Iduna´s Apples

2018-01-21

Why it is (sometimes ) good to be a fool (The Fool)

“You´re a fool!”

Do you like being called such a name?

To begin with it´s a bit outdated. These days you are more likely to be called a mother***er but this is not my point here. I didn´t like be called a fool until I discovered the Tarot cards for me and the cards made me realize that there are different shades of fools.

There is the common, stupid fool. The person who just insulted you likely belongs into that category. If it is true stupidly there isn´t much you can do. Even the edges of a thunderbolt will grow dull when hitting a really empty head.

But there is a different kind of fool. It is The Fool (and you feel the capital letters, right?), the one that the Tarot concerns itself with.

Now The Fool is not stupid. He is the beginning of all things and the end of them. In a Tarot deck The Fool therefore receives the number zero. He is the raw potential from which the first seed of a new thing is born. He is the initial spark and the beginning even before the start.

The ancient Greeks believed that the first primordial gods – Uranus and Gaia – were born out of sheer chaos. On a similar note the Vikings and Germanic tribes believed that the first beings were created when cosmic fire and ice collided. The Fool is that chaos, he is the fire and ice.

If you examine the card, in moist decks you see a young man looking up to the sky with a smile, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he is about to fall off a cliff.

Stupid?

You´re sure?

Maybe not so stupid.

This Fool knows something most of us have forgotten. HE feels something in his gut that most of us do not acknowledge anymore. HE knows and  he feels that flying is just as easy as hitting the ground. H trusts in the universe that he will step over the edge of the cliff and NOT end up as Wiley E. Coyote in the Tiny Toons. He trusts that this leap of faith will make him soar through the sky instead of leaving him look like a pancake somewhere down in a canyon.

I admit that for the better part of my life I have not been that Fool either. Even today I sometimes find it hard to take these leaps of faith. If you browed through my website a bit you might have noticed that I practice witchcraft and shamanism as well. In one of my shamanic journeys my power animal made me jump off a cliff and I flew. Only much later did I realize how much this experience mirrors The Fool in the Tarot. I made a Fool out of myself during that shamanic experience and I can´t tell you how happy I am about it.

The Fool of the Tarot is the wise Fool. He is the beginning even before the start because he reminds us that we can fly. Acknowledging this possibility is what makes the aces of the Tarot deck possible.

But that´s a story for another day.

Now I´m off, doing something foolish.