The Fool

  • Arcana Major
  • Number 0
  • Figure on this site Odin in disguise
Historical evidence

In the earliest decks

The Fool belongs to the oldest layer of the tarot, which began in northern Italy in the 15th century as a pack for card games, not for fortune-telling. Italian packs call the card Il Matto and the French pattern Le Mat, both meaning “the madman”. In almost all early packs he carries no number and stands apart from the numbered trumps.

One of the oldest surviving Fools belongs to the Visconti-Sforza cards painted in Milan in the middle of the 15th century. The card is now in the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which dates the set to about 1450-1480. It shows a ragged man with bare feet, feathers in his hair and a stick in his hand. Early Fools like this one look much like older pictures of folly, such as Giotto’s figure of Foolishness (1306).

The engraved Sola Busca pack of about 1490-1491, now in the Brera in Milan, names him Mato and is unusual in numbering him 0. Some 18th-century Belgian packs numbered him XXII instead.

In the Tarot de Marseille pattern (for example Jean Dodal’s pack of about 1701-1715), Le Mat walks with a bundle of belongings on a stick over his shoulder while a dog or cat goes at him from behind. In play the Fool was not an ordinary trump. In Italian and French games it is “the Excuse”, a card that may be played instead of following suit, and in French tarot today it is one of the three key cards that decide the score. In Central European Tarock games it became the highest trump instead.

Historical evidence

The Rider-Waite-Smith card

The best-known modern Fool was drawn by Pamela Colman Smith to Arthur Edward Waite’s instructions. Both belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. William Rider & Son of London published the pack in December 1909, and Waite’s illustrated guide, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, followed in 1910-1911.

Waite described the older card as a fool looking back over his shoulder, unaware of the precipice ahead, with a dog or other animal attacking him from behind. Smith’s card keeps the wanderer, his bag and his animal, but changes the mood. The dog now runs beside him, and the ragged madman becomes a young man in rich clothes, holding a white rose, pausing at the edge of a cliff under a bright sun. The card is printed with a 0, and this was the first widely used pack to number him so. Waite himself still discussed the card between Judgement (20) and the World (21), and wrote that the true order of the trumps had never come to light.

Myth and literature · Quotation

Waite’s description

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.

Myth and literature · Context

Later meanings

The ideas below were added from the late 18th century onward. None of them comes from the Italian makers of the cards.

In 1781, in volume VIII of Le Monde primitif, Antoine Court de Gébelin claimed that the tarot preserved an Egyptian “Book of Thoth”. There is no evidence for this. According to Waite, Court de Gébelin put the Fool at the head of the trumps as zero. An essay by the Comte de Mellet in the same volume first linked the 21 trumps and the Fool with the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

The French occultist Éliphas Lévi later gave the Hebrew letters to the trumps starting with the Magician as Aleph, and set the Fool near the end, between Judgement and the World. In that French line the Fool took the letter Shin; Oswald Wirth, following Lévi’s order, drew Shin on the card, and Waite noted the Shin attribution in 1910. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn moved the Fool back to the start and gave it Aleph and the element of air. The systems still disagree, and none of these attributions is older than the 18th century.

Modern interpretation

As read on this site

This is the meaning used for readings here. Using the tarot to divine is a modern practice, and the Norse figure shown for each card is this site’s own association; the tarot began as an Italian card game. A short history is on the Tarot page.

Upright

Keywords: beginnings, trust, innocence, the open road, unwritten chapters

A new path opens, and nothing about it is settled yet — not the destination, not the company, not even the first few steps. This is the card of the threshold: the moment before the story has a shape. Odin walked the roads of Midgard as a stranger precisely because the strange has things to teach that the familiar can't. You don't need a plan worthy of a saga; you need the willingness to leave the hall and see what the weather does.

In general: Something is starting, and it's allowed to start messy. Resist the urge to map the whole journey before you've taken the first step.

In love: A connection that hasn't been defined yet — don't rush to name it. Let it be what it is before deciding what it should become.

In work: A new role, project, or direction with no fixed script. Your inexperience here isn't a liability; it's the reason you'll see what the veterans have stopped noticing.

Reversed

Keywords: recklessness, naivety, unprepared risk, avoidance dressed as adventure

Reckless leaping looks like courage from a distance, but up close it's usually just a refusal to look down. The wanderer's gift is curiosity, not carelessness — when the upright energy curdles, you get someone sprinting toward the cliff edge to prove they're not afraid, rather than walking it because the view is worth seeing. The road was always worth walking. It still is. The sprint is the problem.

In general: Check whether you're moving toward something or just running from stillness. Both look like motion from the outside.

In love: Jumping into intimacy or commitment to outrun loneliness rarely outruns it. The pace is the tell.

In work: A leap taken without enough information, or a refusal to learn the terrain before changing it. Slow down by exactly one step.

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