The Fool

Before the Fool was anything symbolic he was a rule. In the fifteenth-century Italian card game from which the tarot descends, the card called the Matto was not a trump at all. It was an excuse: played to escape the obligation to follow suit or to trump, it took no trick of its own and could not be captured. That is why the Marseille pattern gives it no number. The zero is not an ancient silence about the unmanifest. It is an eighteenth-century addition, made once the cards had been recruited for divination.

The game itself is well documented and genuinely old. Trump cards, carte da trionfi, appear in Italian court records by 1440, and the oldest surviving examples are the hand-painted decks made for the rulers of Milan in the middle of that century. What is not documented for roughly another three hundred years is anybody using them to tell fortunes. The earliest known evidence of tarot cards read as an oracle is an anonymous manuscript of about 1750. The Egyptian origin story, the Romani origin story and the claim of a lost priestly book are all later inventions, and none of them has a manuscript behind it.

This matters more for the Fool than for any other card, because his modern meaning rests entirely on his zero. Read him as the number before one and he becomes potential, the soul before incarnation, the first step of a journey. Read him as the piece that sits outside the sequence and takes no tricks, which is demonstrably what he was first, and he becomes something stranger and arguably better: the one card on the table playing by different rules from everything else. Both readings are in circulation. Only the second is attested in the fifteenth century.

None of the Fool's occult identity is medieval, and the layers can be dated with some precision.

In 1781 Antoine Court de Gebelin published, in the eighth volume of his Monde primitif, the claim that the tarot preserved a book of Egyptian priests. In the same volume the Comte de Mellet supplied the other half of the apparatus, matching the twenty-one trumps and the Fool to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Both essays are wrong about history. Both were enormously influential, and very nearly everything esoteric written about the tarot since descends from that one publication.

Eliphas Levi turned the correspondence into a working system in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, issued in two parts between 1854 and 1856, and it is his arrangement that first binds the trumps to the paths of the Tree of Life. Levi did not put the Fool at the head of the sequence. He placed him near the end, between Judgement and the World, on the letter Shin. The now-standard assignment, Fool, Aleph, the element Air, the eleventh path running from Kether to Chokmah, comes instead from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1887 and 1888, and reached a wide public only through the decks and books its former members produced. Waite prints the Fool as 0 and then discusses him out of sequence anyway; Crowley keeps the Golden Dawn placement and defends it at length.

A modern account of this card therefore stacks four layers roughly a century apart: a fifteenth-century game piece, a 1781 Egyptian fantasy, an 1850s Kabbalistic scheme, and an 1890s revision of that scheme. Each is worth knowing. None is the others, and presenting the whole stack as one ancient tradition is the most persistent error in tarot writing.

Readers do not agree about this card, and the disagreement is old enough to be informative.

The dominant modern reading treats the Fool as beginning, trust and open possibility, and treats his approach to the edge as courage rather than carelessness. A second reading, closer to the older French card, treats him as the holy fool or the vagrant: outside society, unhoused, possibly mad, and not obviously to be envied. A third, common in Marseille-derived practice, declines to fix him at all and reads him positionally, as whatever the spread has not accounted for, the loose element, the thing that will not stay in its category. That last approach follows directly from what the card did in the game.

Reversals are a genuine dispute rather than a matter of taste. Etteilla assigned upright and reversed meanings from his earliest cartomancy work of 1770, and the practice entered occult tarot with him. Waite gives reversed meanings for every card in his companion text and clearly expects them to be used. Much traditional Marseille practice does not use them at all, on the reasonable ground that the older decks have pip cards with no fixed orientation and that a reader working from the whole spread does not need a second meaning bolted onto each card. Many contemporary readers have quietly abandoned reversals for the same reason, and read a difficult card by its neighbours instead.

Where reversals are used, this card is usually taken as recklessness, avoidance, or a beginning refused. That is a defensible reading. It is not the only one available, and it is worth saying plainly that a reader who never turns a card upside down is not doing tarot wrong.