How the Fool Engages with Mystery and Unknown
We have stepped over the threshold from Winter to Spring. Aries season is upon us, and it’s the start to the astrological new year. We welcomed the first Full Moon of Spring and April Fool’s day last week. Usually, April Fool’s day is one of my least favorite day in the calendar year because of the pranking. So instead of focusing on the pranking aspect of April Fool’s day, I want to shift that into thinking about The Fool through a tarot lens and the Sacred Fool through an archetype lens.
The Tarot is a deck that has 78 cards. Starting with the Major Arcana with The Fool card and moving through Minor Arcana with the different suits, cups, wands, swords, and disks. Each card has an upright and reversed meaning. The tarot is more concrete with the definitions but you can use a combination of intuition and symbolism to make it your own. The Archetypes were first integrated and developed by the psychologist Carl Jung. Arche means “beginning”, or “origin” and Type means “kind”. The Archetype name translated to “the beginning of its kind”. Archetypes can appear through images, personalities, patterns or tendencies.
In Tarot, moving through the Major Acana, we start with the Fool card. The Fool represents new beginnings, opportunity, and innocence. It’s the trust-fall into the unknown card. Depicted on the card is a single person holding his worldly possessions with a dog at his feet. They have everything they need to set out on their new adventure. All the while standing at the edge of a cliff, they are stepping into the unknown. It is a blind leap of faith, taking a trust fall with the universe. The number zero appears at the top of the tarot card. Zero in numerology represents unlimited potential and wholeness.
The Fool by Pamela Colman Smith
Winter is the time of year to slow down and plan, incubate and form the ideas. Spring is the time of year to start to allow those ideas to come forth and start to act on them. This is where the archetype of the Sacred Fool comes in. The sacred fool asks you to trust and take the leap, knowing that there is never a perfect time to start. If we wait for the “right time” we will never start. When embarking on a new adventure, whatever that looks like to us, there is an innocence to it. We don’t know what is to come but we are willing to face the challenges.
“Discomfort is part of the creative process and anything that we do that’s worth doing, especially if we are trying to grow and expand, often comes with feelings of discomfort. We’re engaging in mystery and the unknown and that can feel really scary.” - Pam Grossman
The sacred fool says “I double dog dare you to trust-fall into the mystery and unknown.” Standing on the edge of our metaphorical cliff, we don’t know what’s on the other end but we are willing to try.
