Happy New Year from the Fool!

The Fool of the Incidental Tarot

It is the first day of 2012, and what better day to introduce you to the official Incidental Tarot website!

Now that my ACEO Challenge of 2011 is complete, I can focus on the final touches of the Incidental Tarot project…namely the building of this website and finishing the companion book to the deck!  The deck is currently being printed, and while we’re all itching to get them into our hot little hands, I invite you to follow this blog, share with your friends, and please be welcome to comment and discuss anything and everything Tarot-centric here!

Along with the virtual ribbon cutting *cue champagne popping* ceremony of this blog and website, I thought it most appropriate to begin this phase of the journey with The Fool.

The Fool is the first and the last of the Major Arcana; the alpha and the omega. He represents the most perfect potential of any person or situation.

The Fool wears the guise of a traveler and carries a small pack with only the essentials needed to survive on his journey. He has everything he needs to fulfill his life path, which is primarily to understand the nature of what it is to be human. A banner flutters from his pack inscribed with “a posse, ad esse: from possibility to actuality,” the Fool’s motto. He represents the ultimate potential of destiny ready to be manifest in the world. The Fool also represents the higher self, the intuitive spirit that guides us when the trials and tribulations of life muddle our sense of purpose. If we can remove the mental, emotional and physical clutter of our chosen paths, the purity of the Fool’s vision will guide us through times of confusion and shifting paradigms.  And isn’t that most appropriate now, with the impending transformations of 2012 at our doorstep?  Let us hereby banish the shadow of 2011 and welcome the light of a new year with the clarity and freedom of the Fool’s message.

The Fool took a long time to be “born” as I worked my way through the Major Arcana.  It is a card I had never felt a strong kinship with…perhaps something to do with my inherently serious and perfectionist Saturnine nature.  I just had trouble relating to it.  But eventually I found I did have a very strong vision for this card, and that came from my favorite Mark Twain novel, The Mysterious Stranger.  The story (within a story) centers around August, a young printer’s apprentice in renaissance Austria.  He lives and works in a castle replete with colorful characters, and longing for adventure as any boy would.  One day, a mysterious stranger shows up at the door of the castle and all manner of curious and magical things begin to happen.  Without giving away the beauty of the story (which I highly recommend, by the way), the stranger shows August that anything is possible, and that life is a dream that can be dreamed in an infinite number of ways.  He shows August the potential and the freedom of his own consciousness.  To me, that is the message of the Fool.

The mysterious stranger on the card itself carries the emblems of all four elements, the arrow for fire and action, the rose for water and emotion, the quill for air and intellect and the acorn for earth and the body. These are the gifts (and tools) of earthly existence, and he follows the colorful hummingbird, a symbol of the fifth element of spirit, or the soul. Is he about to catch the hummingbird, or has he just released it?

In a reading the Fool represents pure spirit; the querent need only let go of earthly attachments and conflict to see the insight of his destiny.

To define the Fool in a word: POTENTIAL.

REVERSED. Willful ignorance, irresponsibility, disregard of consequences. Allowing oneself to be ruled by whims. Unable to form coherent plans for the future.