The Fool (0)
The Fool as the central motif, filed under the Sun and the Moon, with the Hand in a secondary part. From The 1909 tarot.
What is happening
Waite, 1911 “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.”
Waite, 1911 “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.”
Waite, 1911 “The Fool carries a wallet; he is looking over his shoulder and does not know that he is on the brink of a precipice; but a dog or other animal--some call it a tiger--is attacking him from behind, and he is hurried to his destruction unawares.”
Key · 2 motifs
Tap a motif on the picture, or a line below. Its note opens under the line, with the reading its author gave it.
- Primary motif
- Secondary motifs · 1
The picture
A young man in a flowered tunic at the edge of a precipice, a white rose in his left hand, a wand with a wallet over his right shoulder, a white dog at his heels, the sun shining behind him and mountains beyond; the Fool as the central motif. By eye
The reading
The picture read whole, in the archive's words, from the sources quoted on the marks. Read on, and the picture follows: the motif under discussion keeps its colour.
Waite’s Fool is not falling. That is the first thing his account insists on, against the older cards, where the figure is a jester hurried over a cliff by a dog at his heels: here ‘the edge which opens on the depth has no terror’, and the young man ‘pauses at the brink of a precipice among the great heights of the world’, looking at the sky rather than the drop. The dog is still there, ‘still bounding’, but it is company now rather than pursuit.
What he carries says who he is. A white rose held loosely, a wand over the shoulder with an embroidered wallet hung from it, and a tunic covered in flowers: ‘gorgeous vestments’, Waite calls them. He is ‘a prince of the other world on his travels through this one’, and the wallet is the whole of his luggage. Waite mentions the older gloss, that the bag holds the bearer’s follies and vices, only to call it ‘bourgeois and arbitrary’.
The sun is behind him. Waite gives it a mind: it ‘knows whence he came, whither he is going, and how he will return by another path after many days’. So the picture has one knowing thing in it and the traveller has his back to it, which is the whole situation of ‘the spirit in search of experience’. He does not know the route. Something does.
The card is numbered zero and Waite keeps it at the head of the sequence, where Court de Gebelin put it, as ‘the zero or negative which is presupposed by numeration’. Everything else in the deck is counted; this is the one who has not started counting. Waite’s last word on it is that ‘many symbols of the Instituted Mysteries are summarized in this card’, and he declines to list them.
Readings quoted
Waite, 1911 “Many symbols of the Instituted Mysteries are summarized in this card, which reverses, under high warrants, all the confusions that have preceded it.”
Waite, 1911 “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.”
Waite, 1911 “Court de Gebelin places it at the head of the whole series as the zero or negative which is presupposed by numeration, and as this is a simpler so also it is a better arrangement.”
Decoded: every motif is marked, and each mark carries the reading its author gave it, quoted from the text, or says that it is observed on the picture and not read. The reading above is the archive's own, made from those sources and no others.
Gold, the perfected metal, and the illuminated intellect. The most overloaded symbol in the tradition.
In plain words The sun stands behind him, not ahead of him. Waite makes it the one thing in the picture that knows the whole journey, where the young man came from and how he will come back, which is why it is at his back: he is walking away from what knows him, into the open.
Waite, 1911 “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.”
An open right hand, a sign on every finger and one in the palm. Hall calls it the hand of the philosopher, extended to those who enter the Mysteries.
In plain words One hand holds a white rose lightly, the other a wand with a small embroidered bag hung from it. Waite reads the whole figure as a prince from another world travelling through this one, and the two hands carry what such a traveller would: a flower, and everything he owns in one bag.
Waite, 1911 “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.”
Also carrying the Sun and the Moon
35 works carry it. The 6 where it is the central motif are here. The symbol.
Where the detail is the subject
This is in the picture without being what it is about. Below, one work that is about it.
In the same series
Record
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