you’ve stopped experiencing them as chains.
This is the person who flatly denies they have a problem, even though it’s obvious to them and everyone around them. They are so thoroughly identified with the limiting belief or the destructive behaviour that questioning it feels like an attack on the self. The shadow Devil isn’t the person wrestling with their demons; they are the person who has stopped fighting entirely and simply become the thing, all while insisting nothing is wrong, or that others are the problem.
Many people would genuinely rather stay caught than look directly at the darker aspects of who they are, because they suspect that to look would be to confront something unforgivable. So they don’t look. They keep the chains on and call it their personality.
The Devil reversed is the call to do the very thing being avoided. To turn around and actually look at what’s been running the show from the shadows. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s the only way out. The aspects of ourselves we refuse to examine don’t go away; instead, they just run the controls from behind the scenes.
Reversed, The Devil can also signify absolute tyranny and totalitarian control. This could be you exerting a suffocating level of control over someone else, or allowing someone else to completely dominate your life. It is the energy of abuse, manipulation, and being utterly crushed by dogma.
Alternatively, a reversed Devil can point to a complete and destructive rebellion against all rules. While breaking free from restrictions is often healthy, this shadow aspect represents breaking the rules just for the sake of causing chaos, even to your own detriment. It asks you to look at whether your defiance is actually serving you, or whether you are just causing further unnecessary damage out of spite or rage.
MAGICK
Magickally speaking, The Devil is the go-to Servant for unbinding restriction and breaking free from whatever has its hold on us. But working with him requires a particular kind of courage, because the first step requires us to be brutally honest about our own complicity in our situation.
Shadow Work, as it is often known, is not comfortable work. Most of us have a deep investment in not seeing our self-imposed limits as self-imposed. As long as the chain is locked by someone else, we don’t have to do anything. The Devil takes this excuse away, and that loss can feel like a kind of grief before it feels like freedom.
But I have always found that the pain of realising just how much of an asshole you are being in one particular area is always paired with a great relief. It’s the relief that you no longer have to act like an asshole anymore. And it’s the relief that at least now you know.
One way to work with The Devil is to begin by naming the rule, problem, or restriction as clearly and precisely as you can. List the actual full details of the specific pattern, belief, or behaviour. Place his image or sigil before you and speak it plainly. Like all the Servants, speak out loud. Talk to him like he is a person in the room in front of you.
Then, talk about your own role in keeping it going. It might be helpful to journal this, too. What do you get out of it? Because we do get something, even from the patterns that hurt us, and we can’t let go of something while we’re still secretly collecting on it. The payoff is usually a little embarrassing once you spot it, and it’s often something you’d rather not believe about yourself—but once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Name it as honestly as you named the pattern, because until you do, part of you will keep choosing the chain.
Once you’ve genuinely identified both the pattern and what you’re getting from it, the breaking can be ritualised. Try to break everything down into a sentence or two and then write it down on a piece of paper. Then draw the sigil over it. Next, burn the paper as a deliberate enactment of the shadow being destroyed.
However, The Devil is emphatically not about beating yourself up, and if your shadow work is turning into a session of self-punishment, just stop. The work with the Devil should be firm and honest, but with a gentle, loving hand. You’re not aiming to punish yourself. The aim is to free yourself.
While many people, including myself for the most part, stay away from baneful magick, sometimes you just need to stop someone from doing harm. Though The Devil’s work is usually turned inward, on our own chains, his binding power also works outward when it has to. If someone is spreading lies about you, harassing you, or causing chaos in your life, you can evoke The Devil to bind them. Write their name and what you want them to stop doing, draw The Devil’s sigil over it, and state clearly that their harmful actions are now restricted. Place the paper in the freezer.
The Devil is also highly effective for oath-making, bindings, and pacts. If you are making a promise to yourself or the universe and you want to ensure you don’t back out, call on The Devil to oversee the contract. Take this very seriously, though, as he will hold you to it.
Another useful ongoing practice is to periodically ask The Devil to show you something you’ve stopped noticing about yourself that is holding you back needlessly. Events and circumstances will appear in your life such that these beliefs and rules come to the surface for you to observe. Once you recognise them, you can begin to work past them and then release them.
SERVANT COMBINATIONS
The Devil and The Contemplator are a strong pairing for uncovering the roots of whatever’s got hold of you. The Contemplator can go down into the subconscious and surface where the chain originally came from, such as an old belief, an early experience, a long-forgotten decision that set the pattern running. Knowing the origin often loosens the grip considerably. The Devil then helps let it go.
Combine The Devil and The Road Opener when you need to smash through intense restrictions or escape a situation where you feel hopelessly trapped.
The Devil and The Gate Keeper make a natural combination. The Devil shows you what’s holding you, and The Gate Keeper reminds you that there is always a key to every door, and helps you find the way out.
The Devil and The Moon work well together for the deeper shadow material. The Moon brings the lies we tell ourselves out into the open. The Devil then gives you the framework for understanding it as something self-imposed that can be confronted and released.
Use the combination of The Devil and The Protector to create a fiercely guarded boundary.
And that’s it for this time, I hope you got something good from it. If you’d like to chat about it, you can leave a comment below, or come find me on Bluesky, though I’m not terribly active over there.
If you would like to support this series and the rest of the stuff I do, then please consider a paid Patreon Membership, buying me a coffee, or sending a PayPal donation! All amounts, even very small ones, all really, really help to keep the engine running here.
So, until next time,
MAY YOUR BEST DAYS BE AHEAD!
Tommie
THE FORTY SERVANTS IN THEORY & PRACTICE SERIES:
THE WITCH - THE GATE KEEPER - THE MOTHER -THE FATHER - THE PROTECTOR - THE SAINT -THE CONDUCTOR - THE PROTESTER - THE IDEA - THE BALANCER
-THE MOON - THE LEVITATOR - THE THINKER - THE EXPLORER - THE MASTER
- THE DEAD - THE SUN - THE PLANET - THE DEPLETED - THE HEALER - THE EYE
- THE CARNAL - THE FORTUNATE - THE MONK - THE FIXER - THE LIBRARIAN
LECTURE VIDEOS:
001 — Introduction
002 — Beg, Borrow, Be.
003 — Art History
004 — The Book Of Pacts
005 — Pathworking Astral Addresses
006 — The 9 Card Spread