For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The Fool ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The eagle is the bird of Zeus, king of the gods, who watches over the Fool as he prepares to plunge into the unknown.

The cave from which the Fool emerges is the past, the dark and undifferentiated mass from which the beginning of a true sense of individuality is about to take form.

The goat’s horns on the Fool’s brow suggest, like the animal skins he wears, that he is like a young animal, driven into life by instinct, not yet conscious or possessed of understanding.

Major Arcana ~ The Fool

The card of the Fool, the first of the Major Arcana, portrays a wild youth, dressed in ragged animal skins of different colours, dancing in ecstatic abandonment at the edge of a precipice. He wears a wreath of vine leaves in his chestnut hair, and bears little horns like those of a goat, on his brow. His eyes are raised to the dawn breaking in the distance, where the sun can just be seen above the horizon. Around him lies a formidable barren landscape of brown and grey rocks. To his left, hidden in the shadows of the receding night, is the mouth of the cave from which he has emerged. Above it on a bare branch, perches an eagle.

Here we meet the hero of our journey in the guise of the mysterious god Dionysos, the Twice-Born. He was the child of great Zeus, king of the gods, and Semele, a mortal woman and a princess of Thebes. Zeus’ wife Hera, furious at his infidelity, disguised herself as a nursemaid and whispered to Semele that she must test her lover’s devotion by demanding that he appear before her in all his divine glory. Having promised Semele anything her heart might desire, the god was bound by his vow when she insisted that he reveal his divinity to her. Reluctantly, he manifested as thunder and lightning, and Semele was consumed in flames. But Zeus managed to rescue the unborn child. Hermes, messenger of the gods and patron of magic, sewed up the foetus in Zeus’ thigh; thus Dionysos was born.

Hera continued to pursue the strange homed child, and sent the Titans, the earth-gods, to tear Dionysos to pieces. But Zeus rescued the child’s heart, still beating. This heart he transformed into a potion of pomegranate seeds, and the magical drink was fed to the maiden Persephone by Hades, the dark god of the underworld, when he abducted her. Persephone became pregnant, and Dionysos was thus reborn in the underworld. Therefore he was called Dionysos-Iacchos, the Twice-Born, god of light and ecstasy. Ordained by his father Zeus to live among men and share their suffering, he was stricken with madness by Hera, and wandered all over the world followed by wild satyrs, madwomen and animals. He gave the gift of wine to mankind, and brought dmnken ecstasy and spiritual redemption to those who were willing to relinquish their attachment to worldly power and wealth.

Eventually his heavenly father Zeus bade him rise to Olympus, where he took his place at the right hand of the king of the gods. On an inner level, Dionysos, the Fool, is an image of the mysterious impulse within us to leap into the unknown. The conservative cautious, realistic side of us watches with horror this wild youthful spirit who, trusting in heaven, is prepared to walk over the cliffs edge without a moment’s hesitation.

The madness of Dionysos seems mad only to that part of us which is bound to the world of form, facts and logical order. But in a more profound sense it is not madness for it is the impulse toward change which comes upon us ‘out of the blue, which has no rational basis and no preplanned programme of action.

The god is portrayed in animal skins•because, in a way, this intuitive, irrational dimension to the human personality is a kind of sixth sense, an animal instinct which hears a music to which jaded ears, used to concrete reality, are not attuned. Dionysos is the son of the king of the gods, and it is his father’s spirit to which he is m tune, although he is ordained to live on earth with mortals; but it is difficult to know, when this impulse strikes us, whether it has come from Zeus’ heavenly abode or a darker, more underworld place.

Thus Dionysos, the Fool, represents the irrational impulse toward change and toward opening life’s horizons into the unknown. The Fool stands at the beginning of his journey, and when we are struck by the mysterious impulse which he represents, we too stand at the threshold of a journey. These irrational impulses can sometimes be destructive, and sometimes creative; and often they are both together.

The wild god can sometimes leap off the cliffs edge into painful and damaging situations which may also yield wonderfully creative beginnings, and so can the individual who is overwhelmed by the strange inexplicable craving for some spiritual food which he or she cannot fully understand. But if we never respond to these calls from the other world, then we sink into drab, meaningless, banal lives, and wonder, at the end of life, what we have missed and why the world seems so empty.

Thus the Fool is a highly ambivalent figure, for there is no guarantee at the beginning of such a journey whether we will arrive safely, if at all. Yet not to begin is to deny the god, which on an inner level means to deny all in us that is youthful, creative, and in touch with that which is greater than ourselves.

On a divinatory level, Dionysos, the Fool, augurs the advent of a new chapter of life when he appears in a spread. A risk of some kind is required, a willingness to jump out into the unknown. The Fool is ambiguous just as Dionysos is, for we cannot know whether we will enter the Fool’s perception of the divine or end up merely looking foolish. In this way, amidst ambiguity and excitement and fear, begins the great journey of life portrayed by the Major Arcana of the Tarot.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]