Look at this familiar image of The Fool from the classic Ride Waite Colman-Smith tarot deck.
The Fool is a youthful, carefree person. They are clothed in bright colors– green to imply youth and growth, yellow to show a sunny disposition. The floral pattern on their tunic suggests springtime. They nonchalantly hold the white rose of purity (virginity) in one hand, in a careless grip that suggests that at any moment it may slip from their fingers. They carry a bag of their meager worldly belongings. Without a care they stroll along, nose in the air, the red plume on their cap suggesting jauntiness and arrogance. A white sun blazes above, implying the alchemical stage of albedo, purification. A little white dog barks at their feet, trying to warn them. The fool does not notice the danger as they stray nearer and nearer to the brink of a cliff.
Everyone starts from somewhere. The fool’s number is zero. They represent the beginning of the journey. This is the card of fucking around and finding out. It is a loving homage to the mistakes we all make when just starting out in life.
The important thing about The Fool is that they fall. If I were to create a Satanic tarot deck, my image for The Fool would be Lucifer falling from heaven. To fuck around is human, to find out is divine.
What lies at the bottom of the cliff? For The Fool, it is not destruction. It may be death, but only in a metaphorical sense, followed swiftly by rebirth. At the bottom of the cliff is a hard lesson. At the bottom of the cliff is wisdom and transformation.
Alcoholics in AA (like me) often talk about hitting “rock bottom”– needing to fuck up our lives so badly that there seemed to be no lower to go before being able to turn ourselves around and do something new. When there is no further to fall, at last one is on solid ground, and is finally free to stand up.
The Fool falls but it is not in their nature to stay down. The Fool hops right back up, climbs up another mountain, and just as likely as not, falls off another damn cliff. But at least it’s a different cliff this time, and therein lies growth. So many tumbles to take! So many lessons to learn! And The Fool can embrace them all. The Fool is the high priestex of the Holy Mistake. Trial and error. Live and learn.
The sequence of the Major Arcana is sometimes described as a story, one character evolving through many roles and stages. A funny thing happens between cards Zero and card One– the Fool somehow becomes the Magician. How does this happen? It occurs off screen. We don’t see the pit into which The Fool falls, we only know they emerge reborn as the Master of all Four Elements, the wielder of Will, the holder of perfect balance. We can only conclude that it is somehow the act of falling that leads to this wisdom and power.
Thus The Fool is the aspirant to magical initiation. The pit into which they fall is nothing less than The Abyss, the realm of unreality in which the ego is destroyed in order to be reborn.
Within The Abyss dwells Choronzon, who is another type of holy Fool. Choronzon is sacred madness, and fertile incoherence. He represents that which is beyond speech, the pre-verbal, the hyperverbal. He raves, he wails, he speaks in tongues. He creates sound without meaning because he is before and after meaning. With his teeth and claws he tears everything to shreds indiscriminately. More primal than the id, he has much in common with an infant– a swirling vortex of needs, desires, sensations and impressions that do not yet have even an identity to contain them. Yet his destructiveness is constructive, and the Abyss is the sacred cunt from which the Magician is reborn.
Thus The Fool is not merely about starting out, but also about starting over. First chances and second ones.
There are many tarot decks, and many aspects of The Fool– The Fool as jester and trickster in the Marseilles tarot, The Fool as The Green Man, as a sacrificial God in the Thoth tarot. But I have a soft spot for the Rider Waite Colman-Smith interpretation, which shows The Fool on the precipice. This image, more than any other classic image of The Fool, emphasizes the aspect of making mistakes.
In life, some lessons can only be learnt the hard way. The Fool is a testament to this, and an encouragement to embrace the process of growth with all its pain.