The Devil you know
Another perspective on Week Seven of the Artist's Way
Hi little coven! I’m dropping in to your inbox with a little bonus note about the special connection between this week’s spotlight card, The Lovers, and its dark mirror: The Devil. But before I do, a couple of announcements and reminders:
ICYMI, there’s a new episode of The Shuffle podcast live - featuring creative insights for Cancer season. Listen here.
Don’t forget that I’m offering a limited edition tarot reading this summer: a channelled letter from your inner artist featuring 12 card pulls, inspired by tht weekly themes of The Artist’s Way. Order yours now. (Paying members can find a discount code at the bottom of this email!)
We’re meeting Sunday for journaling club as usual (7pm UK / 2pm ET / 11am PT), to pull some cards inspired by The Lovers and the theme of “connection”. Watch your inbox on Sunday for a link.
My book, TAROT FOR CREATIVITY, has been shortlisted for the Carta Awards 2025 BEST TAROT BOOK category! The winner is decided by public vote - I’d be honored to have yours. Vote here (for me, or for anyone else) and email me confirmation of your voting at hi@chelseypippin.com and I’ll send you a free mini-reading within the week!).
If the Lovers card represents the creative connections that ground us, support us, meaningfully challenge us and fulfil us, then The Devil can stand in for the connections that keep us from embracing our most creative selves…
Its theme and visual structure stand in direct opposition to The Lovers, which honours the purity of partnership and commitment, praises curiosity, and reminds us that we don’t have to be alone. In this Devil, we see the consequences of getting tangled up with the wrong kinds of connections; the prison of loneliness that accompanies relationships that aren’t built on shared respect, genuine interest, and support; the trap we fall into when we show up to other people at our worst.
Looking at it, I can’t help but think of Sartre’s famous quote from the play No Exit: “Hell is other people.”
Throughout The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron observes the way that other people can drag us into creative hell: the early chapters mention “crazymakers” and she routinely (and rightly!) dismisses naysayers. In Week 7, she observes that our perception of other people can contribute to that hellishness, too. She relates her own struggles with jealousy and describes how, when she let her envy go, she found a new sense of camaraderie with the artists she used to resent.
When she unchained herself from her most ungenerous perception of her peers, she suddenly found herself more creatively free and more creatively connected — both to her own Inner Artist, and to her wider creative community.
Her reading on jealousy feels in tune with the guidance I offer about The Devil in Tarot for Creativity:
The real devil is in the details of this card: look closely at the chains around the figures’ necks and you might be surprised to find that these collars are loose. This is the uncomfortable truth of the card: you have the ability to free yourself from your demons; you just have to be willing to seek out the gaps in your chains and squeeze through them. You have to want to escape the things that are holding you back from feeling creatively satisfied.
Not every barrier that keeps you from creating is self-imposed—socioeconomic factors, cultural norms, health conditions, and other external issues may always create battles for you in your creative life and may require greater systemic shifts to open up creative avenues. But when the Devil appears, see it as a nudge to examine the specific ways you’re holding yourself back, and start looking for holes in the fence.
Giving in to jealousy is a recipe for missed connection, and by removing that judgmental chain we’ve fastened around our neck, we’re free to discover a potential sense of kinship with a fellow artist instead.
There are other ways, besides jealousy, that our creative connections can feel more Devil-coded than Lovers-coded: we may feel unsupported by our creative collaborators, we may feel unwelcome or left out of creative spaces we’d love to be a part of (online or in person!), we may feel an idea was stolen by a friend, or let down by loved ones who dismiss our efforts as frivolous or embarassing. And while we don’t have control over how others treat us, we do have control over the connections we choose to nurture. We can always (though often painstakingly) untangle ourselves from the trap, get clear on what we value in our creative relationships, and seek out new, more fertile creative connections.
Yes, other people can be hell — especially if we view them as threats, dismiss them as “crazymakers” before trying to understand them, or when we find ourselves chained to people who refuse to see and support us. But if the Devil acknowledges the painful trap of wrong connections, I hope this week’s spotlight card — with its guardian angel looking down on our Lovers — can offer the flipside: other people can be heaven, too.
More on this in Sunday’s journaling session…
Coming up next:
Sunday June 29: Our next live session will take place on June 29 th at 7pm UK / 2pm ET / 11am PT. We’ll be drawing tarot cards and reflecting on the theme of creative connection. I’ll send out a link on the day.
Monday June 30: I’ll drop the essay and prompts for Week Eight: Recovering a Sense of Strength with… Strength!