I met him once. I was doing a guided meditation on The Fool, and had just stepped into the card. I was high in the mountains at the edge of a cliff, and I wasn’t thrilled to be there—I don’t do well with heights. The Fool appeared out of nowhere, laughing maniacally. I gazed into his insane, Gene Wilder eyes, shivered, and turned to run. I wasn’t fast enough. He grabbed me up, and jumped off the cliff.
The Fool is the wild card, the Joker, and the divine androgyne. It’s number is zero. Paul Foster Case has this to say about zero: “An ellipse, representing the Cosmic Egg….Zero is a symbol of absence of quality, quantity, or mass. Thus it denotes absolute freedom from every limitation whatever. It is a sign of the infinite and eternal Conscious Energy, itself No-Thing, though manifested in everything…. Boundless, infinite potential, living light, it is the rootless root of all things…..”
It’s Hebrew letter is Aleph, which sounds and feels like an exhalation when pronounced, and is often associated with ruach, the Hebrew word meaning all pervading, cosmic life-breath.
The feminine looking Dionysos, Greek god of wine, ecstasy, and primordial, undifferentiated energy is the perfect Fool. He even has horns!
When The Fool appears in a reading, you know things are going to get exciting. If it’s in a past position, you know the querent is dealing with the aftermath of a life-changing event. The Fool is beginnings and big changes, childlike enthusiasm and lack of inhibition, risk taking and total folly.
In the hero’s journey, The Fool portrays the shift from the Ordinary World to the Special World. His/her energy is the force that kicks off the story. Archetypally, The Fool is always the hero. If he/she also appears as an archetype other than the hero, he/she is frequently the Herald or the Trickster. But The Fool can be any of the other archetypes, or even the physical manifestation of the hero’s higher consciousness. Because The Fool’s number is zero, the number of ecstatic, unmanifested energy, he/she often appears suddenly at turning points in the story and bounces the narrative in a new direction.