There’s a simple message left with us in this card, and it’s all about things that ‘bedevil’ us, it’s about repression, and how we are ‘bound’ to reality. If something bugs us then it will grate every time we encounter it. Saturn is associated with this path, and we can see the relation to the circular lessons again. If we don’t escape these issues within our self then we face a life under the control of self-imposed restrictions.
You might feel as though you are free of issues, and hopefully you are, but there can be forces deep in your psyche that are controlled by subtle issues within. The Thoth deck uses the shock factor of a penis in plain view to evoke repulsion, or childish sniggering. Sex holds masses of repressed material in a great many people, and slowly as psychology reaches out into our educational systems we should see many more well-adjusted people hit puberty without feeling as though sex is something to be rapidly shuffled under the carpet in disgust.
Sex is a great place to dig around for issues and repression. Some cultures are free of inhibitions, and some are not. My generation couldn’t cope with anything below the belt, and sex education was left to embarrassed teachers armed with simple biological facts only. There were no talks about etiquette, or affairs of the heart; we were sent out into the world given the most useless education, and then had to unravel it all ourselves. If you throw all the complexity of guilt contained within the indoctrinated religions into kids’ heads, you can see that this is a complex mess where people are just led straight into confusion at an early age.
If you did find you had repressions and escaped them, take those precious lessons and watch for those issues in others. Chip away at the monkey on your friend’s back to release that internal pressure.
Advanced Notes:
The Hebrew letter is ‘Ayin’ meaning ‘eye’. Here we see that the person can identify their dirty and repressed nature with their wisdom (the third eye is wisdom, meaning their cumulative, processed and refined self), and they’ve beaten that hardest part of their self and understood its teachings. We get these problems and they give each of us a specific twist to our nature. Some find a great deal of humour in being able to look at their own failings squarely. A person who is able to laugh at their self will find life’s journey a lot lighter.
A person who is free of the chains of the Devil isn’t bound by moral laws and is capable of anything — this is what true freedom means, but without boundaries it could all go very wrong. This card on its own shows that we can be free, but we are still in a human world and under the law of the land.