The Tarot Devil: Avoidable Evil
I was going through some old files today, and found my notes from a workshop I presented on the Devil in Tarot. At the time, there was a string of highly public insider trading cases which caught several people in its web, starting with Michael Milken, Dennis Levine, Martin Siegel, and Ivan Boesky. Sadly, this excerpt from the workshop is just as applicable here in 2018, with the endless string of charges and indictments surrounding the current occupant of the US White House.
Paul Huson challenges us to think of the Devil not just as evil, but as avoidable evil. This requires us to take responsibility for our choices, and that’s not always a comfortable thing to do, particularly when dealing with things considering unacceptable by one’s culture. “The devil made me do it” or “I was deceived by someone else” or whatever other-blaming excuse we can come up with is more convenient than admitting the truth of our own bad choices. However, if we refuse to acknowledge our role in the situation, if we externalize and play the victim, it saves our reputation, and perhaps our ego, but creates greater discomfort in the long run because we are refusing the lesson of our soul—which means, yes, we’ll go through this again.
There are times when someone is a victim, and let’s not blame them for their situation. But how many times does someone claim to be a victim of another person’s machinations, when the reality is they just didn’t think they’d get caught?
The Devil from The Aquarian Tarot by David Palladini
