An Inconvenient Sidekick
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Several times in the past I’ve come across arrangements of the 22 trump cards (aka “Major Arcana”) in which the Fool is set apart from the other 21 cards. Most often it is placed above the rest, but my personal preference is to lay it adjacent to but separate from the middle row of the 7×3 array to make it less remote from, and therefore more conversant with, all of its companions. It’s just a visual quirk of mine, but in Jungian terms it brings the Fool down to the “human” level of Ego, where it begins to gain traction in our personality (prior to which it is an amorphous, unfocused, protean impulse).
In her book Tarot and the Archetypal Journey: The Jungian Path from Darkness to Light (previously titled Jung and Tarot, An Archetypal Journey), Sallie Nichols observes that the Fool won’t stay put and is always ready to burst forth into our consciousness at any time during our psychological life’s journey through the Major Arcana. In Tarot Triumphs, Cherry Gilchrist notes in her discussion of Medieval festival floats that the Fool could pop up randomly anywhere in the procession: it was truly a “runaway child, running wild.” Although the Magician is the nominal Grand Marshall of the numeric parade, both for the single-digit series of trumps and as the leading digit in everything else except Judgement and the World, the Fool provides the nascent spark of originality, imagination and inspiration that drives the others forward. The downside is that it also embraces a “null” or negligent state of dereliction and delinquency; every other card harbors the seeds of both the Fool’s genius and his madness. As Billy Preston sang in 1974, “Nothin’ from nothin’ leaves nothin’/’Cause that minus is too low to see.”
This moved me to contemplate how the unrestrained Fool might affect an adjacent trump card in a reading when it lands either directly in front of or behind that trump (the “inconvenient sidekick” of the title). Nichols sees the Fool as symbolically “making a fool of us” whenever it shows up, which became the key point in my thinking. In that sense, the Fool as an inchoate “free radical” might precipitate or exaggerate the blunders of any trump that comes after it (the “look before you leap” caveat is relevant here) or offer a rueful “morning-after” sentiment about what transpired when it follows the other trump. It is not a good “closer” and is at a loss about what to do with the fallout at that point. But it is also not a very accommodating “opener” since it has its head in the clouds and its feet skirting the Void. (This guy would not be my first choice for back-up in a pinch.)
Something similar could be said when the Fool is joined to a court card. When it precedes the court card, we might be made to “play the fool” at the behest of another person, most likely being duped due to some vulnerability in the court card’s persona. When the Fool follows that card, we are in “lessons learned” mode, having already acted “for good or ill;” we may realize that we must go back to “square one” and start over in the venture described by the rest of the cards, rethinking our strategy. The adage “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” is instructive. <Hears Roger Daltry singing “We won’t get fooled again!” in the background.>
When it appears adjacent to a pip card, we could see it as an “Ace on steroids” punctuating the next step on whatever mundane path the pip’s energy is headed down, giving it a motivational (and not necessarily well-aimed) “kick in the pants” when it falls before the pip, or opening that card’s eyes to unforeseen potential when coming after (even though it may be too late to make a difference at that point and we will have to wait “until next time”). In the practical realm, the Fool is the harbinger of the “do-over;” it invites us to do things by halves: half-baked, half-cocked, half-empty. You know the quip: “I didn’t have time to do it right, but I had time to do it over.”
From the standpoint of self-awareness and self-mastery, the proximity of the Fool is made more onerous (and complicated) for the adjacent card when it appears before that card, mainly because it can run amok with or sabotage one’s priorities due to its feckless nature; Robert Burns had some choice words to say on the subject of “well-laid plans,” and perhaps the Fool is his emissary. Coming afterward, although it may still feel like we’re standing in quicksand, it’s main insight is a resigned “What an idiot I was!” or the Monday-morning-quarterback’s “I told you so!” We’ve already gone over the cliff, all that remains is to clean up the mess and do the postmortem. My advice for the querent in any of these scenarios would be to “Keep your guard up and your options open, that Fool can’t be trusted.”
There is a tendency in modern practice to view the Fool as an innocuous naif who merely represents a new beginning that we can turn to our advantage; the old notion that it is a symbol of rank foolishness to be shunned and run out of town has been lost in the starry-eyed haze of current opinion. (Whatever happened to that callous expression “Freeloaders get the bum’s rush”?) The image of the Fool below is more representative of that witless bearing than Waite’s version, as are any of the Tarot de Marseille examples. The historical Fool was truly clueless.
Consider that, in following Sallie Nichols’ line of thought in this essay, I was approaching the Fool archetype entirely from an unconscious perspective as a primordial state with a “null” trajectory akin to the potential rather than kinetic energy of the Aces, and not the affirmative, mystical one common in modern tarot practice. It may inspire and motivate in a nascent or latent way, but it also carries baggage. It must leave that quiescent condition and morph into the Magician before we begin to pick up traction, direction, momentum and purpose.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on September 30, 2023.
