Wild, unapologetic, mischievous, and HOT, the Devil ignites our imagination, and sparks a sense of trickstery in any mind that refuses the binary vision of the overculture. With the devil archetype, you are at the razor’s edge – no longer playing safe, you are entering a territory that pokes you, and may drop you into the abyss. And you like it. 

The lines between pleasure and pain blur. That which scares you becomes the very potency that can liberate you – and not just you, the collective too. You are bad to the bone, and it’s sexy as fuck.

This is what the devil archetype does; it seduces you into your own truth. It intensifies your creative fire. It spins you into spiritual rebellion. It starts a revolution by turning you on. 

Drop the pretence. Drop your clothes. Drop to your knees. Howl. Beg for mercy. Want more? I know you do. So let’s go. 

The Devil at the Crossroads – Meet the Archetype of Rebellion

In the liminal space between darkness and light, between the ancient and the new, between the roads – the one that you are on, and the one you stumble upon – stands the horned god of nature. He was sacred and sensual and scary, sure, and held the power of life itself between his horns. Between his legs throbs the fertile energy of creation that’s always woven with destruction. 

All over pre-christian Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, this wild god of nature roamed; sometimes as a goat, other times covered in leaves, sometimes as flames, other times as a howling storm, holding the delicate, dangerous line between crisis and renewal, the apocalypse and rebirth, innovation and dissolution, inspiration and wandering off into the pit of nowhere, between vision and vigor and wreckage and recklessness. 

Feared and loved, he was untamed and unpredictable. He was Pan, he was Cernanus, he was Dionysus. He was demonized, and thrown off the throne by christianity, and became the fallen angel; a symbol of temptation, terror, and all that is forbidden. Is it possible that reclaiming the power of the Devil archetype could help us push against the oppressive chains of rising authoritarianism, and an overculture that suppresses critical thinking? Can this force of nature be the very necessary energy of renewal within the collapse of the world as we know it?

The Rebel as Holy Disrupter

There is intensity and invigoration in that which disturbs the status quo, that which pushes the boundaries, that which catalyzes change, that which breaks taboos and stirs chaos where order has become rigid. There is danger in it. It doesn’t always lead to the transformation we wanted. 

When the trickster becomes the Devil, he heats things up. He’s less of a fool, and more of a primal, yet sophisticated badass motherfucker who reveals hypocrisy, breaks down old systems, frees up the imagination, and is ready to repurpose the chains, turning that which was the tool of the oppressor to the playful, edgy instrument of erotic pleasure. 

In mythological conversations, there’s an argument about whether or not the Devil is Trickster. Check out this essay about the trickster to explore this archetype further. 

Lewis Hyde, in his book Trickster Makes This World, explains why he doesn’t think the Devil is a trickster. He thinks Christians confused trickster characters they found in other cultures to be the Devil. But when you think of what a trickster is, and you don’t demonize Satan (ha!), you might start to see that Lucifer is the embodiment of the trickster archetype.

Hyde differentiates between the trickster and the devil by saying the Devil is an agent of evil, and the trickster is amoral, not immoral. He writes that the trickster takes the space where “good” and “evil” are intertwined. But we can also argue that the Devil is only evil because Christianity tells us he is

Deception, repression, and control are real in every culture, in every family, in every person. They are certainly real in religion. What breaks these walls is our ability to rebel against our own ossified tendencies, or the oppressive patterns in society. The devil as trickster is that which disturbs and dismantles the systems held by lies and limiting beliefs. 

Listen, boundaries are needed. Some level of repression is necessary. We can’t all just walk around doing whatever the fuck we want to do. Systems that hold civilization together are problematic, but they are important. We need each other. And if we are to live in society, we must repress some of our desires.

Desire as the Doorway to Power

We cannot follow every desire into action, I don’t need to tell you that, you know that would be a bad idea. But in so many spiritual traditions, from Western Monotheism to Buddhism, desire is deemed devilish, the source of suffering, the cause of human downfall. 

Spirituality and the shadow have an interesting relationship. The very denial of our primal source of life is what gives it power over us. Anything repressed becomes much stronger in its hidden place in the shadows. You can read more about the Shadow Archetype in this essay. 

When we turn toward that which holds in itself instinctual force, inspiration, and the danger of leading us astray, into the shadows, we can become empowered by it, instead of haunted and controlled by it beneath the layers of the unconscious. Befriending the Devil and connecting deeply with the energies that seduce us, the temptations that lure us, is healthy. It’s the process of rooting into the soil of our nature. We are animals. And the Devil archetype reminds us not to push that away, but to strengthen our bonds with our primal power. 

Desire is powerful. Getting in touch with what turns us on, with what we want, with what sparks our hunger, tells us about ourselves. Desire in itself is a source of energy, of creativity, of life. 

The trickster archetype is always hungry – for food as well as for sex – and the Devil has been painted with the hues of hell brought on by desire, is another key to our process of imagining new ways of being – personally and collectively. 

The Devil archetype is the agent of transformation. Desire is the engine of change. Harnessing desire instead of repressing it, is not only shadow integration, but it’s the fuel for our creative fire, without which nothing new can be born. 

Trickster Fire: The Devil’s Gift of Creative Chaos

The trickster archetype in mythology either invents fire or steals it, learns to use it or burns the world with it. The devil as trickster takes fire to a whole new level and lives in it, making mischief in the flames, alchemizing reality in its heat. 

When Order Burns, Freedom Begins 

Here’s the thing, order is necessary in order to function. And order needs disruption in order to not become rigid, controlling, and oppressive. We need skills for organization. And we need forces that rebel and poke holes in the stuck, inflexibility of structures held by too much certainty.  

Trickster makes the world by creating openings where we think there’s a wall. Openings are made by questions. Answers that lead to more questions. Doubt and uncertainty are vulnerabilities that make room for creativity, and open up new doors. The devil pokes a hole in the holy, and destabilizes the fixed, unbending rules within any form of faith – religion, conspiracy theories, and progressive closed mindedness alike. 

Is the Devil oppressed, or is he the oppressor? I think he plays both parts; one is the aspect of the other. Interesting how Christianity, which has been such an oppressive force throughout the history of the last 2000 years, has projected this onto the character of the antagonist. What aspects of ourselves and of our lives are stuck because of the patriarchy, the church, the over culture, and the injustice and inequality ingrained in our society?

The Devil in Tarot – Liberation Through Bondage

Commonly, the Devil card is thought to represent fear, ignorance, not seeing the truth, living in the dark, and being confused. Doubt, depression, and lack of freedom. 

The lack of freedom associated with the Devil card is an interesting point to sit with for a moment. Lucifer, in Paradise Lost, thinks of himself as a freedom fighter. Is he? Is anyone who calls themselves a freedom fighter really is? The Devil makes us ask. 

When you look at the Devil from the perspective of the church, his presence does seem like bondage. Christianity makes an eternity in hell sound scary and awful. But we know that this story was told as a way to instill fear in people, so that the church could control them. 

In a way, it is the church, and one could argue most (if not all) religions, is the binding, limiting, imprisoning force. To free oneself from the bondage of religion, is to open one’s eyes to a bigger truth, to knowing that there is always more than one truth, to being able to handle a broader perspective. Freedom from religion is an invitation to stand with life’s complexities, and embrace the paradox that exists in almost everything. 

It’s not an easy path, but who says freedom is easy? Freedom comes with responsibility.

Freedom means we have a choice, and that makes things more complex. The Devil invites us into sacred secularism, into spiritual atheism, into deep meaning that is generated not through dogma, but through doubt and ambiguity. 

My philosophy and mythology teacher, Douglas Brooks, always talks about freedom as the choice to bind ourselves to something. What do you want to bind yourself to? What do you choose to do with your life? We are free to become who we choose to be, who we want to be. Freedom comes with commitment, with the process of attaching ourselves to something we care about, to something we desire. 

We can free ourselves from the bondage of a thought construct, or the control someone or something has over our lives. This process requires choosing something else to bind ourselves to. A new thought construct. A different way of being. A different relationship with ourselves. But we have to keep in mind that there are cases and situations where there is no choice. 

In a way, the devil IS a representation of ignorance, because to unchain oneself from the prison of religion is to broaden one’s horizon. The more we learn, the more we understand, the more we know, the greater the horizon of our ignorance becomes. 

The beauty of the Devil is their invitation to live in the paradox of freedom and bondage, of destroying old structures and creating new ones, of unchained consciousness woven together with reprogramming ourselves and committing to something else, which, of course, re-binds us.

The Alchemy of the Forbidden

The devil is hot, and we know that anything sexy has been portrayed by christianity as forbidden, wrong, and dangerous. Hotness is taboo in the eyes of the monotheistic god. The Devil is the presence of erotic power in its fiery form. It will consume you. But don’t you want to be swept up by a passionate storm sometimes? The dark and dangerous eroticism of the Devil is the call to allow the fire of the desire to take over. And we need boundaries. Consent should never be questioned. 

The Devil has horns because the stag in the Celtic and Druid traditions has horns, and the stag is a symbol of masculine sexuality, of fertility, of the creative impulse of earthly, physical desire. There are stories about the stag chasing the doe. Ancient rites during the Beltane festival included young men wearing stag horns, chasing maidens into the forest – a ritual that ended in a wild ceremony of animalistic sex. This wasn’t always a baby producing event. It was an invitation into life’s pleasure and play. 

The word horny comes from the stag’s sexual strength. Eroticism, which is a living being’s primal urge, was seen as evil, and the Devil was attributed horns, horniness, and immorality. 

The power of passion has been rejected and repressed. It went through liberation and resurrection. And in many ways, it is going through another wave of exile and repression in our world today.  

The thing is, we need desire, passion, and our primal, instinctual aliveness. When it becomes repressed, it comes through in perverse ways. We don’t need to be passionate all the time. I don’t think we want any feeling, archetype, symbol, or myth to have a permanent seat in our soma or psyche. Archetypes need to be fluid and moving in us. States of being need to change. 

The Devil gives us access to shifting things around, to not staying in one place, one state, or one archetype for too long. The primordial passion portrayed in the power of the devil is the invitation to keep the world going, spinning, changing. When it comes to all species on planet earth, the world keeps going through sex.

We burn in the fire of hell with the Devil, and we transform. We don’t come out unscathed. We come through forever changed. In the heat of Hell’s fire we forge ourselves and our society. We alchemize. We create a different, renewed, transformed self and world. And that ain’t happening without desire, without breaking systems down, without passion, without the Devil.  

Check out this Substack piece about the origin of Hell. Clue: she was a goddess. There’s a siren song in this piece too, and I think you’ll love it. 

Loving What We’ve Been Taught to Fear

Shadow integration is the process of reclaiming that which we fear most, the qualities we tend to demonize, the wounds no one licked for us when we were cubs. 

Can you love the world even though it’s flawed and fucked up? Can you love yourself even though you’re imperfect and make mistakes, and have unresolved issues? 

The Devil drops us into the fire of transformation and shadow integration, into the kind of liberation that teaches you to laugh at yourself, to not take your own self importance too seriously. The Devil as trickster is full of humor and the understanding that the joke is on them (like the Coyote in Native American stories).

The Inner Rebel as Sacred Teacher

We all have wounds and flaws that stand in our way. We all carry the shadow with us – the things we deny, reject, and refuse to look at in ourselves, in our community, in our circles of belonging. No one loves the obstacles on their path. 

It’s not always the case, because not everything is about you, but what if that which stands in your way was also at the gate of your unconscious? Scary. Seductive. Appalling. Tempting. 

The Devil archetype stands in the flames at the depth of the unconscious as the very thing we want to avoid, and as the invitation to face it. It’s the defense mechanism we’ve constructed around our issues and around society’s oppression. It’s the tendencies we aren’t aware of, or refuse to own, and it’s the very power to see it and burn it down. It is the force that pushes us to review, reexamine, and reconsider belief. 

It is more common to defy and resist constructs and systems within society. Can we learn to also rebel against our own tendencies, beliefs, and locked views? The Devil archetype reminds us not to be so self righteous, to question ourselves, to adopt self humor as a super power. Mischief is magic when one knows how to challenge, disobey, and play with our own weaknesses and shortcomings, instead of pushing them into the shadow of shame and giving them more power. 

The Devil Archetype and the Gift of Doubt 

Not many love the feeling of doubt. It’s destabilizing, uncomfortable, and unsoothing. Our culture emphasizes clarity. Most spiritual teachings stir us away from doubt and toward certainty. The Devil in christianity has always been presented as the one who sows the seeds of doubt, luring a person away from faith. 

When we look at Milton’s Devil in Paradise Lost, we can see the questioning, the doubts, the heartbreak, and the agony of breaking up with what he once believed in, with the father he once had but turned his back on him. There’s not just rebellion in that. There’s wisdom.

He makes other angels, as well as Adam and Eve reconsider their faith in God, and is blamed for their fall from heaven. I love him so much for pushing against blind faith, and for exposing God’s manipulative, insensitive, and controlling behavior.  

He’s the kid that yells: “The emperor has no clothes!” He’s Toto pulling the curtain to reveal the Wizard of Oz is just a show. He’s the people that stand up against oppression. He’s the person who leaves the cult and exposes the corruption and manipulation of the guru.

Faith needs to be questioned, otherwise it turns to dogma.

Everyone has beliefs. I am not a faith based person, and I am not excluded. Humans are programmed to gather around shared beliefs. People want simple answers. We want solutions to our problems. Humans want to have someone else to guide them, someone they can follow, something to believe in.

We are fed a lot of “trust your inner truth” tales from the spiritual and wellness industries. And while there is, of course, truth and value in trusting our own truth, left unexamined, this concept becomes problematic, because there are facts in the world, and they seem to be unimportant to some people these days. 

Playing the Devil’s Advocate: The Art of Sacred Questioning

When a religious Jewish person decides to leave the faith, that process is called “to return in question.” And when a secular person decides to adopt a Jewish, religious life, it’s called “to return in answer.”

Sacred secularism is the art of sacred questioning. 

One of the most dangerous aspects of faith is the certainty that comes with it. Certainty leaves no room for change, for growth, or for messing up. Certainty leads to tyranny. When it’s all explained and there’s no room to question, there’s stagnation. 

Interestingly, stagnation is one of the concepts Mary K. Greer attributes to the Devil Tarot card. As an archetype who plays the devil’s advocate, this fits into the story, because the Devil as trickster is someone who you cannot really pin down or put into a box. When you try to fit the Devil into a clear description, they will find a way to represent themselves as the exact opposite. 

Why the World Still Needs the Devil

Because the devil represents hell, he is the face of the unpleasant, and so he can become our invitation to face life’s unpleasant aspects, to deal with discomfort instead of turning away, to learn to love a world that is beautiful and problematic, enticing and horrible, enchanting and hellish, to learn to love a world we cannot fix.

The Devil archetype is the call to weave a life of meaning, filled with the truth of paradox, with pleasure and pain, with joy and sorrow, with temptation and disappointment, with brokenness and beauty. They are the invitation to be with the complexity of being human. The Devil archetype offers us grace in darkness. 

The Devil doesn’t ask you to behave, he dares you to wake up. To question. To burn. To taste your own wild freedom.

If you’re ready to dance in the dark – lit by the fire in your heart – and reclaim your power through ritual, download my Free Ritual Guide – your invitation to move, feel, and create with the archetypes that set your soul on fire.

Join my Substack for deeper mythic dives, and my YouTube for somatic spells. And share this with other wild souls. 

Much love,

Hagar