The first day of April is “April Fool’s Day” in my culture, a day we play tricks on each other. This makes me think about the Tarot card of The Fool and how we can use this month to consciously bring more of The Fool’s energy into our lives going forward. Thinking about The Fool in The Tarot inevitably leads me to my grandmother Sallie Stevens Nichols‘ enduring book, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. Originally published in 1980, the book has since been translated into many other languages and can still be found new in bookstores today. As I pulled it out, The Fool on the cover of the book (my original dogeared maltreated copy inscribed by my beloved “Yia Yia”) insisted on falling onto my altar, so here you have a picture of that collision.
Notice that The Fool is setting off on a journey. My grandmother, when she did Tarot readings with me, always had me do the reading, not her. What did I see in the card? How did I relate to it? (not what did a book or my Yia had to tell me about what it meant). Sallie saw the cards as capturing archetypal images, like those brought forward into the west through her mentor, the great psychiatrist/thinker Carl Jung. Publishing the book in 1980, Sallie included not only various Tarot images of depictions of The Fool, but also modern-day “fools,” such as a photo of former U.S. President Richard Nixon and comedian Bob Hope entitled “King and Jester.” Taken earlier, but shown, as it was in her book, after Nixon’s impeachment and resignation, and while Hope was still wildly popular, it left open the question of who was the King and who, the Jester.
The Fool, like all the archetypes survives in our modern consciousness from ancient traditions and cultures, such as the Navajo trickster Coyote, who is given a special role in the social order. “His presence serves the ruling powers as a constant reminder that the urge to anarchy exists in human nature and that it must be taken into account.” (Jung and Tarot by Sallie Stevens Nichols) A mere glimpse at the rise of Donald Trump shows how much continued interest our consciousness has in disruption.
My grandmother’s book points out that the Tarot card of The Fool lives on in the modern Joker in a random box of playing cards. “The Joker connects two worlds — the everyday, contemporary world where most of us live most of the time and the nonverbal land of imagination … where we visit occasionally.” In the oldest known deck The Fool is numbered zero. “In the old Italian game of Tarocchi, The Fool, true to form, had no value of itself, but augmented that of any card with which it was combined. Like the empty, worthless zero, The Fool’s magic can turn one into one million.” (Jung and Tarot by Sallie Stevens Nichols)
Whether writing a book, retiring, divorcing, or starting any new chapter in our lives, we are all essentially seen as “fools” in the eyes of society, both in the sense that we are foolishly giving up stability and the known for the unknown and in the sense that our disruption may inspire those around us to start their own new journey. For myself, I continue to focus on my book and everything that supports it, to the exclusion of many lovely offers, including travel and retreats. I read my own cards, figuratively speaking (I rarely crack a Tarot deck), to determine when to say yes and when to say no. These days, the best way to entertain my fool is to say no.
What journey are you either on or considering these days?
If you’ve been shown to take a journey, what keeps you from this folly?
What else do you need to say no to to say yes to your fool?
‘What can you do (or who can you surround yourself with) to support yourself in allowing The Fool to disrupt you enough to get on your way?
