lesson 13: devil’s advocate (but not like that)

A Cross of four:
Nine of Bats (Swords)
Eight of Bats, Five of Imps (Wands), Four of Imps
Eight of Imps

 The Devil has been at my doorstep all month and not in a bad way. I had a feeling he might show his face today. “Speak of the devil and he will appear,” goes the saying—and I have been, rather a lot lately, and reading about him. And thinking about him. And while I’m assigning him his typical gender of “he,” the fact remains that the devil is any one of us who stands on the margins, by choice or necessity. Since at least the dawn of Christianity, the devil has represented anyone or anything who falls outside the realm of acceptable (read: obedient, subservient) behavior to those in power. We still see it today. Anyone or anything Christians dislike is labeled Satanic. 
 
Good. I’m ready to be so-labeled. I’ve had it with the hypocrisy of morality. It’s always lies. The “moral majority” are a fatuous group of truth-free assholes who live lives of ill-repute in private while judging anyone they dislike in public. They are, to put a fine point on it, as far from the light as they could possibly. And, worse, it has always been that way. How is that the worst of humanity seems so often to rise to the heights of power? Well. That’s not the point of this blog, anyway, but it’s been on my mind. And with so many imps showing up, I had to start here. 
 
In fact, the chances of the “devil” showing up greatly increased when I reached for The Halloween Tarot, Kipling West’s delectable little divinatory confection (if you’re curious, my edition has these fabulous black boarders only because I did that myself with Sharpie. It took forever, but it was worth it). The whole suit of wands is called imps, not devils, but we see them depicted as little genderless devils, which I quite enjoy. And we have a lot of them! Three of the five cards! With the other two being bats or swords. 
 
Why did I choose this deck? It’s just getting to be that time of year and while I love it, I typically don’t use it with clients because the cute factor is a little too much for me when reading in public. Not that I don’t love it, but it can create cognitive dissonance for me when I’m looking at this kitschy cards and discussing, say, someone’s traumatic loss. The deck doesn’t dictate the messages I get, the client (and, when relevant, the question) does. Whatever comes up comes up, regardless of the cuteness level of the cards I’m using. So, it felt right. Also I spent most of the morning wandering the Halloween aisles of local big box stores, despite the 84 degrees I’m sitting with today. Also, yesterday was Friday the 13th. (Did you know 13 is typically considered a number representing women, which is why it is shit all over in pop culture?)
 
Anyway, to the cards: The Five of Imps/Wands at the center of our spread suggests turmoil, but as I always say I cannot jump to conclusions about whether this is good or bad. Being flanked on either side by two even numbers (eight and four) may tone down the five’s restless churning. It’s also above an eight, so the even numbers take the dominant position here. Odd numbers are giving big bottom energy right now. Because this is a blog about reading tarot, the Five of Wands/Imps suggests a shakeup in the status quo—in this case, the status quo of our fire. What’s that mean? Well, I have been known to say that fire can be evangelical (in a neutral way). Our passion for something is being shaken up. Or the way we preach the “good news” may be evolving. Never a bad thing, because this suggests growth and evolution. Divination benefits not from stasis. 
 
As noted, the Eight of Bats/Swords and the Four of Imps/Wands flank this card, providing a certain amount of sustainability. The eight suggests the mental effort that goes into rethinking what it is we’re devoted (evangelism) to. The four says “keep doing this” (because fours are stable) and it also says “enjoy it!” because the Four of Wands is often thought of as a party card. If I were to sum up this row in one sentence, I might say: Never stop working at your journey of evolving your perceptions (swords=perceptions). It’s a reminder to always be destabilizing. By which I mean, always work at shaking up your status quo. 
 
That can be scary (Nine of Swords/Bats). We get anxious about it. We worry that we’ll never be able to rest, to relax, to just let our laurels do the work. We may even find ourselves getting angry at the idea we’re not “good enough” or not “there yet.” Which of course is not at all what I’m suggesting. Well, I guess I kind of am—only in the sense that staying still isn’t going to help any of us get better. But it’s not about not being “good enough”; it’s about “what more can I learn?” 
 
We don’t want to question ourselves because our ego doesn’t like that. Any suggestion that we aren’t somehow supremely brilliant already ignites feelings of shame. And while that’s fair, I can tell you first-hand that it will not benefit you. Anyone who thinks they’re “done” is essentially announcing they’ve given up. They are conceding a readiness for the tomb. Boring. I hope never to reach that—though I do look back at times in my life when I for sure imagined myself as being fully baked. Even with tarot. Of course, the times where I felt that level of arrogance, which I was really doing was masking the deep knowledge that, in fact, I wasn’t anywhere near done learning. I envied those I viewed as having reached their apex. Arrogance always equals insecurity. Confidence doesn’t need to be proven because it is confident. Arrogance needs people to know because it’s papering over fear. 
 
When we reach the apex, friends, the only way forward is down. Best to keep climbing (unless we’re stopping for much needed rest . . . see prior posts). 
 
The Eight of Imps/Wands increases the eightiness of the spread and suggests, again, that the root of this reading is effort. We have to make the effort mentally and physically (air/fire) and even spiritually (air+fire) to keep doing this, and we must sustain that as long as we can (four). 
 
That’s not a bad lesson to take from the cards, except it’s also a message we’ve gotten before. Now, one of the things you might know about divination is that if you keep asking the same question, you’re going to keep getting the same answer—at least most of the time, when things haven’t changed. The question I always ask in this blog is “what is lesson #x?” (whatever this week’s number is). So it’s fair that we’d keep getting similar answers. Also, I’m always the reader, so it’s easy to see where you’d keep getting similar themes given my own worldview. The idea that constant learning is necessary also happens to be fundamental to my worldview. And, most of the time, getting the same answer multiple times is validating. It helps us understand that we’re reading “correctly.” That’s one reason I don’t think it’s a bad idea to read on the same topic multiple times. It can help you see different routes to the same answer. 
 
There are times, though, where repetitive answers aren’t helpful or necessary—and given the topic of this reading, might I suggest that everything I’ve said about these cards is incorrect in this example? Or, let’s say it this way: I’ve found the logical answer given my methods, but what if there’s a less logical answer? One thing we don’t talk much about in tarot, and I think there are good reasons for that, is being wrong. I often say that when a client doesn’t respond to an answer, there’s a strong possibility that they’re not reading to hear what the reading says. That’s true. But I also hold that sometimes readers aren’t in synch with the client or with the cards. It’s not always that the client isn’t ready or can’t hear the answer. Sometimes the reader does take the wrong path. When reading face-to-face this is easy to correct. We check in with the client and discover how resonant the answer is so far. It’s harder to know when we’re reading asynchronously. This is why I sometimes, not a lot but enough to mention, provide more than one interpretation of a card array—especially when I’m not sure I’ve hit the target. 
 
The phrase “devil’s advocate” seems relevant here, and it’s possible I just triggered a whole lot of my fellow lefties with its use. The term is frequently cited as an example of how folx in oppressor roles negate the experience and thoughts of people in oppressed roles. That’s valid and true. Still, and I’m going to include myself in this category, many lefties use this as an excuse to avoid facing our own shit (mostly, but not exclusively, white liberals). When someone presents a differing opinion, that’s not a negation—particularly if it can be validated with evidence of some kind. There are plenty of times in my journey I’ve thought I was on the right side of an issue and resisted any counter argument—up until someone made a counter argument that suddenly re-contextualized the issue for me. So, no, playing devil’s advocate is not always a negation of oppressed experiences, especially if the oppressed person is using it as a way to center what privilege they do have. Nothing is all one thing, including that phrase. (Still, all that said, there is a majorly problematic habit that oppressor groups have of doing this—so just because it’s more nuanced than good/bad, there’s a reason why we despise that phrase.)
 
Given that the devil represents marginalized people (we are, after all, the enemy of the church—at least from the church’s point of view . . . which means that, increasingly, we also view ourselves that way, which can be quite liberating), literally playing devil’s advocate means advocating for marginalized opinions. We might due well to reclaim the phrase, then, and say to those who want to play the game, “If you want to advocate for the devil, then you advocate for the unpopular opinion.” (In many ways, this has become my mission in life . . . and fuck if it doesn’t get me in trouble.) In fact, anyone who says they’re playing devil’s advocate by arguing for oppressive or status quo opinions isn’t playing devil’s advocate at all. We might say, instead, they’re playing “pope’s advocate.”
 
I’m going to play devil’s advocate now and rethink the entire reading I’ve just done. I tend not to shift my perspectives on cards much based on the deck. I read them more or less the same way regardless of which deck I’m using, though the occasional design choices might shade or color my interpretation. Sometimes a major change in a deck can open new insights, though, and so I should probably do a better job of noticing the choices artists make. In this case, the thing that I want to “notice” is that we’re not in the suit of wands; we’re in the suit of imps! Yes, fire, but a certain kind of fire that isn’t a wand. Imps are playful trickers and troublemakers. Sure they’re devils, but they’re more like devilettes. Mini devils. And they’re not evil so much as needling. They push buttons—but not ones that launch the nuclear apocalypse. The buttons they push are more daily. If we’re getting a little sexy, the button they’re looking for is the G-spot (or equivalent). And it makes sense to get sexy, because sex is one of the things the church finds satanic! (The very idea that anything supposedly created by god can be evil should highlight the fact that there is no such thing as the good/bad binary, but the church has been astoundingly good at selling it anyway. Throughout the bible, god is doing all kinds of mean shit. Like . . . how can anyone think “he” isn’t a complicated entity? The bible tells us that he hated his first draft and started over [the flood and Noah], so obviously he ain’t perfect.) 
 
If I focus on the impishness of the cards, here, I think the reading reminds us to play “devil’s advocate” with ourselves and our cards. Just as I’m doing to my own reading now. “What if that I think isn’t correct? What if I take an entirely new path?” I’m not suggesting second guessing (which is typically what I do when I re-read cards) but instead that we . . . think like the movie Clue. Right? If you don’t know it, I’m sad for you. The original theatrical release of this cult classic, which was not successful, showed only one ending to a theatre. But when the film was shown on TV and released on home video, we got several endings. And the brilliant way they were spliced together included title cards that read, That’s how it could have happened, but what about this? Variations on that theme preceded each new ending. They’re all a delight and I think are one of the main reasons why the film did better after it come to us on VHS and DVD. The various possible endings were the brilliance of the script, because each one is totally plausible and rewards the viewer for paying attention. One ending, meh—we’ve seen murder mysteries before. But three? Hells yes. 
 
Choosing to start all over again and re-interpret a reading isn’t bad. Both interpretations might be true and fascinating. Both might offer insight and answers that will help the client (or ourselves) see our situation more clearly. We tend to think that there’s only one right answer to any given question, only one solution to any problem, one path we should walk. I think that’s all nonsense. And re-interpreting the cards may show various outcomes and pathways, all of which might be useful for the client. It’s not about negating what we’ve already done, but impishly implying that there may be more layers to this particularly crispy croissant. 
 
Re-interpreting this spread in this way makes me see the Five of Imps in a more playful way—a more impish way. “Fuck shit up. Don’t settle for the first, or easiest. Keep digging, keep messing things up.” That re-contextualizes the flanking cards: The Eight of Bats suggests effortful thinking, which sounds bad but isn’t. It’s simply an effort to think differently about what we’ve already looked at. The Four of Imps doesn’t change much. It still says “keep doing this,” but focusing on the imps reminds us to keep doing this “devilishly,” which I take to mean “darkly, deviously playful.” Same, of course, for the Eight of Imps. 
 
The suit of bats in place of swords also offers insight: first, this may “drive you bats” (crazy), because you’ve already gotten the “right” answer. But it’s helpful to do this work (eight) even if it makes you anxious or mentally cranky (nine). It’s good to try a different route through a reading and see if it offers something else. In this case, then, the reading isn’t dramatically different in tone, but its specifics are more fun: don’t rest on what seems likely, feel free to dig deeper into what seems cool, weird, or strange in the reading. You’re not throwing out the answer; you’re adding to it, developing and deepening it. We could say we’re darkening in it, but not making it less clear—rather, richer. We’re taking it from pastels to jewel tones, which are much sexier in my opinion. (I am a slut for jewel tones.)
 
Bats are among the coolest animals on the planet, incidentally, and I don’t say that because of my Dracula fetish. They actually just amazing creatures and quite cute, in my humble opinion—which adds a playfulness to these cards, too. “Look,” they say, “you think this is going to be difficult, but that’s because you’re not approaching this playfully.” Just do it! 
 
There’s a self-seriousness to divination which is partly necessary. When we read for others, we’re taking their life situations into our care for the duration of the reading—and we’re for sure impacting that experience by giving the reading, which in a way means we’re inserting ourselves into their lives. But there are times when we (including the client) benefit from exploring the reading and interpretations more playfully, or, to borrow a phrase, in a more “left-handed” way. (I’ve always resented the use of left-handed as a sign of evil and toxicity because I’m left-handed. My mother, also a lefty, had her left hand tied behind her back by the nuns in school. These days, fuck it. I’m a left-handed redhead. If you think I’m of the devil, maybe I am. If you think the devil is dangerous, then maybe you should back away. I keep thinking about a maintenance person in my apartment who, upon discovering that my partner and I were a couple, fled from the apartment leaving his tools in the bathroom and the tub faucet unfixed—he couldn’t work with these queers (that’s not what he said; it’s what he showed us). Nobody ever followed up until I wrote to the landlord and expressed my feelings. The experience triggered mucho trauma and shame. Now, however, I think: Good. Be afraid. Now you know what I felt like my whole life. I’ve always had to hide from straight men because you’re dangerous! Yes, you should be afraid. I am coming for you. For your bigotry, your legislated hatred, and for the power you have to make me feel unsafe in my own home—to make me feel like a villain my own safe space. Yes, you better run little man. Because your time is over and mine is just beginning. Which I guess is a long-winded way of saying, if you think someone is the devil, you better treat him nicely. I no longer care what people think I “am.” And if what I am makes them fear me, I’m OK with that. Bout fuckin’ time, that’s how I feel about it. So maybe I am the Devil’s advocate. Maybe I am a witch. And maybe there are some folks who should be afraid of me.
 
A Read of One’s Own
Nothing is all one thing, which is something I find myself more and more certain of. Let’s explore this by drawing three cards that we will read in three ways. The first way (reading from left to right, as we read English) explores how playing devil’s advocate while interpreting can benefit our clients. The second way (reading from right to left) explores the way in which it might negate the experience. The third way (starting in the middle and working outward) provides a blended summary and food for thought. 
 
A brief example (pictured below): I’ve drawn Temperance, Page of Pumpkins (Pentacles), Ten of Ghosts (Cups). In the first read, I look from left to right as I listed the cards here. This is highlighting how playing “devil’s advocate” could help a reading. We blend (Temperance) the earthy (pentacles/pumpkins) and emotional (ghosts/cups). That’s one way to read it, but boy is it boring. Temperance is a card of uniting opposing forces into a new one-thing, and I think that highlights the way that reading a reading two ways does that. We are able to take only a few cards and blend them into various entities that are whole but also yield to the potential for other possibilities. We do this by being curious (page) about what we’re seeing (note how the page inspects the pumpkin in her hands) and really digging deep into our intuition, not just trusting the apparent. (In this case, I’m taking ten to suggest depth—something I’ve never done before, but it makes sense; I’m accepting water as intuition, here). 
 
Reversing the order, starting on the right, the Ten of Ghosts/Cups makes us feel (cups/ghosts) overwhelmed (ten) with possibility (water—mostly thinking back to the Seven of Cups and its sense of possibility). We have a hard time being curious when we’re overwhelmed, even the things we think we understand become less certain because our confidence has diminished (pages being the least confident, at least in this context). That leaves us feeling like we’re unable to blend (temperance)—so we doubt ourselves and our abilities, which can hurt the reading. 
 
Thirdly, we start with the page, who is very focused on her jack-o-lantern, but gets a visit from a ghost in her card—as though the ten has bled into her landscape. I love little visual rhymes like that. This unites the practical with the spiritual/intuitive, reminding us that this is stuff we already do. The page’s bias toward the Ten of Ghosts suggests that we’ve got the instincts (intuition) to handle even too much possibility (ten/water). She (the page) brings Temperance with her, the innate ability to blend and flow. This highlights the watery nature of the reading. Temperance isn’t a water card, but has watery vibes given its typical depictions. Readers are always blending; that’s the act of reading. So you can fret about whether or not playing devil’s advocate with the cards is good or bad, but because nothing is all one thing (which is a very “temperance” experience), we should remember a) that it’s neither good nor bad; and, b) you’re doing it anyway, because that’s “all” reading is—so why not just do it?
 
And there we have it, friends. Sympathy (ahem) for the devil. Until next week!​