Have you ever wondered how you can harness the power of archetypes and symbols to live with more wisdom and depth? In this week's episode, Dr. BethAnne continues the Archetypes of the Tarot series with Deconstructing the Devil.
Key talking points include:
- Understanding the archetype of the devil and the invitation of freedom in this card
- Perspectives on understanding our shadows so we can consciously choose light
- How to utilize the lessons of The Devil to inspire freedom and radical change
- Ideas and tools to help us channel inspiration from archetypes so we can feel more equipped to journey with peace and ease
Tune in next week for a new episode of Your Heart Magic, where we'll continue our Mental Health Toolbox series. New episodes of Your Heart Magic air weekly each Thursday at 6pm HST.
Resources:
Tricksters from Lamentations of The Sea: 111 passages on grief, love, loss & letting go
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Your Heart Magic is a space where heart wisdom, spirituality, and psychology meet. Enjoy episodes centered on mental health, spirituality, personal growth, healing, and well-being. Featured as one of the best Heart Energy and Akashic Records Podcasts in 2024 by PlayerFM and Globally Ranked in the top 5% in Listen Notes.
Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright is a Licensed Psychologist, Spiritual Educator, and Akashic Records Reader. She is the author of the Award-Winning Lamentations of the Sea, its sequels, and several books of poetry. A psychologist with a mystic mind, she weaves perspectives from both worlds to offer holistic wisdom.
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Below is a transcript of the episode as generated by Otter.ai. (*please note, this transcript has only been edited to put in line breaks for easier readability and may contain errors where a word or phrase got lost in transcription.)
[0:13] The symbolism and interpretations of the Devil card in Tarot readings.
Aloha and welcome to Your Heart magic and illuminating space where psychology spirituality and heart wisdom meet. Here's your host, Dr. BethAnne Kapansky. Wright, the clinical psychologist with a mystic mind.
Aloha, everybody. Welcome to in your heart magic. This is Dr. BethAnne Kapansky. Wright. Today we are continuing our archetypes of the Tarot series, and we are talking about card 15. The devil This is an interesting card because I think just the name of it the double brings up so many things for so many people, it would actually be an interesting self exploration activity to write that down.
And underneath it just free associate and write down what are all the ideas and associations that you have around the devil. And where did this come from? Are they religious construct societal constructs, something that was taught in the home, something that has become a part of a narrative that we might tell ourselves or think because somebody told it to us. It's just an interesting exercise and activity to do that.
And when I sat down today to think about some talking points to share about this archetype, I was really struck by just the flood of ideas that went through my mind with how vast this term is, and what it means to so many people. In the traditional tarot, the devil often represents addiction obsession, anytime that somebody is stuck in an over attachment to something that is no longer healthy for them.
And they are struggling to leave it can represent temptation, it can represent falling off the path and feeling really trapped in something. If you look at a lot of the ways various cards are drawn, oftentimes, it depicts some archetype or picture or image of some kind of devil like character. And there's two people like dancing puppets, I've seen two people trapped in a cage. And again, there's this sense of being trapped in something and stuck in something.
And yet one of the things I've always found beautiful about this card is that there's freedom to be found. And in the pictures, there will often be a way out like they're sitting in a cage, but there's no bars, or they feel like they're being pulled by puppet strings. Except, you know, there's a pair of scissors laying there, and it would be easy to cut the strings. There are many ways that I've seen this picture depicted in different texts. And ultimately, that is the message of this archetype.
[3:07] Embracing emotions and finding freedom through forgiveness and grace.
It's about freedom, and learning to free ourselves from attachments, or behaviors, or actions, or anything that is keeping us from becoming a more true version of ourselves a more authentic version of ourselves. And that's the focus I want to look at today, as we talk about how can we understand this archetype and our lives? And how can we feel inspired by it? I'm personally tired of fear based messages where people might pull this card and think, oh, no, I'm in trouble.
And sort of have this knee jerk reaction, like the universe is watching the Tarot deck is watching. And we're being called out on bad behavior that feels very old programming. To me, it feels like this very kind of base. I'm about to get caught out.
And when I think about that, I think about feeling like we're being called into the principal's office or called before an angry parent, or somehow, somebody's going to show up and knock on our door and tell us that we're not doing life, right. And we're in trouble now. And I don't think that's really what this card is about. Usually, if we're doing something that we don't feel good about, we know it.
We don't need to be caught up by your tarot deck, or called out by somebody else. Like we know it, it doesn't feel good inside. And focusing on that and then falling into that sense of shame and beating ourselves up often perpetuates the cycle. That's not really how we find freedom. From attachments and behaviors in our life that are no longer serving us. We find freedom through radical acceptance and compassionate detachment.
We find freedom through forgiveness, we find freedom through perhaps a little bit of tough love and a A little bit of a talking to to ourselves where we might find a more empowered voice and say, Hey, I am bigger than this, and I'm ready to change course. And here's my action plan for how to do so. But I think that ultimately, freedom is found through compassion and forgiveness and grace and learning to tap into those frequencies, as opposed to this very fear based way of looking at things.
So with that, I want to read a passage that I actually wrote from my book lamentations of the sea, and it's called tricksters. And I feel like this sets the tone today for the ideas that I want to present with how we can understand the archetype of the devil and our life.
Tricksters:
Rage, anger, hate, bitterness, resentment, desolation, isolation, self pity, wretched want, there may be some extraordinarily ugly emotions that come with grief.
While I have learned that everybody handles these experiences differently, I have also learned that we truly do need to feel them in order to bring healing to ourselves. If we deny the monsters in our rooms, they will only get bigger and louder, for they are simply trying to get our attention as they wait for our acknowledgement. All of us owe it to ourselves in our healing process to acknowledge the full spectrum of what we are feeling.
There are some hard beasts to face inside of ourselves, and they will come out during a passage of grief, but they do not have to be ignored and hidden. In fact, the more we learn to listen to and make peace with our own peaceable thoughts, by paying attention to what they have to say, honoring those feelings is valid than choosing love anyways, the more we realize they're actually teachers and disguise here to trick us and to learning about humanity, forgiveness and grace.
That's the bottom line when it comes to monsters. If you sit with them long enough, find a way to look them square in the eye and face what seems so scary, you'll begin to find they are not so scary at all, but are instead tricksters that help us get in touch with the toughest, darkest stuff of humanity.
So we can learn to make a conscious choice about choosing love, choosing forgiveness, and choosing peace, thereby becoming a willing participant and our own growth of the soul. They trick us into exploring the dark. So we are better able to appreciate and embrace the grace of life. After all, if we can learn to forgive and love over what feels dark inside of ourselves, how can we not then learn to begin to extend the same grace wherever we go to others, to our relationships, to our community, to the world.
That was written in 2016, as I was working through grief over the loss of my brother, and I had this moment during that time, where I was struggling with all these horrible emotions and my attachment to those emotions and how bad they felt.
[8:22] The Devil archetype in tarot cards and how it can help free us from limiting beliefs and behaviors.
And wanting to deny or disown the emotions or shove them aside, it doesn't feel good to feel things or to behave in ways that don't feel like our true self. And one of the gifts of grace that came from that time was the realization that when we go to dark places, and we explore the shadow self, inside of ourselves, and make space for the shadow self inside of ourselves and witness it, that in many ways, it tricks us into saying well, I don't want to stay here, I want to come out into the light as soon as possible because that feels so much better to live that way and so much more of a reflection of my true nature and what's really in my heart.
And so ultimately, I saw so much of what came up as a trickster that allowed me to understand that I have a choice always, and how I choose to experience life and how I shaped my narrative and my heart and how I choose to see the world and that I wanted to make a choice because I've been presented with this is what it looks like to be in the dark for a long time. I wanted to make a choice to find my way back out into a lighter space.
And ultimately, I think that is one of the things that the devil card has to teach us as an archetype, that it is part of our journey to have these experiences of falling into things that might feel dark or challenging or things that we might not even feel good about. that that is part of being human. It's part of understanding this journey, we might not mean for that to happen.
But many of us might find ourselves in a dark space, we could find ourselves in a toxic relationship, we could find ourselves in behaviors that feel obsessive or compulsive that we don't feel good about.
There's so many ways that this energy shows up in our lives. And it's part of the human journey. If we can learn to work with it constructively, and learn to find a way to bring light or compassion or grace into that experience itself. There's so much freedom to be found there. There are so many ways that we are able to forgive ourselves and to find what we need to make a change for the better.
And to move through that experience with more peace and ease and acceptance. So we can choose to create a new experience and our life if we don't like where we're at. And we feel we're in a dark space.
Shame doesn't free us from that, but compassion can. And the more we're able to bring compassion into that space, the more likely we are to say, I don't want to stay here anymore. And start to find our mojo that helps inspire us to make a change, to ask for help. To take a step in a different direction, to say I'm ready to create a new experience. So this isn't a bad archetype. There's no bad tarot cards, that is all dichotomous thinking, that says like this is to be avoided at all cost. It's actually an invitation to further liberate ourselves from anything that is getting in the way of our heart, and our authenticity, and what's most real inside of ourselves.
[11:47] An invitation to free ourselves from self-imposed limitations.
Ultimately, the devil archetype teaches us how to keep freeing ourselves from that which limits us. And what limits us can also be ways of thinking, and how we've attached a meaning to something.
Something that came up for me and making this particular archetype of the taro episode is that I had a sense of like, how do I even begin to tackle this because the card itself and the word felt so big to me. And I was trying to think about what talking points to shape and share with everybody. And all of this was kind of flying through my head the other day when I was out running, which is the space that I often have inspiration and creativity flow through. And then I can take that and ground that and make it into something later that I might want to share.
And as I was running, I had this thought, and I just started to laugh to myself, and I thought, oh my gosh, BethAnne, you are being such a perfectionist right now, you are not responsible for interpreting this archetype and offering some end all be all explanation, that explains the philosophies behind the collective ideas around what the devil is like, you do not have to offer an explanation for all of that and deconstruct what has been debated by philosophers and in religious text and spiritual leaders for centuries. Like, it's not your job to do that. You're talking about the Tarot deck, you're talking about how we can take this archetype into our individual lives and understand it.
So we live more meaningfully. And in that moment, I felt this freedom opened up. And I realized that the cage that I was putting myself into was this cage of perfectionism. And feeling like I had to somehow make this bigger than what it needed to be for an episode today, and these high expectations of self.
And so that was a really good example of this very small way that I was kind of boxing myself in, and trying to kowtow to the demands of perfectionism and feeling like I needed to do more than I actually have to do. And one of the ways that I've worked with that old belief within myself, which is very limiting, it's very restrictive, it's very confining, it's very hard on ourselves.
When we do that to ourselves. One of the ways that I've learned to work with that is remembering Less is more, and that we don't owe anybody being perfect. What we owe, if we choose to share it from a free space in our heart is to simply show up as ourselves and do the best we can. And we don't owe that to others. I think that's something that maybe we owe to ourselves and owe to our journey is to give ourselves that opportunity to be authentic and to be real.
And you hear the freedom and the shift in that from where I was at to what I reminded myself of and so again, when we encounter this archetype in our lives, it's an invitation to ask Where am I limiting myself and Sometimes how we are limiting ourselves might be something that we're actively doing or engaging in our life. But before we're ready to make a change, oftentimes that change starts with how can I see this with more light? And how can I work with this? And how can I bring more grace and peace and the energies of truth into it?
[15:22] The "devil" archetype and its role in personal growth.
That is really what this Trickster archetype is about. It tricks us into exploring these areas of false light, so that we feel better equipped to truly choose real light and truly choose something that holds substance to us. And let's talk a little bit about the idea of what is false light. What does that actually mean?
Sometimes false light truly is something that is completely false. It looks really glittery on the surface, we think there's something good there, we began to explore it and realize that appearances aren't at all what they seem like we walked into what looks like a beautiful place filled with treasures and filled with sumptuous fabrics or something like that. And then maybe if this was a fairy tale, we might realize in the light of day that it's all an illusion, and a spell has been cast.
And it's nothing is real, nothing holds substance. That's a very black and white example of something that would be false light, something we're dazzled by and attracted to, and we wander into. But a lot of things that are false light are much more nuanced than that.
And it's not that there's not good things for us to learn in them, we might wander into an area on our journey, and there are some things to be learned, maybe we fall down the rabbit hole of exploring a spiritual path or healing art or working with somebody or learning from them. And we really buy into whatever it is that we're learning. And maybe there are some things there that feel true for us. And that feels supportive for us, and that are good, edifying things that we can take away.
But ultimately, maybe we realize, when we stay too long that we also see things that don't feel good, that don't feel true, we start to see behind the curtain a little bit more, and begin to realize what once seems so edifying to us is no longer feeding us anymore. And that we've learned all that we can from that space that once felt exciting or glamorous, or gave us something now feels out of balance and is not truly nourishing us. And we began to realize that it's not substantial enough to stay there that it's time to move on and continue to seek things that truly feed our soul.
And so when I use the concept, false light, I think of that a little bit more on a spectrum, where sometimes none of its real, and there's something rotting at the core. And there was nothing good there in the first place. But sometimes I think that there are some good things we can learn from parts of our journey. But after a while, we just run into a wall and say, This isn't real enough. Like I've learned what I came here to learn, I can't hang out and camp in this space, I can't stay in this relationship, I can't stay in this philosophy. I can't stay in this lifecycle with this behavior.
And this job, this location, whatever it is, like this no longer feels true for me. It doesn't feel authentic, it doesn't feel genuine, it doesn't feel like real light. It feels like I took what light that there was. And I learned those lessons and I need something that feels more real, something more heartfelt, something more nourishing something that gives me a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in my life.
And so we make the choice to evolve and move into whatever it is that truly nurtures our soul, and truly feels like rivers of light, as opposed to something that was a pale imitation. And so the devil archetype helps us continually keep shedding the things that feel like pale imitations, when we have taken all that we can and it's time to move on.
[19:27] The devil archetype is a potential gamechanger towards authenticity and self- liberation.
And it's an ongoing invitation to help us step into a deeper space of authenticity, and to keep freeing ourselves and stepping through whatever self imposed limitations in cages we might find ourselves in and finding ways to move towards a more authentic relationship with ourselves a more compassionate relationship with ourselves. If we can free ourselves from shame over something right there.
We have just blasted through so many brick walls inside of ourselves. And now we've got more space in our start to show up for ourselves to show up for all parts of ourselves, to begin to show up in our relationships and in our lives, when we create space that is a game changer.
And so the devil archetype is ultimately a potential game changer that helps us see where we need to make a change and create more space in our life. And when we can say yes to that, from a place of self compassion, self forgiveness, and just truth, the ability to look at ourselves and with a loving, compassionate detachment say, This isn't good for me.
This isn't serving me, there's nothing more for me to learn by repeating the same old pattern or the same old thinking air, or the same old way of being, I am ready for something new. When we can say yes to that we have freed ourselves from some form of a self imposed limitation, and we are moving into a new place of grace, and space and freedom in our life. Thank you so much for joining me today.
And this episode, where we explore the devil archetype and I hope looked at some ideas that help you think about this a little bit differently. And see the grace and the love that actually exists in this card and the invitation to a more authentic relationship with your heart and with the light.
We will be back next week with a new episode and we have a mental health toolbox episode that will be coming out where we will be exploring some topic that helps give us a good Mental Floss and supports our psychological and emotional and mental wellbeing.
Until then, have an amazing week everybody. Be well. Be Love, be you and be magic.
You've been listening to your heart magic with Dr. BethAnne Kapansky Wright. Tune in next week for a new episode to support and empower your life
