Zero: "The Fool"

One of the most powerfully symbolic and important cards in the entire Tarot, equating to the number zero. The Fool is also the only symbolism in the Major Arcana that can be found in an average pack of playing cards.

Superficially, The Fool is taken to mean just that. Someone who is error-prone, lacks discernment, understanding, is crude in his and her ways, is inadequately prepared for what is ahead and is both selfish, insensitive and ignorant in his/her manner and progression. That said, by contrast at this level The Fool can also be engaging, beguiling, charming – as someone who is doomed to failure may often be – honest (“many a true word spoken in jest”) and extremely single-minded and determined to see something through no matter what.

Commonly, for meditation and for divination, the classic “foolishness” of the card is the foolishness in the sense of one who is ill-equipped for what lies ahead, oblivious to all oncoming risks, lacking in even the most basic understanding of the current situation and thereby inviting a certain ruin through recklessness.

The common Fool symbolism with a figure walking one way (often straight along the edge of a cliff) with gaze fixed elsewhere reinforces the central notion of a wanderer and dreamer. And yet, under the cosmetics, there lies considerably greater depth to The Fool. While it represents that which is fleeting, it also represents that which endures. The Fool as number zero establishes both the dreamer and, at the dreams end, the dreamer with an intimate realisation of the dream itself.

The Fool as represented in the Cosmic Tarot. The journey of a hundred miles begins with the acknowledgement of a single step.

The Fool symbolises the purity of the first step already taken, a first distinction among a journey of endless steps – in short, the stuff of life itself. To follow this recognition comes the next steps: the myriad questions, choices, possibilities that the traveller must deal with, all providing form along the ways. Whatever happens there, whether these are all dealt with or not, even recognised or not, it is all conducted on a journey already begun.

The Fool then is all of us, our most base potential, our raw material, a universal shout of sorts through which cosmic ebb and flow occurs. And it is these vast experiences, rays outwards from the first step, that form the spectrum of the accompanying 77 cards of the Tarot.

The Fool asks us to be aware of our journey and to be aware of the vicissitudes ahead. It asks us to think that where we look, what we explore, may not be the “what is” at all. There’s a kind of teasing there, where every step is open to prodding, perhaps in a less than flattering way. Every step of the way we might feel right or completely wrong and quite possibly at times even unable to distinguish between those shifting states. Indeed, The Fool is an acknowledgement of this, a reminder of sorts to remember that the journey is just that. And that when we feel most right, we may ultimately be at our most wrong and vice versa.

As I mentioned earlier The Fool is, somewhat strangely, a wisdom card representing as it does our collective and enduring knowledge from birth to death. All matter and circumstance rests here awaiting movement and thus formation, all garbed in the lurid colours and patterns of the jester and the raggedy traveller. This timeless symbolism of our never-ending “is-ness” cycles continually; it is no mistake that the cards of the Major Arcana begin and end in The Fool.

The Fool shows us that the road we set out to travel is the road we never leave. All possibilities remain before us and around us and, through the experience of travels, (sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter) formation occurs. This is the universal process of always becoming, the expression of all knowing and unknowing.

Was it ever what we expected? What would it serve us to always be so? Blindly and half-glimpsed, The Fool gives birth to itself endlessly. One of the most important wholeness symbols in the entire Tarot.