The Fool Tarot Card
From Association of Independent Readers and Rootworkers
The Fool is a special tarot trump. It is usually unnumbered, but in the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot shown here, it is number 0. Its separate status from the numbered trumps came about long before the use of the tarot for fortune telling, when it was part of a card deck devised in Europe for various trick-taking games, such as tarocchi, tarock, tarot, and königsrufen. In these games The Fool, not numbered, is often called "The Excuse" -- because playing the Fool card excuses the player from either following suit or playing a trump.
The image of The Fool is of a beggar, vagabond, wanderer, or jester, carrying a bindle of personal belongings on a stick. He is often accompanied by a dog or cat; in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck his companion is a small white Spitz-type dog. The Fool is called Il Matto ("the beggar") in Italian Tarocchi decks and Le Mat ("the madman") in the French Tarot of Marseilles. In older decks he has feathers stuck crazily in his unkempt hair, but in the British Rider-Waite Smith deck he wears a fancy houppelande tunic with dagged sleeves, far costlier than a real beggar would ever wear, and he has a beautiful feather plume in his Bay-leaf head-wreath, the symbol of accomplishment. He also carries a white Rose, an emblem of purity and of the search for chaste, new love. He is up in the icy mountains, looking at the sky, and not minding where he is going. In fact, he is about to step over a crumbling cliff, and his dog is barking out a warning, while also coming all-too-near to the edge of the precipice.
In "The Pictorial Key to the Tarot," written in 1910, Arthur Edward Waite interpreted The Fool as "folly, mania, extravagance, intoxication, delirium, frenzy, bewrayment." If the card is dealt upside-down or reversed (and if the reader reads reverses as a separate set, which not all readers do), he added these meanings: "negligence, absence, distribution, carelessness, apathy, nullity, vanity." The picture these words paint is clearly one of warning. If the subject is a family member, lover, or friend, something is definitely wrong with them. If the query is about a job, investment, school test, court case, or legal matter, the querent is warned to stop and reconsider before stepping off of a proverbial cliff.
Strangely, in the 1970s a small but influential group of tarot readers decided to completely alter the meaning of The Fool card. After 500 years, his extravagant mania was re-conceived as "the soul's journey," his intoxication and delirium were interpreted as his entry into "the great mysteries of life," and his negligent step over the cliff's edge was called "the leap of faith." He was, it seems, played as an "excuse," a way to avoid telling the reading client that there would be serious consequences for foolish choices. Despite this feel-good rewriting of the card's meaning, most cartomancers still interpret The Fool in the traditional way, as a sharp warning to clients to pause and pay attention to the ground under their feet in order to avoid a bruising, or even deadly, fall.
Credits
This page is brought to you by the AIRR Tech Team:
- Author:catherine yronwode
- Contributors: Papa Newt, nagasiva yronwode
- Image: Pamela Colman Smith; courtesy of Hoodoo Psychics
