The Fool

Zero – The fool

Divinatory meanings: Insanity, Creativeness, Something New. Going blindly into something. Acting crazy.

Yes or No Question: No.

Numerical Value: Try again.

Why did I choose Heath Ledger’s Joker for this card? Well, besides the fact that the Fool IS the Joker in the ordinary playing deck, I wanted to go back to the roots of the nature of the person that is portrayed in the film. In “The Dark Knight”, Heath Ledger’s joker is a total anarchist, a person who has no ties or desires other than anarchy itself.

The Fool is the Trickster of all Pantheons. His names are many: Native Americans call him Raven. Vikings call him Loki. Mexhicas call him Tescatlipoca. There is a dark side to this fool, a kind of ‘devil may care’ that allows him to go into uncharted territory without maps. He is unbound, incapable of being told what to do by anybody, even God.

The fool does not care about the reactions to his actions. He is free in the greatest possible sense of the word, even free of his own desire-nature, because the desires of the fool come from above, not really a part of the personality of a being who has not really formed a personality. Perhaps a better way to understand the fool is to think of him as a new-born. A soul, upon entering the human body, is fascinated simply by the amazing wonder of being alive. The fool does not fear death and dying because he has not really lived yet. And within the fool, every possibility is real. Neither truly good, not truly evil, the fool will do whatever strikes his fancy. This utter lack of care for the consequences of one’s actions, is of course, the greatest kind of madness. The fool is thus, the craziest of all of us. There is no point of reference for the fool. No place to call home. No resting place. Is this wicked? Not at all! It simply allows for whatever is present in the zeitgeist to happen without thought or prejudgment.

In our present day and age, the Fool has taken the form of “The Joker” a kind of nihilistic anarchist mass murderer. Why? Because we are at the end of an age, where murder, war.. Seems so utterly outdated and primitive that it should be banned by all governments. And yet, here we are, fighting a “war on terror”, when war is the principal cause of terror. One can sympathize with this white-faced devil who wants nothing more to burn and blast everybody out of their complacency and insanity.

Perhaps in another age, the Fool will return to a more playful form, tricking us into re-thinking our most basic ideas about truth. But in Kali-Yug, the Fool is also the destroyer. We have gone too far into knowledge to allow for mistakes of judgment. Either we allow for these destructive forces of the evolution of consciousness to rein free, or they will escape from us and blow our cities apart.

We envy the Fool’s valor. We wish we could be like him, giving a damn about anything so long as he is having a good time. And yet, to live as he does would terrify any reasonable man or woman. To boldly go into the precipice without concern for the fall… Is that not the ultimate form of madness? Was Christopher Columbus not insane to allow his ships to sail so far? Or the Astronauts? Or even Oppenheimer, who built the bomb, not knowing if he would be setting off a chain reaction that would not be stopped and which would literally destroy the world?

In a gentler world, the fool makes us laugh. In this world.. He terrifies us.