The Fool

The Fool: a first step

Every other card in the Major Arcana has a number. The Fool has a zero. Arthur Edward Waite went further and called him "an unnumbered card", one that does not quite fit in the row. Now look at the young man Pamela Colman Smith drew. He stands high up on a rock, near its end. His face is turned up to the sky. He holds a white rose in one hand, a small bag hangs from a staff on his shoulder, and a white dog jumps at his side.

Since the twentieth century many readers have laid the 22 trumps out as a single road, and on that road the Fool is the one who walks. This card is his first step, and it hasn't landed yet.

The image

Look at where he stands. The rock runs out a stride or two ahead of him. Beyond it there is only air and a row of snowy peaks. A white sun shines behind him in a yellow sky. He looks up, away from the drop.

He is dressed for a party. His dark tunic is covered in green leaves and orange circles, like little wheels. He wears a red feather in a green wreath, and yellow boots. Waite called him "a prince of the other world on his travels through this one". He also called him "the spirit in search of experience".

Look at the bag on his staff. It is patterned all over. Waite wrote that it carries dim signs, "to shew that many sub-conscious memories are stored up in the soul". So the Fool seems to carry almost nothing. He may be carrying a great deal, packed where he can't see it.

Now the dog. Waite described how the Fool looked on the older cards. There a dog, "or other animal", attacks him from behind, while he looks back over his shoulder and walks toward the edge without knowing it.

Smith changed that scene. On her card the dog is "still bounding", as Waite put it, and nothing is chasing the Fool. Is the dog warning him, or cheering him on? Maybe it has only come along for the walk. You can leave that open while you look.

The inner journey

Carl Jung had a name for the long work of becoming who you are. He called it individuation. In his view it happens through meeting inner figures. One is the shadow, the part of you that you would rather not see. Another is an inner man or woman. Another is a wise old figure. At the end waits something larger than your everyday self. These figures turn up in dreams and in pictures. Jung wrote very little about the tarot. Once, though, he guessed that its pictures came down from very old images of change.

Later writers took this further. In 1980 Sallie Nichols read the Major Arcana as one long journey of individuation. In the same year Rachel Pollack laid the cards out in three rows of seven and set the Fool apart, free to walk through all of them. Read like that, the Fool is the self before it knows what it is. He can still be surprised. Everyone on the later cards is someone he meets. You could see the Magician, the Emperor, Death or the Star as powers he has to face. You could also see them as rooms in a life he grows into.

• The MagicianTrump I
• The EmperorTrump IV
• DeathTrump XIII
• The StarTrump XVII

The road can bend, too. The sun at his back, Waite wrote, knows "how he will return by another path after many days". And a zero is drawn as a circle. So the Fool is where the journey starts, and he may come back whenever something new starts, at any age, in the middle of any other card.

The poet John Keats had a name for a world like this. In a letter of 1819 he asked his brother and sister-in-law to call the world "The vale of Soul-making". Much later the psychologist James Hillman borrowed the phrase, soul-making, for the slow way a soul grows as you stay with images. You could walk through the 22 cards in order, like a road. You could also treat each one as a place to stop for a while, and see what that is like.

Across traditions

Waite's deck follows the order of the trumps kept by the Golden Dawn, a magical order of his own time, with Strength straight after the Chariot. Waite then numbered Strength VIII and Justice XI. The Golden Dawn also matched each trump with one of the 22 Hebrew letters. The Fool got Aleph, the first letter. He also got the element air, and the secret title "The Spirit of Αἰθήρ", Greek for the bright upper air. Air suits him. It is the breath before a word, and the space under a lifted foot.

Waite still left the letters out of his book. He wrote that "nearly every attribution is wrong". The order's own notes on the cards, Book T, give the Fool one short line: "that which endeavours to transcend Earth". That is close to what Smith drew, a young man whose whole body tilts upward.

Many traditions have their holy fools. Saint Paul wrote to the Christians of Corinth, "We are fools for Christ's sake". Around 1200 the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach told the story of Parzival. His mother raises him in a lonely forest, far from knights and battles. One day the boy meets a group of knights and kneels to them, thinking each one is a god. Now he wants to be a knight too. His mother dresses him in a fool's rough clothes, hoping that if people laugh at him he will come home to her. He rides out in them anyway. He knows nothing of the world. Even so, he stumbles his way to the castle of the Grail.

The tarot's Fool belongs with these figures. He walks into the story without the knowledge everyone else thinks they need.

Try this

Before you read on, try standing like the Fool for a moment. Put your weight on one foot and lift your eyes. Notice what your body does at the edge of its balance. Then open any other card and imagine the Fool walking into it. Where does he stop? Who does he meet? What does he pick up, and what does he leave behind? The game works with every card in the deck.

Questions to sit with

• What is in the bag he carries? Does he know?
• Is the dog warning him, cheering him on, or only along for the walk?
• Where in your life is a foot lifted and not yet down?
• If you could take only a rose and a small bag, what would you put in the bag?
• Which card would you like the Fool to walk into next?

The film

No film for this card yet.