The Unnumbered Trump

The Fool stands at the threshold of becoming, suspended between ignorance and illumination. He is not yet wise, not yet damned—only open. Zero in the Tarot, he exists outside the sequence, the necessary beginning before all beginnings. His journey is not a moral one, but an existential one: a plunge into experience itself. He steps forward without certainty, guided only by instinct, impulse, and the strange gravity of becoming. The Fool is not a warning, but an invitation—to risk foolishness in the pursuit of transformation, to step off the cliff and trust that something within us knows how to fall without breaking.

The Fool is numbered as Zero in the Tarot, having no beginning and no ending. The Fool eternally sets out on the Fool’s Journey, his personal “Stations of the Cross,” being his journey through the twenty-two Major Arcana, the Inner Veil as it has been designated. Each stage is another step on his evolutionary journey, but it is also our own, as we surmount obstacles that block our path, or give in to the perverse pleasure associated with self-pitying, masochistic defeatism. Although we are strong believers in karma, one must strike a balance between apathy and effort—one is never certain on which side they will fall, and a toss of the coin, a turn of the screw, can see situations formerly in a state of disrepair coalesce into an acceptable form. And vice versa.

The Fool is a vagrant, a hobo, traveling unthinkingly over the cliff he doesn’t seem to see because his head is stuck in the air. He is “whistling past the graveyard,” to use a phrase popular since olden times. On his shoulder, a staff—his potential potency, his energy, his phallus—rests; folded and dangling from it, the pouch-like, womb-like sack of his earthly goods. A pregnancy. The phallus and the womb. Pregnancy, potency, rebirth. The circle (“Zero”) has no beginning and no end—the potentiality of a God-borne being, reborn always as the snake eating its own tail is reborn, as time is an illusion, and we are, as Nietzsche put it, “slaves of the eternal return.”

But where steps the pointy-toed medieval foot of The Fool? Below him yawns a chasm—the abyss of himself, his foreordained doom as a wanderer of the earthly realm of material, physical, and densely molecular matter. If he doesn’t watch out, he’ll fall out into empty space. Does his little dog, his little guiding, guardian angel, seek to hold him back from his own destruction, or is it goading him on?

In readings, The Fool is always a new beginning. Very rarely would it ever be taken to mean a literal fool, although it is a benchmark for those who start off with an extremely naïve attitude. Reversed, The Fool can indicate folly, or a lack of foresight; it can also indicate drunkenness, overindulgence, dissipation, or acting out of thoughtless malice.

The Fool corresponds to The Sun, the round glowing ball of fire, whose rays send forth illumination. The Sun is numbered XIX (19) in the Tarot, numerologically the culmination and also the new beginning—1 and 0 taken together, equaling 10, and also read as One and Zero. The Fool and the Magician. The Sun is also linked to Cupid, the love-bringer, riding the white stallion, and to Kalki, the final avatar of the Kali Yuga. Love and destruction, renewal and ending, bound together.

Cupid is the promise of love, the opening of possibility, the herald of new beginnings. And so we arrive at the Fool once more—poised on the brink, about to tumble forward into the next stage of becoming: the Magician, the One, the initiator of will.

To read my other article on Tarot, click below:

Tarot: The Twenty-Two Major Arcana

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