The Fool

The symbolism and compressed details encompassed in the artwork of a typical card in a Tarot deck always fascinates me. I generally like it when art alludes to something else, like in religious imagery,
where a rose symbolises Mary mother of Christ and a dove Christ himself, or in moralistic paintings like some of the Pre-Raphaelite art, heavy with imbedded meaning. One of the worlds most famously allusionist paintings, Jan Van Eyck's "The Arnolfini Marriage", where a pair of clogs means domesticity, and a mirror means fidelity or some other such exquisite suggestive signalling always reminds me of something you'd expect to see in the most beautifully rendered Tarot art. This particular deck uses photo collages of real people and the delightful photoshop, and some landscape art, to come up with this new-agey classic interpretation.

Back to The Fool, and Tarot cards, and what bull crap a person will buy into in a desperate attempt to gain some control over the future, or just get a little reassurance over present circumstance. The Fool is card zero in the Major Arcana of a typical Tarot deck, and it's pretty light in terms of refrences to mythology and fiction, but what it stands for is pretty awesome. When it appears in a reading it often indicates a choice to be made, or rather a lack of one, a surrender to someone or something one is irresistably drawn to, illogically almost, a recognition of the soul's desire to merge, the truimph of subconscious desire over rational thought, the former naturally being feminine energy, the latter... quelle surprise... male energy.

The Fool stands for the querent, a new start, a new beginning, and a ceratin rosy outlook to life that may come and bite you in the heiny, (the little dog quite literally furnishes that option). Some serious abandon going on here, and that's the idea behind card zero, indeed the idea behind a whole Tarot reading; the suspension of disbelief, cynicism and all those clever thought based decision making systems, and going with your animal gut, an intangible feeling that this is what you need to do, repercussions be damned, falling off the cliff and into something new, dangerous, and exciting.

At this crossroad of new beginnings, art and intution, I salute the fool in all of you; it's a warning card as well, to open our eyes, watch our step, but still embark on our journey, go, go, go, to where life, and 2010 will take us.

"Cat Among the Pigeons"