Dreams in Pasteboard: The Fool
I want to try something different. I love tarot attributions, but if I try to go through and write 78 of those, I'll never finish, because I'll get bored. Or, worse, I won't be convinced I'm doing something useful. You can read the work of Susan Chang or listen to the podcast she did with Mel Meleen.
But you can sit down, quietly, and go into your temple space, or your sacred grove, and open a door with a tarot card painted on it. This isn't unique either. But I wonder if it will allow me to get to my own voice on these cards, these 78 ghosts in a kaleidoscope.
I actually did "pathworking" through the trumps a little over halfway before I began to explore other magical practices and put it on the backburner. I can't find my notebooks from that period, and I might as well just do it all again anyway, this time without the "pathworking" part. If you don't know what that means, it's essentially doing what I said above: going into that card, or visiting the spirit that speaks through it, but by using the structure of the Tree of Life and the correspondences the Golden Dawn used to map the cards on there. I'm not doing much Golden Dawn magic these days, but I can still talk to these cards.
Let's start with the Fool. I withdrew the Fool from the CBD Tarot, or the Conver-Ben-Dov tarot. I meditated, and then I did some light trance entry. And then, in my sacred grove, I opened the door.
You can see some light greenery around the Fool's feet, and apart from the heavy, humid air, that's the first thing I noticed. To my left were a line of high hills, and the figure with his askew clothing and rucksack said he came from there. Far to my right, over somewhat barren ground, I could see the grey shapes of a city. The Fool said he was going there. Perhaps someone could give him a crust of bread there. He said it had been all downhill lately, and that was good.
He asked me for a coin, which I gave him. He rolled a cigarette and offered it to me, but I said no, thank you. And I asked him what he was doing. "Walking," he said. I asked about his dog. "Oh, he's not mine." The dog wandered around and in fact did seem less concerned with us than I'd expected. This was a surprise. I genuinely expected the dog to be his. I'll say why later.
He seemed practical, down to earth, but lackadaisical. He was unafraid and happy to stop and talk. He had no origin point and no destination, just spots in the geography he had been in previously and would be in soon enough. "Just another day in paradise," he said. Now, someone said that to me yesterday, so that was my brain remembering it, but I think the spirit pulled it out. I'm not certain it was "just my imagination," though what would that even mean anyway?
The sky was lovely if quite overcast. It certainly seemed as though it would rain soon. I thought of the moors, the waste lands in England and Scotland ruined by overfarming with poor practices in quite ancient times. But we weren't quite on the moors, I don't think. But someplace similar. Someplace one passes through. Not a place one chooses to stay in.
I had a distinct thought while I was there. The Fool is the Buddha mind. Thich Nhat Hanh once described Buddha mind as the experience we've had of accidentally throwing our covers off while sleeping, and pulling them back on because we knew we were cold, but without actually waking up. That pure ability to note and respond without being muddled in illusions -- in dreams, and also in thoughts -- is the Buddha mind.
I failed to ask him why he was walking. I didn't ask what was in his sack, either. But I wrote that and the little sound over my shoulder that one recognizes from ritual said "oh food and treasure" so I suppose that's the answer.
Here's what strikes me as interesting from all the traditions I know: the Fool is often associated with the element of air. He's sometimes Aleph, the first letter of the alphabet. Sometimes he's zero, and sometimes he's unnumbered, and sometimes he's 21. Some writers put him at the beginning of the trumps, some at the end, and some between the Judgment and the World.
I think we should also associate him with Earth, with a surety and a simplicity that borders on foolishness. He's motion, but undirected, purposeless -- or, at any rate, he is when we compare him to the Chariot.
We could think of him as sortilege itself; he reminds me of the way some oracles worked by sending the petitioner out with the injunction not to speak to anyone, and to take the first words they hear as the answer to their question or petition.
He has a kind of equanimity simply because he has almost nothing and doesn't seem to want it. He could pick up and leave any time. In fact, his foot's half out the door all the time.
A lot of writing on the tarot is predicated on activity and passivity -- as often as not unfortunately bound up in gender nonsense. But the basic idea of thinking in terms of more or less action, more or less quietness, makes a lot of sense. And I think the Fool is a perfect balance of the two -- he is totally active as he presses forward, but he is totally passive as he accepts all he receives from the world around him. He's the ideal of Emerson's eyeball, taking in all around him -- but with legs to march on.
Here's why I thought he'd say the dog was his. There's an 18th century poem, titled "A Marriage Betwixt Scrape, Monarch of the Maunders, and Blobberlips, Queen of the Gypsies." Yes, I know. Look, it was 1720, I can't do anything about it. This poem is by Alexander Pennecuik, and is a satirical verse about the marriage of the king of the beggars to the queen of the... generic and culturally misunderstood itinerant group of people.
Among the wedding gifts Blobberlips receives is
A string of beads, a bitch and a kent
(To help her through the bogs and the bent)
You can read the poem here. I don't much like the site but I can't seem to find it online anywhere else. I read it in Lonsdale's New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse.
A kent is, according to the OED
A long staff, properly such a one as shepherds use for leaping over ditches or brooks’ (Jamieson); a long pole used in leaping ditches, climbing mountains, etc.; a leaping pole.
The "bent" is rushes and the like. I read this poem a few years ago and thought it was an amazing depiction of the Fool, in his popular guise of a beggar wandering the countryside, stealing and begging, with a staff and a dog allowing him to find safe passage in many dangerous situations.
I still think that's true of course, even if this Fool didn't have a dog.
People have written many words and much about the Fool as the person who travels through the tarot trumps, and I like that as well. He's Everyman, who, we should remember, was called by God to a reckoning, a judgment.
Death: Everyman, stand still; whither art thou going
Thus gaily? Hast thou thy Maker forget?
Life's long journey is a hike, not a sprint, and the Fool is the one who walks it, slowly but surely, with as little destination in mind as we had when we were born. He is not smart, and cannot pontificate, even after the manner of any worker caught during a break who can rail about politics or make you laugh with stories of the night before. He accepts, and he walks. He accepts the dog, who is tearing at his clothes. He has food and treasure, and who is to say what the treasure is?
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