The Devil: The Expansionist
image: a chain over a scratchy faded light blue background.
2023 was a year that saw the expansion of whiteness and attempts to expand whiteness.
We witnessed the fall of affirmative action. An activist court repealed Roe v. Wade. Genocide, war, tyranny, and violence hit every corner in the globe.
Fascism has risen and we should all be real about it. The threat is not somewhere in the far-flung future. It's here.
The Devil is an avatar for capitalism.
It individualizes our pleasures. It makes us beholden to the whims of the wealthy, even to meet our most basic needs.
Tarot's Devil card is an expansionist. To tarot's Devil, too much is never enough. It's a flame that's never completely fed. It always wants more.
The more tarot's Devil desires is never the more for which the people cry out. It's more for shareholders, business people, and bankers. Tarot's Devil's more more more means less for you and me.
There's been a push among tarot readers to neutralize the work of controversial cards. Archetypes like the Devil, Death, and the Tower get painted over and recast in a more hopeful light.
A political reading of tarot asks us to do two things at once.
It asks us to acknowledge the Catholic context in which tarot came to be. It asks us to wrestle with the lens that tarot presents.
It requires us to appreciate the Devil as a celebration of sex, the body, and pleasure at the same time. To do only one and not the other is incomplete.
The Devil is a card traditionally associated with Capricorn. It's connected to the entertainment industry. There's a focus on true artifice, not illusions like The Moon.
What's more artificial than capitalism?
What's more counterintuitive than paying for water, apples, and grapes, as Orlando Brown recently said, to great applause:
What can you say when you watch this video but “hell yeah!” He's right. It's evil to charge people for food, water, shelter, and the other things they need to live.
But capitalism isn’t just evil, it's contrived.
The laws of capitalism would rather lock baby formula behind plate glass than lower the price. It costs society less to feed an infant than make a criminal of a mother—but it costs shareholders more.
The corporate bottom line matters more to the government than its taxpayers. More than clean air, food that's not poison, and potable water.
They remind us of this every day.
Standing Rock Sioux tribe and other sovereign nations put their bodies and lives on the line to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, they were deemed terrorists. But to whom? By whom?
What's terroristic to other human beings about not wanting a pipeline to break all over you and your kin? What's terroristic to the land about wanting to keep it safe and healthy? No, they were deemed terrorists to the dollar, the corporation, and the "American way of life."
In the topsy-turvy world of The Devil, those who protect life at the expense of those who seek to end it are villains.
The Devil isn't an archetype to sanitize. It presents us with tricksy, misleading situations and doublespeak. It's treaties and contracts are bad news. We don't always have the power to refuse.
That's because The Devil speaks to things that take away our power. Things that bind us if we don't bind them.
Whiteness is one of those things.
After the 2016 election, we were told white women voted against their interests. This makes no sense. They simply voted on other interests--namely around whiteness.
The Devil is a contract maker and a contract breaker. So is whiteness.
As we've seen in stark relief for the past year or so, whiteness is a category that expands and contracts depending on the needs of the most white.
When fear rises that white people will be overtaken as the largest ethnic group, more white people can be made. One can go from proximity to whiteness into the real thing overnight.
You can literally go to bed classified as a person of color and wake up white.
The contracts The Devil and whiteness present are never settled. They're are always shifting. No one can be sure where they'll end up.
I rarely talk about it, but I wrote a kids book on contract almost a decade ago. It's called How Greek Immigrants Made America Home.
I learned a lot about how someone can go from non-white in the eyes of America, accepting only 70 immigrants a year to being solidly white.
It means selling other people out. It means leaving your culture behind. It means being used as a weapon against non-white people.
Whether through fighting a war, becoming a cop, or promising to vote republican, a near white can become white. It sounds impossible until it happens.
All that's needed is skin that's not brown, and a willingness to engage in violent anti-Blackness, imperialism, and piety.
In short, if you'll enter a devil's bargain, you can be white, depending on where you come from. This is because whiteness is a negotiation that never stops.
But that's not the end of what writing that book brought up. When I accepted the assignment, I was clear that I was a working writer taking on project not because I was Greek, but because rent was due and I had an interest.
I was clear that I was a Black person in the US due to chattel enslavement.
When it came time to promote and sell the book, my publisher decided to say I was Greek. What the everloving FUCK!?
I was livid and immediately got in touch to rectify the problem. They assured me they'd correct it at once, and they did.
But a few months later, when I checked in on their work, they had changed it back. To sell the book, they needed me to be dressed in digital whiteface.
While it pisses me off, I understand that whiteness reproduces itself through tricks, traps, and lies.
To whiteness and The Devil, the truth is unimportant, as our individual needs. All that matters is expansion, and profit.
Further Thoughts
Justice: “Do You Want a Revolution?”
Five of Cups, Five of Swords: Two Sides of Shame
image: hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.
