Tarot Alchemy: The Fool and The World.
Generally when I buy a new tarot deck, I find that the cards are packaged so that the Major Arcana cards are book-ended by The Fool (either unnumbered or numbered 0) and The World (Number 21). This mirrors a general modern tendency to consider these cards as representative of the Start and Conclusion of the Fool’s Journey that is laid out in The Tarot. The notion that “We end the Journey at The Universe only to begin again as The Fool” is highly reflective of our general perceptions of life. We either speak of life as a journey—something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, or we look at time as cyclical—The daily circling of the hands on the clock, the repeated phases of the lunar cycle, the solar wheel of the year. We rarely think of what the combination of those two concepts actually looks like. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I spent about two years working very closely with the archetype of The Fool, and what I discovered during that time was that The Fool is neither beginning nor end point. Rather The Fool is the person making the journey, or perhaps the energy that allows that person to take a step. In numerology, zero, which is the number assigned to The Fool, is the “unknown” or “hidden” number. When The Fool shows up in a reading, it represents the spark of energy that means you are fully invested in that moment, whatever that moment is. Any card can become the Fool by making an investment in presence, and the Fool can be any card.
While the Fool represents the energy it takes to make a step, The World represents the space through which that step is made. As the card with the highest number, The World “holds” every other card that appears on the Fool’s Journey. It is not the final step of that journey, but rather the space through which that journey is made. Every card exists in The World; when we stop on our journey to experience our surroundings, we become one with The World.
Through The World and as The Fool, we make a journey into the heart of the labyrinth and back out again. It is a journey often describes as “two steps forward and one step back,” but every step backward is also a step forward, and every time we advance, we also retreat. This journey is represented by 20 cards, or two numerological cycles of ten—we step into the labyrinth as The Magician, and find the center of the Labyrinth at the Wheel, then we retrace our steps starting with Justice until we reach Judgment, which is entrance and also exit. If we were to describe the Fool’s Journey numerologically, with The Fool (F) representing the energy to make the journey, the The World (W) as the space journeyed through, a C representing a numerological cycle of 10, it would probably look something like F=WC².
For some reason that equation looks familiar…
The Fool's Journey
