The Devil, “Lord of the Gates of Matter, Child of the Forces of Time,” Capricorn. “Do thy will,” obsession, addiction, temptation, ecstasy, creative action, unscrupulous ambition.

The first thing you need to know is that the Devil is a joker. His stock-and-trade is illusion. The only power he has is that which you give him, but that can be considerably strong. He isn’t a 2-D bad guy however, despite how the world paints him. He is one of the three paths to Tiphareth, the encounter with the Holy Guardian Angel, also known as the Higher Self. The other two are Temperance and Death.

The Devil speaks to obsessions, addictions and compulsions. I am not particularly susceptible to addictions (except coffee and tobacco), but I am prone to compulsions, the latest being chess, but it is certainly not the first. Perhaps the worst obsession for me was when personal computers were first available in the mid-1980’s. Most of my friends who were “early adopters” of personal computers lost their day jobs messing with their computers. I almost did, but not quite.

The Devil can be anything that catches us and stops our spiritual evolution. The Path of The Devil runs from Hod, the rational personality, to Tiphareth, the great mediator, and the abode of the Higher Self. The objective with The Devil is to get past him, to see his bullshit for what it is and get free. The message then becomes that the way past the Devil and to the Holy Guardian Angel is through the rational side of the personality, Hod. Sometimes we have to simply decide to change the way we are living and seeing the world. We have to live the rational life, at least for a while, long enough to get healthy.

Are you stuck on something right now?