_{"If you engage in travel, you will arrive."--Ibn Arabi, thirteenth century Sufi Master.}

Tarot Card # 0, The Fool, depicts a rather androgynous looking youth standing on a precipice looking out into space. A small white dog playfully nips at the Fool's heels (although in older versions of the Tarot, the dog is not so friendly). The youth's gaze is in a classic "visionary" mode, seeming to look through the world of form, beyond and into a void which represents the unknown future. Because the Fool's posture, attitude and stance is care-free, we the viewer, do not fear for the fact that s/he appears to be stepping off of a cliff; neither does the little dog seem alarmed. The background, always rendered in a bright sunny yellow in the traditional Tarot, gives further support to the idea of a "bright" future. What then, is this card really talking about?

Those who have studied the Tarot mysteries, know that the little dog represents the intellect, which in this case is in service to the innocent, intuitive essence -  The Fool. The "naive" Fool, a being unburdened by ideas about things, situations and places is master of his intellect, not vice versa, and so is truly free to form his own future. For the youth represented in this card, Blake's "doors of perception" are still wide open.

The Fool's journey is the journey of the soul through incarnate life, as represented by the egg-shaped zero. Life is a circle, and although people who are perpetually wandering around in circles in our materialistic world are considered fools in the negative sense, the wise fool of mysticism knows that there really is no other path. Everything is experience, and cannot be mapped out in a linear fashion. Although the characters in the Tarot appear to change in each card, they are really all the same person—The Fool. The soul, taking the  sojourn called human life, changes form but remains at source, inviolable and without gender.  If you consider that everything and everyone in your environment is mirroring your inner reality, then even if a Tarot card is referring to a person of the opposite sex in your reading, since that person is a part of you, your consciousness being mirrored in your life circumstances, it is still the same person, you, The Fool.

The Tarot is considered a Solar Path. If you look at the traditional cards carefully, you will see that the sun or manifestations of solar life - people, animals, plants, appear in every card. Without the life giving rays of the sun, without photosynthesis,  vegetative, biological life, would not be, just as without the number zero, our system of mathematics would not exist. That is why the Tarot begins with card (also called “Key”) zero which faces left, or backwards,* toward the last card, The World, which faces right at the end of the journey, thus closing the circle. The Fool's jacket is covered in green tendrils to show that she is the concentrated energy of the sun animated through the force of biology - the life force. The energy of the sun, which was worshipped as a god in almost every ancient culture, suffuses every aspect of  The Fool's tableau, from the bright white-light of the large solar disk, the mandela-like wheels which also appear on her jacket, and the bright yellow color. Key #0 is ruled by Uranus, an outer planet that conducts electro-magnetic energy into the human thought field. The "bright idea" is a Uranian truism.

Although the Fool's path is life itself, the road does not end with death. Key #0 in the Thoth deck, designed by high-mage Aleister Crowley, rightly shows our hero with an egg-shaped ribbon looped around him - Shakespeare's "Mortal Coil"—spiraling up into the next plane of existence. The journey of this life prepares us for the next one, as all successive travels will prepare us for the ones to come.

So, the next time you feel that you've been "made a fool," see it as a good thing, and Enjoy!

*This meshes with the "contrary" role many healers take on within a cultural context. In mysticism the sage and the sacred fool are one and the same.