The reversed pentagram
A five-pointed star stands upside down on the Devil’s brow, two points up like horns. Éliphas Lévi had made that the sign of the goat; Waite drew it on the card.
In the tradition
The pentagram with one point up was long read as a human figure, arms and legs spread, under the spirit at its top. Lévi wrote that turned over, with two points raised, it becomes the head of the goat of the witches’ sabbath, and his drawing of Baphomet set the look of the Devil in later decks.
Smith’s Devil keeps its pose, with the raised hand, the bat wings and the goat’s horns. The torch in the figure’s hand points down, and Waite describes it as inverted, so the star and the flame are both turned over.
Sources
- A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910). Waite's own guide to the deck he designed with Pamela Colman Smith, with each card's divinatory meanings.
- Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854 to 1856). The French occultist whose readings of the trumps Waite often followed or argued with.
Updated October 9, 2026.
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