I’d never say you should dance with the Devil, let alone make a deal, but it would do you well to deign to notice the import of its visitation.

About this time last year I began to digest the Devil differently, drawn into an even deeper intensity with daily divination, doubling down with due diligence any time this card came (comes) up.

Last year I wrote to you during Día de Los Muertos, direct from Guadalajara, the land of my great grandmothers, as I began reading Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects by Christina Sharpe on the flight in and below. It became uncanny to track what the text was uncovering as it accompanied me along the trip. It was emergent in more ways than one as I drew the Devil several times through my death ritual.

On the day we ventured to Tonalá, my family and I gathered around the plaza in incredulous speculation of the internalized colonialism enacted in the children’s ritual celebration of the Christian calvary. Only a few young males were selected to dress as the cavalleros with their white shirts, white pants, white stetsons and red capes, or red vests. Far more of the brown youth encircled them. Their legs and arms were painted black, they wore wigs of long straw-like black-blond hair attached to colorfully patterned blue-red masks with protruding horns, fangs, and snouts.

It was horrific.

Not because these young demonios were at all terrifying but because of the rites of defilement and abjection they proudly participated in. These religious “abominations” were attacked with the switches of the young cavalry, lashed repeatedly till their backs, their arms, their legs welted, reddened and bled. These wild ones had no weapons for counter-attack. Their only defense was the long hair covering their body. Their bodies were made to signify the collapsed boundary between human and beast, but in the zealous white-attired youth walking down the streets, after the ritual performance ceased, snapping their whips and breathing fire, it became clear something treacherous was stirred deep within them.

I felt I had time-traveled going back to my mother-land only to witness the monstrous-feminine persecuted by the religious inquisition of colonial Mexico. And what was so jarring was that every other spectator celebrated this scene of subjection.

I was right before the Devil’s blood-stained gate, ever-so intimate with the monstrosity of colonial domination, and as I read Sharpe, I was able to recognize how everyday brutality and violation, then and now, is reconfigured as freedom gradually, within and across generations.

Then, on the last day of the trip I again drew the Devil, only later to find a statue of a red devil with his dick out in the marketplace, a sure sign that here you could find brujos and brujas who maintain the long, magical history of maleficio in the gendered relations occupying the domain of marriage and sexuality as part of a religious dialogue.

From colonial Mexico to Venice, Italy, witchy women call on the Devil for assistance to attract, tame and tie men. And in fact to do this working witches would advise their clients to procure the Devil arcanum of the tarot. We know this because of the records of the witches who stood trial at the Inquisition.

In the Tarot, the Devil card is syncretized to Capricorn, and in the minor arcana, the three decans of Capricorn correlate to the 2-4 of Pentacles.

The Two of Pentacles is an especially precarious card because it concerns the crossroads, where Devils are definitely to be evaded, if not directly summoned. And it’s not all who petitioned the Devil were apostate from God, but that even staunch Christians called on the Devil to obtain their desire was merely “giving the Devil his due,” as done in any coercive attempts to bend another to satiate one’s appetites. As the lord of base, material desires you must at least “pay de Devil!” his two cents when you petition him, or “pay de Devil!” so he will depart as peacefully as possible as he crosses you in the street during Carnival.2