The Devil
Related material
Images
The Marseilles cards
The Waite-Smith card
Summary - a "Hell" card
This card represents evil in the world. It has nothing to do with the figure of Satan that the Catholic Church and the Protestant sects that followed made up to scare everybody. It's important to remember why the world we live in ordinarily is the way it is: evil enteres the world only through the hearts and minds of men.
The figure on this card represents a constellation of archetypal energies that have a real, if unseen, life of their own. These are our mental concepts, our behavior patterns and our emotions. If someone gets angry and right in our face, we are likely to get angry right back, either at that person or someone else later on. The energy of that anger is like Brer Rabbit's Tar Baby: if you let it touch you, it sticks to you but good. The idea, of course, is to let that anger go past you; it's always about the other person, after all. We are to remain centered, serene. Forgiving.
That's what the parable of Turning the Other Cheek is really about. It isn't about meekness or anything of the sort. Just the opposite. It means to turn away from the anger or the offense and not let it bother you - which requires a great deal of inner strength. Try it sometime; you'll see what I mean. Meek my petuttie.
The Image
Look at the chains. They represent the idea of negative emotions and limiting beliefs that stick to us in an active way. Jung called these sorts of things archetypes; in Yoga they're called samskaras. I've coined a new term, Things That Think Themselves. These little buggers cling to us, just like that Tar Baby, but as the chains show, they are loose and the people in the cards could lift them right off if they wanted to.
That's the idea here. We can get out of these negatives if we really want to.
The Fool really wants to.