The Rape of the Lock

Or The Hairmeneutics of the Devil

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Dear reader,

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 this 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 Dia 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 shirt, white pants, white stetson and red cape, or red vest. 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 calvary, lashed repeatedly till their back, 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 be 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.

“My intent is to examine and account for a series of repetitions of master narratives of violence and forced submission that are read or reinscribed as consent and affection: intimacies that involve shame and trauma and their transgenerational transmission.”¹

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 woman 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

But then the precarity is self-evident when you hear women like Isabella Bellochio standing before the Venetian Inquisition in 1589, state “I never understood that one had to pray to or honor the Devil but only that one must light a lamp to him in order to have that which one desired, that is in my case my lover. Thus, I did not light with the intention or worshipping or praying to him, but with the intention that my love be made to come.”³

The Devil is there to satisfy a sinful lust. Its thought that it has dual genitalia so as to be sexually alluring to all, and certainly its libido is insatiable. But always what’s regarded as the most shocking, the most taboo, is how hairy the Devil is. Some women who were arrested for their romantic rituals using the Devil card as the centerpiece on their altar, praying with their hands reversed behind their back, had their hair completely untied!

1626 engraving by Jan van de Velde II in which a sorceress conjures demons while playing cards lay at her feet.

By all accounts the beast is hairy, and he is hungry. In the same geography and moment as tarot is being created, Giovanni Da Modena paints his Inferno fresco, depicting a scene in Dante’s hell where Muhammad is being devoured by demons. This imagery has been part of Western and Islamic cultures since the Middle Ages.

Giovanni Da Modena1410, Basilica di San Petronio , Bologna

The gastrocephalic demon, with his head on the belly, is a common motif in the Middle Ages and in art. The earliest paper Devil we have is from the 16th c., Tarocco of Agnolo Ebreo. It shows a chimeric creature with two naked victims. In the animal assemblage, it is the second head that swallows the victim, serving to lower the intellectual so as to appease the ignoble appetites. The mind moves toward the genitals emphasizing the latin phrase : Diaboli virtue in lumbis est or the virtue of the Devil is in his loins.

Tarocco di Agnolo Ebreo

The Devil’s anatomy is multiple and distorted. Where suddenly there are two mouths, the second serves as gateway to hell. So the Devil is the tormenter but also the place of torment. He ravishes you. He takes you to the underworld against your will ensuring its a terrifying entry. And you are naked and you are vulnerable as you are swallowed into an infernal descent to be digested in the bowel of darkness. By such accounts the Devil makes sense of slavery’s Middle Passage as a hellmouth.

To be made a slave is a “bloody and blood transaction” whereby you are stripped, manacled, whipped and raped. And while the whole of the plantation is hell, the belly of the beast was in the kitchen because within an institution of slavery every “kitchen is a brothel,”⁴ though its horror is unremembered because of its spatial and visual proximity to whiteness.

“The enslaved black woman in the house, in this instance Aunt H/Ester, often in a better material position than the black women in the field, is nonetheless positioned in the midst of the everyday intimate brutalities of white domestic domination, positioned within a psychic and material architectonics where there may be no escape from those brutalities but in the mind. Such spaces will, over time, become ‘site[s] of pain which will turn into site[s] of pleasure.’”⁵ - Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies

Ultimately, the Devil deals with sexual entrapment and the violation of consent. Colonial Mexican women dealing with domestic violence turned to Indian women for herbs, remedies and rituals to make their husbands, their abusers, impotent. Old women taught younger ones, with the requisite secrecy, how to go about producing a ligatura, to magically tie their men. And since the kitchen was relegated to the domain of women, they made “frequent culinary use of their washwater, menstrual blood, and pubic hair” to subversively seize power.