MAJOR ARCANA · TRUMP 0
The Fool
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
New beginnings, spontaneity, a leap of faith, innocence.
REVERSED
Recklessness, hesitation, fear of the unknown.
The card
A young traveller steps toward a cliff edge, gazing at the sky, a white rose in hand and a small dog at his heels. The sun shines behind him: pure potential before experience.
The Fool is trump 0 of the twenty-two trumps of the Major Arcana.
In the Golden Dawn's attributions it carries the Hebrew letter Aleph (א), “ox”, and the element of Air. On the Tree of Life it is path 11, joining Kether and Chokmah.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: The Fool, 0.
In Waite's words
Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew, and explained it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). His text, with his spelling:
DIVINATORY MEANINGS Folly, mania, extravagance, intoxication, delirium, frenzy, bewrayment.
REVERSED Negligence, absence, distribution, carelessness, apathy, nullity, vanity.
The picture and its symbolism
With light step, as if earth and its trammels had little power to restrain him, a young man in gorgeous vestments pauses at the brink of a precipice among the great heights of the world; he surveys the blue distance before him—its expanse of sky rather than the prospect below. His act of eager walking is still indicated, though he is stationary at the given moment; his dog is still bounding. The edge which opens on the depth has no terror; it is as if angels were waiting to uphold him, if it came about that he leaped from the height. His countenance is full of intelligence and expectant dream. He has a rose in one hand and in the other a costly wand, from which depends over his right shoulder a wallet curiously embroidered. He is a prince of the other world on his travels through this one—all amidst the morning glory, in the keen air. The sun, which shines behind
him, knows whence he came, whither he is going, and how he will return by another path after many days. He is the spirit in search of experience. Many symbols of the Instituted Mysteries are summarized in this card, which reverses, under high warrants, all the confusions that have preceded it.
In his Manual of Cartomancy, Grand Orient has a curious suggestion of the office of Mystic Fool, as a part of his process in higher divination; but it might call for more than ordinary gifts to put it into operation. We shall see how the card fares according to the common arts of fortune-telling, and it will be an example, to those who can discern, of the fact, otherwise so evident, that the Trumps Major had no place originally in the arts of psychic gambling, when cards are used as the counters and pretexts. Of the circumstances under which this art arose we know, however, very little. The conventional explanations say that the Fool signifies the flesh, the sensitive life, and by a peculiar satire its subsidiary name was at one time the alchemist, as depicting folly at the most insensate stage.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), Part II § 2 and Part III § 3. Public domain; text from the 1922 printing on Wikisource.
Related cards
In three historical decks
The same card as it was painted in fifteenth-century Milan, printed in the French pattern of the Tarot de Marseille, and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.
In the Tarot de Marseille: Le Mat, usually unnumbered.
Learn more in the lessons
- The Major Arcana Journey · 18 min
- The Tree of Life · 18 min
- The Twenty-Two Paths & the Tarot · 18 min
- The Structure of the Tarot · 14 min · free
Images: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909 (public domain); the RWS1909 scans on Wikimedia Commons. Lequart, Paris, c. 1890 (public domain); scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons. Attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, mid-15th century (public domain); scans by David Madore, via Wikimedia Commons.