Haindl Tarot

O - The Fool

HEBREW LETTER: ALEPH, THE "OX"

RUNE WYNN: "JOY"

ASTROLOGY: THE PLANET URANUS

The Kabbalistic letter for the Fool is Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Aleph means "Ox" or "Bull," a sacred animal in many parts of the world. With its curved horns the bull symbolizes the Moon, and so the bull became known as the male partner of the Moon Goddess (see the High Priestess and the Empress). The bull represents active life energy.

Unlike all of the letters in the Roman alphabet, Aleph is actually silent, a carrier for vowel sounds. This means that it symbolizes the mystery of the spirit, which cannot be described in ordinary words. Aleph begins the Ten Commandments, the first sentence of which reads, "I am the Lord, thy God." In Hebrew, "I am" is "Anokhi," spelled beginning with the letter Aleph. Thus, when God declares Himself to humanity, the first letter is silent, symbolizing that knowledge of God cannot be spoken in human terms. Some people describe it as the mouth opening to speak, or the drawing in of breath in preparation for sound.

Look at the shape of the letter. We can imagine it turning, like the blades of a fan. Think of it as the whirlwind of pure existence before Creation set everything in order. So it is with consciousness. The silent aleph symbolizes the state of total awareness before ego and conditioning put everything in categories. This is the state of the Fool.

The Rune for the Fool is Wynn, or W, meaning "Joy." The Fool is a child, rejoicing in life. To look at the world as the Fool does means to delight in existence, to dance through the challenges of the trumps. The Rune also means to bind forces together, or to bind people into a community. The Fool, the Aleph, is the silent force that binds together all the varied experiences of the Major Arcana.

The Fool's astrological planet, Uranus, emphasizes the unexpected, the joy of surprise that moves the Fool through the different steps of life, forever daring to move on into the unknown. The white border around the card indicates that the element is Air. Usually Air means thought, but it also symbolizes Spirit. Though the card is filled with symbols and ideas, the image is direct. We see in the foreground the Fool himself. He stands outside the border, as if he has not yet entered the world of the trumps with all their challenges. He wears a multicolored coat with one sleeve entirely brown; he also wears six bells. Behind and slightly above the Fool, we see the swan, and beyond that six planets in a night sky.

When we think of the term archetypes we tend to imagine stories, or dreams, or encounters with mysterious old men or strange children. We call an idea or an image an archetype because of its importance to daily life. Archetypes are found not only in mythology but in social and cultural institutions. The Fool is reality as much as story.

Countless myths and fairy tales present to us the image of the Fool - an innocent, who lacks education or worldly sophistication, yet ends up winning the treasure or the princess because of a pure heart and an instinctive sense of what to do in every situation. But virtually every society has made a place for real-life Fools as well. The Haindl Tarot card of the Fool shows us a medieval court jester. The jester's job required him to entertain, but it also allowed him to criticize the powerful, to speak truths no one else would dare to express. Further, the jester's position as an outsider allowed him to see truths that everyone else, in their fixed place in the social hierarchy, missed or avoided.

In our time we see the archetype in the television comedian. While some rely on clichés or slapstick, others, surprisingly many, fulfill the archetype role with observations on contemporary life and sharp attacks on the powerful.

The jester and the comedian represent one aspect of the Fool. In many cultures the archetype takes a more basic, perhaps more powerful, form - that of the sacred clown who breaks down all rules and social conventions. In medieval Europe the lord of the carnival, chosen for his foolishness, presided over a temporary disintegration of the rigid rules that governed society. In some Native American cultures the society of clowns deliberately broke the most fundamental laws, dancing naked, telling jokes during the solemn ceremonies, cross-gender dressing, even defecating in public. Through their bizarre behavior they reminded people that the rules and customs of society, even the holy rituals, are merely a set of conventions, like clothes we learn to put on as we grow up. Reality, strange and unknowable, remains underneath these connections. In Hermann Haindl's card of the Fool, the court jester wears colors sacred to the Lakota of North America. Perhaps because we become more conventional or more rigid as we get older, the Fool in fairy tales usually appears as a child. In the Haindl Tarot we see a young person, eyes wide with wonder at life yet without emotion, for the Fool touches something deeper than ordinary feelings. We describe the Fool as "he" but the figure is neither male nor female. The Fool's innocence takes us beyond that most fundamental split, reminding us that masculine and feminine roles are cultural institutions.

The Fool launches us into the Major Arcana. Traditionally the Fool represents the child, the seeker about to journey through life, the soul as it incarnates into a body. The other 21 trumps then signify the various challenges of life, practical as well as spiritual. Like the child in fairy tales, the Fool moves from one task to the next, until he reaches the unification, the final triumph (trump) of the Universe.

The Fool bears the number zero. This sets him before and apart from all the other cards. It also symbolizes the intuition of the sacred clowns, that we are not any of the things we think we are. If we are not any specific things, then we are no-thing. Nothing. Reality can never be pinned down to any specific explanation or philosophy. Therefore reality itself remains - nothing. Whereas the other Major cards, with their fixed places in the sequence 1 through 21, represent particular states or stages of life, the Fool, zero, can become anything.

In modern number systems we write zero in the shape of an egg, 0, indicating that all life, all experience emerges from an unknowable nothing: Originally zero was written as a point to signify the same idea. In Kabbalist tradition creation begins as a point of light from a Nothingness beyond all comprehension (see also the Sun). Zero can be described as the other side of infinity (divide any number by zero and the answer is infinity). Mathematicians signify infinity by the same Hebrew letter, Aleph, that represents the Fool. And in modern cosmology we can trace the universe back billions of years, almost to the precise instant of the Big Bang. But what existed before that moment?

The Fool symbolizes instinct and innocence, a sense that we contain within us something pure, something that reaches back before culture, before conditioning, before ego, even before personality. We think of ourselves as particular people, with character traits that make us different from everyone else. The Fool, with his blank expression, reminds us that something lies below all those visible characteristics, a universal life energy, beyond thought, beyond individuality, that is shared by all life.

In fairy tales the older brothers or sisters plot and scheme. Their plans fail because life does not run according to their expectations. But the Fool plans - nothing: He or she does not know how to scheme. The Fool can only respond to life as it is.

The sacred clowns break all the rules in order to remind us that human beings made those rules, that reality remains something else. Culture is to humanity what personality is to individual humans - something constructed but that becomes so ingrained we confuse it with the essence of life. We become so used to our images of ourselves that we think of all those character traits - such things as smart, or popular, or hardworking, or loving - as the sum of our individual existence. Similarly with culture, we learn our cultural assumptions, our beliefs about the world and morality and the proper roles of men and women, so deeply that we consider them universal truths, refusing to believe that in other times and places people believed differently. Personality and culture become like masks we wear over our faces. And because we never remove them - and because everyone around us is wearing a similar mask - we consider them our true faces. But the Fool reminds us that we can never hold life to a set of rules. Life remains always something else. No specific thing. Nothing.

All this does not imply that we should think of the Fool as perfection. If the Fool represents freedom it also carries its own limitations. We cannot maintain such a state of nothingness. In reality we cannot dance through the world, reacting purely on instinct. There are times when we need to plan, think ahead, even to scheme. We also need to fit into society, to get along with other people and hold jobs and share our lives with our families and friends.

And there is something else intriguing about the Fool. He can never know himself; this is his paradox. Because the Fool is not separated from the world around him, he cannot step back and look at himself. Therefore we cannot stay with the Fool, but must travel through the different stages of the Major Arcana - through life - carrying the Fool inside us as the instinct that pushes us onward, as the reminder that reality is always something different, as we learn, through each step, to become conscious of ourselves and the universe.

In virtually every culture we find a myth of the Fall. The human unconscious produces a story of a lost paradise, where no one died, no one suffered or quarreled, no one had to work or go hungry. Sometimes, as in Genesis, the Fall comes through disobeying the gods. In other; less moralistic cultures, a simple mistake loses paradise. Somebody goes to sleep at the wrong time, or drops something, or eats from the wrong basket. These stories reflect more than a complaint that life is too difficult. They spring from a sense that we have lost something true and perfect. Inside us we feel that we somehow belong in that place of love and delight, and something terrible must have happened to make us lose it.

Probably in reality no such perfect innocence ever existed. Most likely human beings were always pretty much the same as now, bound to their egos, struggling with each other and with life. But if paradise never existed, that does not make the myth a lie, or a simple wish fantasy. The truth of the story does not lie so much in its picture of perfection as in its image of loss. We carry within us the intuition that life can be different, spontaneous, joyful, and loving. To believe we have lost this makes us hope that we can get it back.

The Tarot goes beyond regret or nostalgia. It says that we must fall into consciousness and separation, so that the individual self can emerge. The Tarot teaches that we can travel through consciousness to a state where we become conscious of the Fool's unconscious energy. At the end of the Major Arcana, in the Universe, the yearning for innocence becomes transformed into wisdom. This is a kind of psychological version of the Christian tradition of the "fortunate Fall," that it was good that Adam and Eve lost paradise because otherwise Christ would not have needed to redeem humanity from sin and so raise people to a higher level. You do not have to be a Christian to see a psychological truth in this story. If we remain in childlike innocence, we will never have to change to go through life.

In Hermann Haindl's card of the Fool, the wounded swan represents the Fall. In many cultures the swan symbolizes purity and love. The Hindu creation gods, Brahma and Saraswati, rode upon swans. People have often linked the swan to the planet Venus, and thus to the Goddess of love (the Empress). More particularly, a wounded swan appears in the legend of the Holy Grail, a myth vital to the Tarot, for the symbols of the Minor suits - Cups, Wands, Swords and Disks - are exactly the symbols connected to the Holy Grail. (We see these symbols in the trump of the Magician).)

In the Grail story the innocent hero, Parsifal, shoots a swan. Parsifal wounds the swan, but wounds himself as well. He becomes conscious of suffering for the first time and so begins the quest that will result in the discovery of love and redemption.

The presentation of the Fool and the swan exemplify what I have called Hermann Haindl's "economy of symbolism." If we take the Fool as ordinary reality then we see that beneath or behind daily life lies a level of animal desire. Now we tend to think of the animal in us as savage and cruel, but in fact, humans become most destructive when they separate themselves from the animal level of feeling. Nuclear bombs, concentration camps and the extinction of vast numbers of species (one species per hour is the current rate) have all been done in a mood of cool rationality. So the Fool points to a wounded beast to remind us that we must heal that broken connection between ourselves and our animal existence, between ourselves and the world.

Christian moralists have taught that we must overcome the animal within us; modern psychologists that we need to acknowledge it; and ecologists, that we must somehow embrace it. But the esotericists and the mystics of all religions speak of a further level of awareness, a direct connection between all beings and the cosmos. Isolation is an illusion, for we are linked to every atom and to the most distant stars. And so, in the Fool, we see the swan behind the jester, but also the heavens behind the swan.

Medieval theology described humanity as halfway between the angels and the beasts. Through rejecting passion and following "right reason," humans can move toward the angelic. The Tarot turns this around. We must discover and join with the animal in us in order to reach cosmic awareness; for only by exploring the hidden truths in ourselves can we find the truth in creation. Therefore, the animal lies between the human and the stars.

We can view the card vertically as well. At the bottom we see the green-brown mass representing the Earth. The swan rises from this shapeless area and reaches above, to the sky - a movement that follows the evolution of life and consciousness. The first creatures arose from the seas and the dirt. As animals evolved and became more complex, consciousness evolved, leading finally to that sense of unity with the heavens. This movement forms a circle, or rather a return, because the Earth itself emerged out of material thrown off by exploding stars.

We might also describe the vertical ascent as the development of individual awareness. We begin life without any real sense of who we are. We do not separate ourselves from our parents or the world around us, so we see only a vague mass of color. As we mature we gain more of a sense of uniqueness. The sexual instinct plays a large part in this, showing us our own needs and leading us away from our parents. Therefore we see an animal -the swan - that sacred to the Goddess of love. But the animal is wounded, because we cannot fully understand love until we experience the reality of suffering.

The wound points upward (and downward) toward that universal knowledge, symbolizing the double-sided quality of suffering. While suffering helps forge the individual personality, it also links us to humanity (the Fool's finger touches the wound) and to the world, finally lifting us beyond individuality to a union with all life.

We see the connection between the wound and evolved consciousness in the swan's body. Though the neck twists in pain it forms a spiral curling into the sky. Consciousness does not "ascend" in a straight line, but spirals upward, like the whirling dances of the Sufi dervishes. The golden beak, however, does point almost straight up, as a sort of arrow directing us to the stars and planets. The swan's left wing arches upward, creating both a frame for us to view the sky and a staircase, as if we could climb to heaven through the experiences of love and pain.

The Fool wears six bells; we see six planets in the sky. This reminds us of the Greek myth of the music of the spheres, representing the harmony of existence. (The number six also connects us to the Lovers, card 6.) The Fool, in his aspect of the innocent, perceives this harmony but only intuitively. Before he can grasp the truth he must "fall" into consciousness. Three bells line the crest of the Fool's hat. Haindl has said they signify the three crows of the rooster when Peter's human weakness led him to betray Jesus. Just as the swan indicates wounded nature, so Christians believe that Christ, who joined the spiritual and the physical, redeemed the suffering world through his own pain. It also links the Fool to Parsifal, who became a figure of Christ in his search for the Holy Grail.

The ecological dangers of our time probably derive in part from the belief that humanity is separate from, and even opposed to, nature. Western theology teaches us that God expects us to dominate nature, to use it for our own comfort and wealth. This attitude led to the wonders of technology and medicine, giving vast numbers of human beings a far better life than ever before possible. It also led to unchecked destruction, and the death of species as well as whole bodies of water and huge stretches of land. Many non-European cultures, such as the Lakota (Sioux), whose colors appear in the Fool's jacket, saw themselves as vitally connected to the land, the plants, and animals around them. We cannot turn our backs on everything we have accomplished in the last centuries, nor should we want to. Like the Fallen Fool, we must travel through the crisis, to bring together the achievements of individual consciousness and the sense of union with nature and the divine.

The brown hood and sleeve suggest the Christian monastic orders, with their vows of humility and renunciation of wealth and power. More specifically, they connect the Fool to St. Francis of Assisi. Like a shaman or a Lakota visionary, St. Francis went out into the wilderness where he learned to speak to the animals. St. Francis could serve as a symbol for contemporary culture struggling to unite the concept of the individual with the older truth of harmony with the world around us.

The Fool's mouth, a horizontal line, appears at the same height as the swan's vertical wound. Together they form a cross. The corners of the mouth turn down, symbolizing his Fall and his sadness at the wound in himself and in the world.

The image of talking with the beasts, and especially with the birds, forms a further archetype. Around the world we find stories of people learning "the language of the birds." Because birds fly they symbolize Heaven and "higher" consciousness. The beasts of the Earth, on the other hand, symbolize the "lower" or unconscious levels. To speak with birds and beasts both joins human consciousness - for speech and language are very much human attributes - to all these levels. In the Haindl Tarot we see this union as well in the swan, whose feet vanish into the brown-green mass of the earth and whose wing arches upward while its neck spirals among the planets.

Despite his link to St. Francis, the Fool does not actually speak. His mouth remains closed. We can look at this in two ways. Language belongs to consciousness. Existing in a pre-conscious state, the Fool has not yet learned to speak. Through speech he will become more human. In the Parsifal legend, Parsifal encounters the Grail at an early stage in the story but loses it because he does not say anything. The journey through the Major Arcana is a journey of learning to speak.

But we can also look at silence as a form of speech that reaches beyond words, beyond human language, to an instinctive communication with life. As a creation of cultures, words limit our understanding to only the ideas shaped by whatever language we happen to speak. European languages think differently than Native American or African languages for example, and tend to limit us to a rational explanation of life. Silence, as an aspect of Nothing, contains the potential for all languages, plus an understanding of experiences and intuitions that cannot be expressed in any language. Remember the Aleph, the silent beginning of God's speech.

With his Rune of Joy, the Fool embraces all life, including suffering. He dances through experience, finding the secret joy in the heart of all existence.

DIVINATORY MEANINGS

When we encounter the Fool in a reading, we look at how the complex ideas relate to a person's immediate situation. The Fool indicates a situation where planning ahead is not possible or not desirable and the person needs to react intuitively. Sometimes this means following a "foolish" impulse, such as quitting your job or moving to another country, without any certainty of what comes next. Although other people may point out the craziness of such plans, the Fool says to follow your instincts rather than someone else's wise advice or the norms of society.

More generally, the Fool indicates a time in life when a person needs to act impulsively, to follow her or his feelings. It advises us to leap into new experiences and to trust that things will work out in a good way. The Fool can signify a time of surprise, of wonder, and excitement at life. If opportunities come, the Fool says to take them. Do it; do not hesitate.

The Fool insists on acting on impulse, but the Fool is only one card. The meaning of a reading depends on all the cards taken together. If the outcome appears undesirable and other cards, such as Temperance), suggest a more cautious approach, then the person might think again about following the Fool.

REVERSED

Reversed, the Fool indicates that a person may find it difficult to believe in his or her own instincts. The person may desire to do something but doubt the value of it, especially if it may appear foolish or if others point out practical problems. The person may fear to step into the unknown. Alternatively, depending on the other cards, the reversed Fool may warn against recklessness.