The Fool’s Freedom

Some reflections on the fool archetype

Marseilles Tarot

Rider/Waite

Everything novel begins with a bit of foolishness—for instance, playing around with the Tarot. Why should we be foolish enough to do such a thing? To answer this question, we can begin our exploration with the Fool himself. In this short essay, I will analyse the Fool from the point of view of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s restored Marseilles deck, originating in France in the 17th and 18th centuries (and probably first created in 13th-century Italy), and the classic pop culture Rider-Waite Tarot, published at the beginning of the 20th century by Golden Dawn occultists.

First, the Marseilles Fool is less like the idiot of Dostoyevsky and more like Zorba the Greek. He has a blue beast following him and leans on a red staff, symbolising mystical ability and phallic power. He projects a rugged realism, and Jodorowsky tells us he looks like a giant. He could be the crazy wisdom master or the enlightened vagabond. Conversely, the Rider-Waite Fool is the idiot savant or adolescent with his head in the clouds. There is a world of difference.

This Rider-Waite Fool seems to warn us of the danger of spiritual or artistic inflation. He is the puer aeternus—Peter Pan or the Little Prince—a dandy with a flower in his hand, followed by a white lapdog, about to step off a cliff. While he strides on a mountain peak with glee, perhaps reciting poetry, he misses the abyss before him. Naive fools of this type are the most dependable scapegoats—they become gods after an early suicide. Like the 26-year-old rock star on the verge of a drug overdose, this Fool's vision and energy may be present, but his path leads to annihilation.

The original Marseilles Fool is neither naive nor dysfunctional; he is profoundly practical and grounded. He is a traveller who can navigate drunkenness and ecstasy and be sober and serious when necessary. He is not frivolous and has everything he needs in his bag. He lives what Chogyam Trungpa called “the journey without a goal.” The fact that he has a leaf in one hand (rather than a flower) and a red staff in the other tells us he is a gardener and a lover, that he is generative rather than self-destructive. His nature is like dynamite, breaking apart rigid structures and introducing primordial energy into the system. He has a wild energy that could enliven or disrupt. Without this Fool's enlightened chaos, the patterns of the world become reified and artificial. Again, he is the furthest thing from the idiot savant—he is a primordial and positive archetype.

The Marseilles/Crazy Wisdom Fool is a spiritual pilgrim, like the Japanese ronin (or unemployed samurai), shunning patronage and refusing the world of conventional wisdom. He is a bit of a gambler and certainly a lover; he has a healthy kind of hedonism. He loves—therefore, he is a Fool—but his love is without fixation. To be such a fool/lover is to risk everything and be divinely unreasonable. Therefore, the Fool is the origin of the Joker, the Jester, and the Trump card. Of course, the world doesn’t suffer the Fool easily, and it's true that, more often than not, the Fool falls off a cliff, as is suggested in the Rider-Waite Tarot.

We could say that the Fool is also the precursor of the modern hero. Don Quixote is a Fool archetype; Charles Bukowski played out the Fool in real life, choosing to live with prostitutes and the poor rather than within conventional society; James Joyce's Ulysses is the Everyman Fool. The Fool is the hero of novelistic literature and poetry rather than of myth.

Aleister Crowley, the British occultist, became a world-record mountain climber before becoming the most influential occultist in the West and was certainly a fool of sorts. Crowley's behaviour was unconventional and dangerous, to say the least—it was never quite clear whether he was a black magician or a crazy wisdom master. But as we have said, the Fool/lover is naturally a gambler, and we wouldn’t want a world without dangerous people doing dangerous things. However, a critical difference between the naive Fool and the crazy wisdom master is the latter's tremendous compassion and wisdom. Was Crowley a compassionate magician? It’s hard to say.

We all begin as Fools—the Fool represents the beginner's mind. The wise person can always return to the beginner's mind, not because he is a naive romantic but because he is a full-bodied adventurer. The Marseilles Fool is like Socrates, the wisest person, not because of sophistry or secondhand knowledge but because of his ability to experience ecstasy. He is the alpha or primordial beginning, pure dynamite, an exploration of something just for the wild joy of it.

To conclude, the Fool is essentially a pilgrim without a fixed address or identity, “the original man without any rank,” as the Zen master Rinzai put it. He represents the beginning of the journey of Tarot archetypes. He is the man without a number who has woken up from the nightmare of history. He lives in a spontaneous zero point of pure potential and dynamism. He is a little disturbing, certainly, but he is just what we need in this age of extreme mediocrity and automatic thinking and being. On the other hand, perhaps we have had enough of the idiot savant depicted in Rider-Waite’s deck—even if it is a path we all traverse as young, beautiful, and inexperienced fools.