The Fool

The image

Pamela Colman Smith's Fool of 1909 is a young man in a richly patterned tunic, striding along a high crag under a bright yellow sky. A white sun shines in the upper corner. Over his shoulder he carries a staff with a small bundle tied to it; in his other hand he holds a white rose. A small white dog leaps at his side, and behind him rise snow-tipped mountains. His face is turned upward and away from the drop that lies a step ahead.

History

In the Italian tarocchi of the fifteenth century the Fool was a ragged figure — in the Visconti-Sforza cards a dishevelled man with feathers in his hair — and in the card game he was not a trump but an "excuse", a card that could be played to avoid following suit. The Tarot de Marseille calls him Le Mat and leaves him unnumbered, often with a dog or animal tearing at his breeches.

Because the card had no number, occultists argued over its place. Court de Gébelin gave it zero in 1781. Éliphas Lévi put it between Judgement and the World and gave it the Hebrew letter Shin. The Golden Dawn instead set it first, as zero, with the letter Aleph, and Waite's deck followed this, although his Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) still discusses it beside the last trumps. Waite described it as a prince of the other world rather than a common madman.

Symbolism

Zero suggests potential before form: the empty circle from which the numbered sequence unfolds, which is why many modern writers read the trumps as "the Fool's journey". The white rose stands for purity of desire, the white sun for a spirit not yet clouded by experience, and the cliff for the risk inherent in any beginning. The dog has been read both as loyal instinct and as the warning voice of the world below.

In the Golden Dawn system the Fool is Aleph, the first Hebrew letter and one of the three "mother letters" of the Sefer Yetzirah, attributed to Air. It sits on the eleventh path of the Tree of Life, joining Kether and Chokmah. Some twentieth-century writers added the planet Uranus, a modern attribution.

In a reading

As an outcome the Fool favours setting out; as an obstacle it can point to naivety. Beside the Magician it suggests a beginning backed by skill; beside the Tower, an unplanned fresh start after upheaval. In a spread about the past it can describe a period of freedom or an impulsive choice still shaping the present. Readers often treat a Fool in the first position as the theme of the whole reading: something new is asking to be tried.