Reading Tarot Like the Fool

I grew up in a small, conservative Christian community in New England. I went to church school until I was in junior high. Until I was eleven or so, I could count on one hand the people I knew who weren’t members of my family or members of my church. It was a small world, smaller because women weren’t allowed to speak in church or on religious subjects with men or hold jobs outside the home.

It didn’t take very long for me to know that life wasn’t for me, but I had to pretend that it was until I was free to go to college. I lived for freedom, counting down the years and then the months until I could get away and live my own life.

Then I left. And I was utterly lost. If life was a number line starting at 1, I would have been at 0. I had no idea who I was, what I was doing, or where I was going. I was in Fool time. I was off the map.

So, I did the only thing you can do when you don’t know where you are and no one is looking for you: I started exploring. I studied philosophy, psychology, art history, and literature. I eventually got a degree in English only because my advisor absolutely forbid me to stop changing my major. When I ran out of undergrad, I went to a graduate school that didn’t require you to know what you were studying—or even what academic program you were in—until you had to write a thesis. Everyone around me thought I was crazy, but I had an instinct that the way forward for me was to travel light and cover as much ground as possible. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, how do you know where to look to find it? The only solution is to look everywhere.

The Holy, Bellowing Fool

Look up the word “fool,” and you’ll see that the origin of the word is the Latin word for “bellows” or “empty bag.” To be a fool is to be empty. The dictionary says “empty headed.” It’s tempting to go from empty headed to ignorant or stupid, but an empty bag has room to be filled. The poet Keats called this “negative capability.” Being in a place of negative capability means that there is room in your head for new ideas. You don’t approach everything you see with a firm set of assumptions. You know you don’t know everything. You’re teachable. The Buddhists call this ”beginners mind.”

The Fool is a beginner. He doesn’t know anything but what he sees. He is like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” The child might not be the only one in the crowd who sees that the emperor is naked, but he is the only one whose head isn’t so full of manners that he can’t tell the truth.

Being a fool isn’t always about speaking your mind and hoping for the best. In Medieval Europe, the king’s fool had an essential role in court. His job was ostensibly to make the king laugh, but his real job was to say the things no one else in court could say. In an age when the king could lop off your head for no reason at all, being a fool was a careful dance of wisdom and cunning. A fool needed the wisdom to see the truth under the facade of court and the cunning to speak the truth in a way the king could hear. This is a more mature face of the fool, closer to the idea of the holy fool, the saint in ancient times who went around town doing crazy things to snap people out of their super-serious assumptions about what it means to be holy.

Another face of the holy fool is the trickster. The trickster wears many faces all around the world. In ancient Greece, he was Hermes and Prometheus. In Norse mythology, he’s Loki and Odin. For some Native Americans, he’s Raven or Coyote. In Hinduism, his name is Krishna. Like his name suggests—and the trickster is, for some reason, always male, according to Lewis Hyde—his role in society is to play tricks. “Pushing, goading, jabbing the kings and heroes whenever they turn away from the inner world of truth,” Rachel Pollack says.

She points out that he is carrying a wand. In the major arcana, the Magician, Chariot driver, and the World dancer are the only other archetypes who carry wands. While the Magician and Chariot driver carry theirs “self-consciously, with a powerful grip,” the fool and World dancer “hold their wands so casually we hardly notice them.” The fool is even using his wand to carry his bag. While the other wands in the major arcana are white, the fool’s wand is black. Black is the color of “all things being possible, infinite energy of life before consciousness has constructed any boundaries.” The Fool does not know his own power. This means he can’t use it consciously, but it also means his power cannot destroy him.

Ultimately, though, the Fool is a light-hearted card. If you are working with the Fool, Michelle Tea says that “the Fool wants you to be spontaneous…If it is bathed in optimism and takes you into unknown territory, the Fool wants you doing it.”

The Polyglot Fool

Tarot is a language of the soul. There are many other languages of the soul. Just like spoken languages, there are ideas that overlap, and there are ideas that are found in one language and not in others. If you want to know about longing and nostalgia, ask someone who speaks Portuguese about saudade. English is one of the world’s most preeminent languages for swearing, and there are branches of philosophy that are nearly impossible to understand without a basic working knowledge of how to construct a German verb.

When you know lots of things and you bring what you know into your practice of reading Tarot, it increases your literacy. The cards are literally able to say more things to you.

For example, Tarot has a sun card, and astrology also works with the sun. The sun is an important part of Wicca and the Norse, Egyptian, and Greek religions. This morning, I was reading a theory from an anthropologist’s doctoral thesis from a hundred years ago that Arthur is a memory of a Celtic sun god and the tales of the round table are all that are left of his lore. The Anasazi and the Romans planned their cities around the path of the sun, and Japan was once known as the Empire of the Sun. Florida and California are obsessed with the fact that it’s sunny there, and there are places in the north called the Land of the Midnight Sun. The place I live right now is defined by sun season and no-sun season. There is a song by They Might Be Giants about the sun and a Beatles song and a children’s song about “Mr. Sun” that is currently stuck in my head and driving me crazy. Those of you who are more scientifically minded than me can probably find a lot of meaning in the finer details of the sun’s nuclear reactions or whatever it is that makes the sun burn.

I’m sure that if we put our heads together, we could come up with dozens of other references. Any of those references could inform your readings as long as you—and the person you’re reading for—find meaning in it. You could draw the sun card and have it mean that the person is going to move to a place with a strong association with the sun. It could mean that they need to work on developing their ego. It could refer to one of the solar holidays. If your client venerates a sun god, that card could point to a message from them.

You might be feeling a bit dizzy right now wondering how you know which reference to choose, but that’s a good thing. It means that you have possibilities. Knowing which one to choose is a matter of trusting your intuition, which we’ll deal with later.

Begin Each Reading Foolishly

When you begin a reading, be the Fool. Explore everything. Make as many connections as you can. If a card reminds you of someone from your favorite TV show, write it down in your journal. Find yourself assigning cards to all the characters in Harry Potter? Fantastic! (And I want to see!) Collect as many connections with each card as you can.

Resources:

Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, Rachel Pollack

Trickster Makes this World, Lewis Hyde

Modern Tarot, Michelle Tea

This post was originally published on Aquarius Moon Journal on 21 December 2019.