A Deal With the Devil

On new year’s eve my husband and I have a strange ritual. Once we have returned from whatever festivities we have attended, once the children have gone to bed, we pour ourselves cocktails, and we read tarot.

My husband does not know how to read tarot, but with the help of the cocktails he disregards that fact, and each of us draws a card from the major Arcana for each member of our family.

A tarot deck is actually a composite deck. It comprises the Minor Arcana, also called pips, which is more or less the same as a normal deck of playing cards. The only difference is that each suit has an extra court card – usually called a knight or a prince. The Major Arcana consists of twenty two cards, numbered 0 to 21, whose archetypal images have evolved over hundreds, if not thousands of years. Theirs are names to conjure with – the Magician, the Priestess, The Hanged Man, Death… Into each card are woven vast skeins of myth and history, civilisations lost and imagined, and somehow encoded in this mini-deck is, perhaps, all the spiritual potential of human experience.

It is an easy thing to consult the tiny booklet that comes with every pack, pluck an interpretation from the brief flurry of concepts like a chick from a brood: the beginning of a venture; a fresh start; opportunity; faith; innocence; naïveté; risk-taking; inexperience….It is less easy to look into the card itself and draw out the particular nuance that matters to you. You can read a major Arcanum perfectly with a glance and a quip, or you can spend years waiting for the sense of it to hit you.

With all that in mind, you can imagine my husband and me, a little bit solemn and a little bit drunk, cutting the deck for the cards that would reveal for our family the new year’s challenges and potentials. It is slightly nerve wracking. You can affirm all you like that there are really no bad cards, but there are cards you certainly don’t want to see.

Last year my cards were The Tower and The Magician. I looked at them and said glibly, “Looks like I’m going to have to pump up my mojo, because apparently the world is ending.” Then, for weeks, my country was on fire. After the smoke cleared came the devastating hails. And then there was the Plague. Mojo-requiring times indeed, but sadly I was not up to the challenge. 2020 got the better of me. Isolating became a habit, and whatever creative energy I worked up in the early days foundered somewhere between the video link-ups with friends and the emails to total strangers. And that is, after all, why the Devil created Netflix. Streaming will drown an artist. It is not simply the effortless distraction – it is the sheer unscalable liquid wall of it, the relentlessness of content – good, bad, sometimes brilliant. What is the point, you wonder, of trying to make anything? Creativity seems like those Christmas gifts you give and receive after a Certain Age – it’s nice, but where is anyone going to put it?

That, though, is not the worst of it. I developed a perverse addiction to Bad News. Current affairs has never been my trivia night topic, but all of a sudden I couldn’t get enough of the breaking stories, the in-depth analysis, the opinion pieces. I tuned in for Trump’s alternative truths, followed the covid body count, the natural and unnatural disasters, race riots, neo-fascist sabre-rattling, the final flailing triumph of Brexit. For light relief I checked up on Harry and Meghan. I watched the world much as I watch a spider consume its prey – with a grim and horrified fascination. I watched foreign language news to read it in people’s faces. I backdated my bad news, and watched documentaries about Reagan and Thatcher, global warming, endemic racism, the history of slavery, homophobia through the ages, cold war propaganda, the rise of Hitler, the origins of World War 1. And I read the comments. I read all the comments.

The Comments is a species of Bad News all of its own. The gist of it is that Freedom of Speech is most jealously asserted by those who have absolutely nothing to say, and no wit with which to say it. Commenters fall into roughly five groups: People who have clearly not understood the article, or have not read it at all and simply respond to clickbait titles; people who feel the need to say exactly the same thing as twenty three other people have already said; Americans who somehow think everything everywhere is all about America; a minority of reasonable and courteous people naively hoping for actual conversation, and, finally, people who tell them they’re idiots. All of this I devoured indiscriminately, on some level convinced that the world was indeed ending, and the Apocalypse had not four but five harbingers: War, Famine, Plague, Death and Banality.

And that, perhaps, is why, in the birthing hours of 2021, the card I dealt myself was The Devil. . It is certain that I had become him – the Prince of Darkness, at once detached and obsessed, wearily mesmerised by humanity’s failures. He does not want the world to end. He just wants to say “I told you so” when it does. He doesn’t want the world to change. He just wants to say “I told you so” when it doesn’t.

In Tarot, The Devil represents enslavement. He also represents liberation. He represents the power that lies simmering under the experience of powerlessness.

There is a story I tell people sometimes. Years ago, I went to see a psychologist. Her practice was in a house, so there was an entry foyer, then the waiting room. When I arrived, the waiting room seemed empty. Nobody was at the reception desk. Nobody was sitting in the chairs. Then I noticed her, the young woman huddled on the floor against a wall. She was thin and wan. Her hair was lank. Her face was bruised. I hesitated before moving forward. I did not want to invade her space, which seemed cavernous. Reminding myself I had every right to be there, I took a seat, and sat there wondering where to look if not at her, what to think of, if not of her. The receptionist hovered in the kitchen, poking her head out to register my arrival. Later the next client would come, and he would stand awkwardly in the foyer while he waited. When the psychologist came out, I offered up my session, as clearly someone had a greater need. She assured me that was not necessary. The girl came every day so the psychologist could be certain she ate. So I thought of her every day, sitting hunched over I don’t know how many hours, holding unconscious court in the waiting room, everyone deferring instinctively to her, everyone surrendering time, space, love to her unresponsive slumping form, the psychologist serving her meals, the receptionist fielding her calls…And all the while she believed she was the bruises on her face, she was the baggy, discoloured clothing on her body, she was the chlorinated stain in her hair. But to me it was clear: she was the power that moves the world.

And that is what Evil looks like. Not a vain Bond villain, or a psychopath in tights – certainly not a half-goat half-man indulging in an orgy. Not a foreigner with a semi-automatic. Not an orange man in a suit. It is drab, unremarkable, beneath your notice. It is fog in the mind, it is dust on the tongue. It is anything and everything that hid from that woman who she is, and who we are. Like the wind, we never really see it, but we can see what it does. We can see where it’s been. In its wake are poverty, despair, violence. Evil had buffeted that girl I don’t know how much or how often…But still, her power was in her, howling like a child lost in a hurricane: Take me back! Come back to me!

I do not know what to do about Evil. It’s not a matter of pointing and yelling, “stop that man!” That is, perhaps, comforting to imagine, but history has shown us that it is just imagining, and as often as not, the wrong people are pointed at, and the wrong people are stopped. I do wonder, though, whether the psychologist ever found a mirror to hold up to that girl that didn’t reflect the bruises and the stains, the hunger and the neglect, but something fierce and indomitable that could, without a touch, push people from a room, or draw them in, and engrave her on their memory. I would like to find that mirror. It occurs to me, maybe, I am that mirror.

My husband dealt me a very different card. It was The Fool. The Devil knows everything that is dark in the human experience, but The Fool knows none of it. The Fool is an innocent. He believes in the good in everyone, and is probably very eager to help out that briefly financially embarrassed Saudi prince. He is often shown stepping blithely out over a precipice, his mind on other things. We do not know what the drop is. Maybe it is a light step down. Maybe it is a plummet to his doom. Maybe it is a long fall into a fortuitously placed pile of mattresses where the lover of his dreams is waiting naked.

The Fool lives as if nothing were at stake, and The Devil lives as if nothing matters. I am the Fool as much as I am The Devil. And both of them drag me back to that room with that girl.

So maybe I am the mirror, because I believe in the good, and maybe I am the mirror because I believe in the power. Maybe I am the mirror because I trust nothing in particular, and maybe I am the mirror because I trust everything in general. Maybe I am the mirror because I see the dark, and maybe I am the mirror because I see beyond it. Maybe.

Ask me in a year what the cards meant. What I know now is this: I have been staring at Evil long enough. I am the thing that sees past it. And if all I can do is reflect on what I see, maybe that is enough. Maybe that can be a good thing in the world, so maybe I should come back.

And that is what I am doing. Right here. See?