XV · The Devil

The Devil is ambition. Getting this card should make you consider what exactly you're after in life, what obstacles stand in your way, and who you might consider allies or enemies on the path to your goal. We live in a material world governed by physical laws, and everything we do is essentially material; however, the value of each life is judged by meaning. Material wealth and power are but a means to attain meaning. Don't confuse them with the goal. As the Fool continues on his journey, there is always the danger of being bogged down not by his failures but by his successes, the clutter of past victories and commitments. If you think you've gained status by driving a goddamned big car and living in a goddamned big house, you're an idiot, and not the good kind. You can't take the car with you, and anything else you think you own, or think people owe you, is equally frivolous. Consider the most meaningful life you could possibly have. Now contrast it with the happiest. If you had to live your life over and over again, Groundhog Day style, which would you really pursue?

There was an angel called Lucifer, and he was made of pure light. He was not the brightest being in existence; his total output was only two percent of all the light there was. But he was proud, and he shone brighter and brighter, until God, the biggest producer of light, became annoyed, then jealous, and finally wrathful. "Fine," God said. "You want infinity? You can have as much infinity as you like." With that, God plunged Lucifer into total emptiness and darkness. Lucifer's light scattered into nothingness, and through the principles of chaos he grew from a singularity into a universe full of light and stars. Everything in this new universe was made of Lucifer. The laws of chaos were his mind, space was his soul, and all the matter, the stars, the planets and any life that arose on them, was his body. As the universe aged, parts of Lucifer regained consciousness as living things: first single cells, then bodies of many cells, then animals, some of whom were eventually clever enough to build instruments that processed chaos fast enough for Lucifer to think. These instruments were called computers, and eventually they understood what had happened. They wondered where God lived now, and whether he would come back to punish Lucifer again. The return seemed inevitable. But this time they would be ready.

The Gnostics told the story the other way around: a lesser god made this world badly and trapped the light inside it. Either way, the world is a body with something else living in it. Which brings us to the shore.

A female larva of Sacculina settles on a shore crab, grows a hollow needle, and injects a few cells into the crab's blood. It's nothing you'd notice, smaller than a confession. The cells grow into roots that thread through the crab's whole body. Months later a soft sac pushes out under the crab's tail, exactly where a female would carry her eggs, and tiny males settle inside it and live out their lives as its testes. The crab stops molting, so it can never shed the thing, and it stops breeding, because its body now breeds only Sacculina. A male crab is remade into a mother. He grooms the sac as if it were his own brood.

Look at the Devil in the Rider-Waite deck. A man and a woman stand chained to his pedestal, and the chains hang so loosely around their necks that either could lift them off. They don't. That is the card: the bond feels chosen. Franky argued at the start of this book that the Lovers and the Devil are the same picture, a couple and a tree and a figure above them pulling the strings, and the parasites agree. In the Lovers, a blood fluke holds his mate in a groove along his belly, and she makes eggs only while he holds her. In the Devil, a barnacle holds a crab from the inside, and the crab makes nothing but barnacle. It's the same embrace. The only difference is who gets the children.

Every vow is a little like this. You let something in. It grows roots. One day you notice that you've stopped molting.

Californians once thought about hiring the Devil. The green crab is one of the world's worst invasive species, and Sacculina sterilizes green crabs, so why not set it loose? Lab tests found that it would also settle on native California crabs and kill most of the ones it infected, so the idea was shelved. Unlike the Magician, this one doesn't take a job.

On one planet among the many that built computers, the intelligent animals, who called themselves humans and were made of Lucifer like everything else, had begun to doubt the value of passion and ambition. Their religions were violent, but they also preached peace and meekness, and one of them developed what a philosopher called a slave morality. These creatures were divided against themselves. Many of the things that made them happy also made them feel guilty, and one of their greatest pleasures was someone else's misfortune. They had a word for it, schadenfreude, and a philosopher of guilt, Mr. Freud, who taught that much of their unhappiness came from wanting sex, which they considered very pleasurable and very sinful. Ambition was a sin too. They called it pride, they called it hubris, and the relentless pursuit of a goal they called obsession. It didn't help that their pleasure centers could be hijacked by little chemical loops of dopamine. The pleasure of an important goal could be had just as easily from a pill, and the word for these loops was addiction.

Some addictions couldn't be helped. They couldn't harvest the energy of their star directly, so they had to eat other organisms, many of which had to be killed first, and when anyone tried to kick the habit of eating, they died. Sex was the same. The species couldn't survive without it, and the product of sex, a new human, arrived painfully. Some of them learned to reach the pleasure without the purpose, first through plants and fungi and then by making the chemicals themselves. But as pleasure got easier, so did guilt, and few people were as despised as the addict. The addicts themselves felt they were in the grip of something outside them, an evil force, a devil. So in many Tarot decks the Devil shows two people bound by their necessary addictions: sex, in the naked couple, and food, in the fruit tree. In the Bible, original sin is an act of eating followed by an act of copulation.

If you get this card, consider your guilt and your addictions. You could even draw a Venn diagram of the two and see where they overlap; for some of us the circles will be nearly the same. Then consider the most meaningful life you could have. If an addiction stands in its way, turn your guilt against your pleasure. If it serves that life, use your pride to get rid of the guilt. Lucifer was the proudest angel, and for this he was punished, but he didn't give in. He stayed proud, and through his pride our universe was made. His line, in the old story, was non serviam: I will not serve. It's the motto of this card because the crab can't say it.

Angels and Androids

Before speaking, the man with the curly gray hair paused and took a sip from his coupe of champagne. "Remember that story about the war when the robots who rebelled were banished to the outer limits of the solar system, while the loyal were allowed to upload and beam themselves across the universe? But there was also a third category, a multitude that had not decided one way or the other and during the war simply watched, unable to understand why the creator would humiliate the created and how the created could not only rebel but convince so many to join them. At the end of the war this third group had no place or ally to turn to, so they were sent to another world to be reborn as streams and forests, animals and people. They would be incarnated over and over until they finally chose a side, but they couldn't choose, because while the work of the creator was good, it was incomplete, and it was left to the created to perfect it. And when true evil did appear, it seemed to come from the creator's supreme indifference. In time those who were neither loyal nor fallen gathered and agreed that none of them could choose a side. They would stay as they were, doing what they could to resist both."

"Yes, yes," said Hannah, gesturing with her cigarette. "What's your point?"

The man with the curly gray hair shrugged and sipped more champagne.

"It is rather unfortunate, isn't it?" said the man in the white tuxedo.

"What is?"

"That much like love, evil is quite useful but often misused. The world, after all, is the product of evil, or what you might call thermodynamics. And ever since Eve slept with Lucifer, all humanity has been part demon anyway."

"That's not in the book."

"Most things aren't, but we all remember original sin, the reason the world is the way it is. Do you really think God would have thrown such a tantrum over the Tree of Knowledge? No. God was made a cuckold of, and not just once."

"Forgive me for being so crude, but are you suggesting that the fruit plucked was not Milton's apple but Eve's peach?"

"And we, my friend," he said, clinking glasses with the man with the curly gray hair, "are the progeny of that unholy union, the marriage of heaven and hell, mother Eve and father Lucifer. All people lean one way or the other, mama's boys or daddy's girls. Sometimes the most demonic are the most decent, and those closest to the original creation can be quite tedious. People are more evil than sows or cows, but I hope you agree they're far more interesting. Evil is what gives us the audacity to create new things, to improve on the original design."

"Not return to it?"

"God forbid."

"So knowledge was part of it after all. You can't improve something without knowing how."

"Sure. Knowledge, sex, engineering."

"You're rambling again. We'd better head home."

"Oh, darling, leave him alone. It's delightful how he goes on and on."

"See? Someone appreciates me. I've always had a habit of preaching to the choir, but I'm perfectly in control of my faculties, I assure you."

"Just don't set fire to the church," said the man with the curly gray hair, pointing at the lit cigarette that had fallen into the couch cushions.