The Fool-0
The Fool is the 0 card.
Anything can happen.
Beginnings and New Beginnings
Taking a leap of faith or a foolish leap
Do we ever know the difference? Until a later judgment.
The Fool character in Shakespearean plays:
Clever, witty, wise, humorous, and sarcastic.
A commentator on the characters and critic of societal norms and the powers that be.
Advisor, comic and fools are symbols of free speech and freedom of thinking. Makes me think of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, comedy geniuses
The fool across cultures
In ancient Greece the fool was called Philosophos, which implies the quality of wisdom.
Court jesters are a form of the fool, sometimes with a deformity and oh so colorfully dressed, often pied with alternating patterns on different limbs of their bodies. The fool often has a deep understanding of the world. The beautiful youth who is often androgynous and known for their beauty, wit and wisdom is another kind of fool. In some cultures, the fool is a trickster archetype. The trickster, a character in many cultures, has some features of the fool, but tends to actively outsmart others. The holy fool puts spiritual beliefs ahead of societal conventions and is seen as wise and holy.
The fool is often a clever and wily individual who is able to be successful and surpass those of higher social status with regard to intelligence and pragmatism.
In Europe the history of the fool in literature is longstanding. The fool is the jester in the court, able to say things that an advisor might never be able to say because his role is not as a counselor, mentor, or guide. The fool’s social status precludes that level of nobility. Nobility would not be caught dead playing the fool, their seriousness and gravitas prevents them from behaving the way a fool has license to do. The fool has license to confront themes of love, psychic turmoil, personal identity and more. Sometimes the fool ‘speaks truth to power’ and can get away with it because he has no social standing.
The Fool character in Shakespearean plays:
Clever, witty, wise, humorous, and sarcastic.
A commentator on the characters and critics of societal norms and powers that be.
Advisor, comic and symbols of free speech and freedom of thinking.
The fool also has license to interact with the audience, to break the 4th wall.
Here is a beginning of a list of famous Fools in literature
What other writers utilize the fool/the jester in so many ways?
Shakespeare character | title of play
Touchstone | As You Like It 1599
Feste. Introduces the theme of love in his song; At the end of the play Feste talks about the progress of man from childhood to aging to deat and provides a life lesson | Twelfth Night 1600
fool | King Lear 1605
Fool | Timon of Athens
Autolycus and/or Sepherd;s Son — Yokel | The WInter’s Tale
Citizen | Julius Caesar
Coten | Cymbeline
Clown | Othello
Clown | Titus Andronicus
Costard (a country bumpkin) | Love’s Labor Lost
Tarot decks major arcana begins with The Fool who is designated as the zero. Often when laying out the major arcana they are placed with The Fool, the zero centrally in a row of its own and underneath are laid out 3 rows of 7 cards each. If the zero were on a number line, it would imply that there are positive numbers and negative numbers. Does this kind of layout or spread as it is typically called when doing a Tarot reading show us the positive and negative cards? Not necessarily, although that could be an interesting way to do a reading.
Tarot does have the quality of a binary system in many instances contrasting positive with negative; showing difference in genders. Although the fool does not necessarily have that dichotomy.
The Fool in Tiger Tarot
Lori Fields, artist and designer of Tiger Tarot. Published 2022
At first glance the fool card appears to reverse the figures. In traditional tarot, the Rider Waite Smith, the fool is a human being with a ‘familiar’ a small white dog. The small white dog seems to be holding the fool back or warning him that there is a cliff before him.
The Tiger Tarot has a large tiger heard figure in a fools peplum top with a fool’s ruffle around the neck. It looks like a jacket with black diamonds and red dots as well as black lines for decoration. The smaller figure with the human head appears to fly above the tiger. She has wings, yet her limbs and body seem tiny. She is disproportionate the way an infant is disproportionate with a large head and small limbs dn body. She is covered in something that looks like a green gold armor and sports a cape that gives the appearance of her flying. It is winter. The trees and branches have no foliage and several birds are perched on branches .
Laetitia Barbier wrote the booklet that comes with the deck. She writes of The Fool card:
“As above so below. Like a palindrome, the fool stretches between the end and the beginning of all things, moving freely like a board game piece on all terrain. Lost in his own interiority, the silent tiger doesn’t need to speak to be heard, a witty introvert whose movement is his true language.”
The ambiguity about which figure is the fool, plays with us and we may never know. The tiger’s gaze is downward as though focused on the next step. The human face stares at us as perhaps a missive telling us to watch where we step. She has a tiny hand on the tiger as though holding the tiger from moving
To pull this card feels like we are moving intuitively, despite any warning by a familiar. We are stepping out of this winter world into a clearing. There are no branches in front of the figures.
The booklet that comes with the deck says that artist Lori
“Fields tarot represents a subversive and emerging feminine concept of power.”
She also writes on the last page, the inside back cover:
“The anthropomorphic tiger” is a common thread and invites us to “create a new and unique fable.” The booklet also states that the Prince cards, one for every suit is meant to be non-binary.
Fables and stories are certainly attached to the Fool as denoted in the list of Shakespeare plays and this trickster might also be a pied piper of Hamelin. Lori’s directive is to deliver new fables.
My new fable would be an animal dressed to look like a human walks ahead of a flying baby- proportioned girl. This is now the way women move, like tigers. Like wild animals in unusual finery with the baby girl still clutching at them. Yet the tiger woman moves forward on a path unknown and untrodden. She plants in our mind that women are changing. Women will not be held back by the touch of a baby’s hand. They will move forward and the baby girl will have a new role model.
It is hopeful that women’s wildness will lead the way and change or shift our world view not only of women but of the binary nature with which we tend to perceive gender.
This is a new outlook for feminism which has always been inclusive and an upstander for the oppressed.
The Fool in the Motherpeace
Now we’ll look at the fool in the Motherpeace deck. This deck published
in the late 70’s nearly 50 years ago was meant to be both feminist and multicultural.
The deck is round. This takes away from that hierarchical space as though someone powerful sits at the head of the table. This also complicates the way of reading because the directionality of the card influences the way that it is read.
Motherpeace Deck by Karen Vobel & Vicki Noble
Our Motherpeace fool is psychedelic mushrooms, several familiars including a tiger, an alligator, a bird with black back and white feathers around the neck. The booklet describes the Fool “as the main card in the tarot,…the essence of life itself…divine light within the human form and the secret of reincarnation.” The Fool is dancing on hands, upside down and at the edge of the stream. A sun appears to set behind the mountains.
The fool has achieved a new balance, a re-balance and connections with living beings and a psychedelic spirit.
The late 1970’s was a different time for women and these two decks represent that difference in times. The late 1970’s had just recently seen Roe vs Wade pass and women felt powerful for taking charge of their own lives. The Tiger Tarot fool shows us something different. The fact that its artwork was done during the pandemic and in a more solitary setting where it was not only women’s mobility that was restricted in order to stay alive seems to give a very different feel to the Tiger Tarot.
There is a difference between the power of the two decks, the Tiger and the Motherpeace. The Motherpeace is strong and has powerful singular images of women working, leading, fighting. Action oriented. The Tiger has the nubile pink hue of a baby and the faces are like masks. Is it telling us that something has been lost, the voice, the power and become a beautiful stylized appearance, hiding a force that lurks underneath.
The Fool is also the innocent, the childlike figure. This is the archetype of beginning.
Sally Nichols writes in her book Tarot and the Archetypal Journey, about the fool as hitchhiker. She wrote in the late 1960’s when hippies seemed to proliferate in our culture and ccreated controversy about the way to live outside the corporate culture of the company man that was revered in the decade before. She writes as though it is a choice to be that traveler with little more than a sack on a stick carrying all one’s belongings.
Is the fool a “happy wanderer” as she describes. Many fools are those who live on the fringes of society because they fail to adapt. Is that failure a life choice or an inability to conform? There is a theory in sociology that the outgroup, people with a different philosophy and lifestyle who are relegated to the edges over time become the center of society. However, there is an outgroup that is on the fringe due to an inability to manage mental health issues. In some cultures these people may be seen as sacred. They are provided for, given shelter and food within the community. Perhaps, they might go to seclusion, a cave or a dessert for spiritual experience. The Motherpeace with the red dotted mushrooms leaves the impression that psychedelics might be in the same league as this kind of spiritual journey.
Yet, for the most part in capitalism, we don’t have room or time for those who are unproductive and don’t fit into the schedule that work imposes. Although, perhaps, post pandemic there might be a new way of working remotely, that allows a shift from Sally’s description of the free-spirited hippie who lives outside society and the worker who is productive. Who could this new fool be? A social media professional? A travel writer? Some possibilities are perhaps opened up.
When I do a reading, as I’ve done for 40+ years at the New York RenFaire in Tuxedo or at an event, and the Fool comes up, I’ll often be using the Rider Waite Smith deck which shows the fool about to step off the edge. Typically, I’ll engage the client with what is essentially a Jungian exercise called active imagination. I’ll ask the client to image themselves in the fool’s place. Sometimes, in a private reading, I’ll engage them in taking the posture of the fool, to feel the fool in their body in the way the fool is standing. I’ll ask what happens next.
Bringing this section to a close, I notice a song floating through my mind which will probably become the earworm of my day. It’s the lyrics to The Fool on the Hill from the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour, released in 1967. The lyrics address some of my comments Look it up if it’s in your pleasure.
By Martha Rand on February 1, 2023.
