The Fool

Background. The Fool is a person of childlike mind, outside the normal social order, an object of humor and derision. He may be a beggar or vagabond, or may serve as entertainment for the idle rich. He is at the mercy of the elements: when it rains, he gets wet; when it snows, he gets cold. He often seems oblivious to his plight, content in his own simple world of bewilderment and surprise.

The Fool is an ambiguous figure. On the one hand, he seems to be without the means to take care of himself. He can be the victim of much cruelty--an outcast, homeless and bereft. On the other hand, there is something enviable in his simplicity, recalling a certain Christian humility and purity of spirit. The ambiguity is even stronger in his role as court jester, where he is the object of mockery but is also allowed to do what no one else may--mock the king himself.

In the tarot sequence, the Fool represents the lowest rung of worldly status. (In fact, he is not on the ladder at all!) He corresponds to the beggar (misero) in the Tarocchi of Mantegna. He is the very antithesis of power and achievement. He is without accomplishment, without influence, without even the necessities of self-preservation. He stands in contrast to the first numbered trump, the Bagatto or Juggler. This character has learned to use his wits to attain some modicum of control over his environment. The Fool, on the other hand, has no capacity for the Bagatto's opportunistic type of cleverness. The Fool lives moment to moment, connecting to his physical environment through his emotions and moods. He is also poised in contrast to the Pope, the highest of the figures of human society depicted in the tarot. The tarot was created in the late Renaissance, as the seeds of the Reformation were beginning to emerge. No doubt there was a consciousness of the hypocricy of the Pope, who preached humility but wielded enormous wealth and political power. The Fool is a counterpoint to the Pope, powerless but ironically closer to God.

The Hermit's Tarot Fool, although patterned closely on the Tarot of Marseilles design, is meant to bring out some of the pathos inherent in the Fool as beggar. He is gangly and awkward looking, perhaps the victim of disease in childhood. It is dark and rainy, and his shoes are in tatters. The dog pulls at his leggings, subjecting him to a humiliation that he is not even aware of. His jester's costume, perhaps given him by a beneficent host in the last city he visited, is becoming soiled and ragged. Where will he sleep tonight?

Triadic Placement. The Fool is the first card of the first triad of the tarot. This triad depicts humans in relationship to the physical world. The Fool is the passive principle manifest in this domain. He is at the mercy of nature. Social power, learned principles, and religious searching are quite beyond his sphere of concern. He is pure victim, not only at the hands of humanity, but at the hands of the material world itself. He stands in contrast to the Bagatto or Juggler, who relates to the physical environment through the active principle of control and manipulation. The dichotomy represented by these two finds resolution in the Papess, who relates to the physical world through myth and story, and is neither its slave nor its master. See The Physical Triad.

Tree of Life. I have associated the Fool with the path from Malkuth to Netzach, in accordance with my view of the Fool as someone who relates to the physical world through the emotions. For him, there is no processing of experience into concepts and stories, only the immediacy of feeling in response to sensation. He leads a completely unstructured life, subject to the swirling turmoil of his own moods, pushing off unpredictably and uncontrollably from the raw events imposed on him by the world. The Hebrew letter corresponding to his path is tav, the cross, reflecting the fourfold symmetry of the material world and physical life in its simplest. purest state.

Divinatory Meanings. The Fool is the most basic human condition, humble and sincere but also powerless and without ambition. It thus represents taking things as they come, living without thought to consequences, being an outsider, free from inhibitions and also free from plans. As a condition imposed from without, the Fool can signify a complete loss of status, having nothing left to lose, or becoming a victim or an object of ridicule. As a deliberate choice, the Fool stands for "dropping out", leaving the rat race to the rats, letting nature take its course, living in the moment, and freedom attained through humility and passivity. Either way, the card represents life divested of its familiar structures of power and thought, leaving it chaotic, spontaneous, and unfiltered.

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Copyright © 1999 Tom Tadfor Little