The Fool.
A flower carried to a cliff.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
A young man at the edge of a cliff with his face turned up, away from it. A white rose in one hand, a small bag on a stick over his shoulder, a dog jumping at his heel. His front foot is over nothing.
Zero, and nothing has gone wrong yet. Whether that is innocence or carelessness the card declines to say. It says only that he is mid-step, and that the step is the last one he could take back. You are standing in one of these and calling it a decision.
Four things people go to on this card
- his foot
You went to his foot. The ground stops and he has not.
The last moment before something is irreversible, drawn with the man in it looking the other way. He is not falling. He is in the middle of a step, and that is a shorter state than it feels from inside.
Nothing is being warned against and nothing is being encouraged. The card is only accurate about the instant when a decision stops being one, and you have been describing something as still open that closed a while ago.
Which step have you already taken that you are still describing as a decision?
- the white rose
The rose caught you: white, loose in his left hand, not gripped.
He is going somewhere new without armour, carrying a flower instead. White is the plainest colour in this deck and he has brought it to a cliff.
That is either innocence or a lack of preparation, and the card will not choose between them. What it will confirm is that whatever you are bringing to this is not defensive, and people will read that as naivety for as long as it keeps working.
What are you bringing to this that is not a defence?
- the dog
The dog is what you picked. Small, white, jumping at his heels, and the only other living thing that came.
The part of you that already knows, and is trying to say so. It is not blocking him. It is at his heel, agitated, coming along anyway, which is what that part of a person usually does.
So the thing to find is not the reasoned objection. You answered that weeks ago and it stayed answered. Find the other one, the animal one, that has not settled since and cannot be talked to.
What has been nagging at you about this that you have not been able to argue away?
- the bundle
You picked the luggage. One small patterned bag, on a stick, over the shoulder.
Very little is being taken. One bag on a stick and no cart behind him, which is the only reason he can move at this speed.
There is a plain question in that. Most people cannot start because of what they would have to carry, and you have never checked how much of it is actually yours. Work out what would fit in a bag that size. The rest is an inventory, not a life.
If it had to fit in one bag, what would you take, and who does the rest actually belong to?
On the Tree of Life, The Fool is the eleventh path, Aleph, from Kether to Chokmah, in the Golden Dawn's attribution (Liber 777).
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.