I'm late to this fantastic party, but I wanted to add a couple things which feel pretty wanky now that I'm typing them, but I'm in one of those moods...
thorhammer said:
He's a very sexual Fool, to begin with, which isn't all that evident in most others. So, without letting this post get into Using Tarot Cards territory . . . I'd say that the client in answer to whose question Atu 0 appeared is still subject to sexual whimsy. S/he isn't willing to commit, basically.
The Thoth Fool is by far my favorite fool of any Tarot deck. The wildness of him, the danger, the dementia, the motion... all that explosive energy spiking down into the Creation out of who knows "where." The Fool is the big squirt of the Divine wank. God pleasuring Itself by imagining separation.
He IS a very sexual fool, and the sun hiding his big shiny "Great Mystery" is justifiably a hub of much of the card's symbolism. He puts me in mind of a time when sex wasn't recreation, or procreation, but a great force that was barely understood. The first unforgettable prick of the Divine Phallus that impregnates the cosmos (cf Atu XXI).
I always think that there's something of the Rapist in him... not in the criminal "forced sex" sense, but in the abductive, mythological sense. Like Persephone or Europa or the Sabine women... He carries us away and does what he will. Opposition is impossible with him. He hangs in the Air between everything like the first cells to divide in the history of carbon-based life forms.
Aeon418 said:
The element Air is attributed to the Fool. He is prana, the divine life breath that animates all creation. And he is the same
spiritus that moved upon the face of the waters in Genesis 1:2.
The Hebrew letter of this card is Aleph, the Ox. The ox has traditionally been the animal that has been used in the ploughing of fields. It is therefore a fertilizing and creative force symbolised by this card.
The Phallus is the active, creative principle that animates all nature. (It does not necessarily mean penis.
) During incarnation it is said that we lose the knowledge of this inner creative principle. It is buried within us, waiting to be discovered. We must journey within and re-member (pun intended) our True Selves. As such the Fool is a hieroglyph of the True Self, the Phallus.
When I tried to cover some basic Qabalah with my students the big question that kept coming up was: what IS it? The best answers I could come up with that were sound-bitey enough for them to grasp was: How does Creation happen? Where do Ideas come from? What is the origin of Gnosis? How do we interact with something as complex as reality? This they could get a handle on: Qabalah was an attempt to look at the start of things, the source of things, the connections between things.
For some reason, the Fool's attribution to air expresses this so clearly. The word
inspiration literally means to take in air. We take spirit into ourselves. Perfect! Think of our reactions to shock, terror, orgasm, exhaustion, grief, joy, boredom, pain, relaxation, discovery:
we draw in breath. Every moment that carries "importance" for us forces air into us: yawns, sighs, laughter, and shouts. Before we can speak our minds we must draw breath. Before anything, babies take in a gulp of air and will continue to until they die; breath is the first bar in the prison of mortality, and the lock on the exit.
In a cosmos in which the Divine "divides" itself in order to know itself... inspiration is both the most precious and the most common thing. The great Danger of living and being conscious is that the very act of being incarnate means that we are "divided" from the pleroma... the Fullness of creation. Every time we draw breath we sink further into illusion and delusion. And yet these sparks, these shards of perfection are buried in us. Bury themselves in us. The minute the perfection of the One splits itself into a creation, the Fool is right there waiting to do something irresponsible and stupid and wonderful and horrifying. And mad mad mad mad mad.
The other Fool I love nearly as much as Harris' is the Noblet with his crazed ensemble and his big lurid cock dangling there in claws-reach before that swiping beast. Ass hanging out, and his penis about to be torn open like his trousers and he's looking back at us, almost with a wink as if to invite us along. . So open to everything that anything can happen and it doesn't matter because he has no sense. He lives in rags, he walks with animals, he risks everything, and he is
out of his gourd. A mad beggar, not a Watteau rustic. The Fool might beg for a meal at your door, but he also might take a dump there, or plant stolen pennies hoping to grow a money tree.
Fool's Journey my anus. What a crock of shit. How can the Fool proceed in a linear fashion? How could he march through the Trumps like a goddamned beetle? How could the Fool "advance" when he has NO direction at all? The Fool doesn't have a plan! Eden Gray sold that load of simplistic mnemonic twaddle to the New Age publishers and STILL it gets repeated for no effect and reason.
It's that mushy, declawed Fool I can't abide in so many decks. Grinning jesters and apple-cheeked juveniles. Gack.
I get so irritated with those Waite-Smith keyword books that talk about the Fool in fluffy terms: NEW BEGINNINGS or LEAPS OF FAITH... this Thoth Fool is not exactly platitude-friendly. He ISN'T a Hallmark card. He's only an innocent in the Lord of the Flies, Dionysian sense. He's a monster, a lunatic, a simpleton, a bum, a beast. He's dangerous exactly because he can't conceive of danger or repercussions or context. As free and strong and erratic as the air. The thing I love about the Crowley Fool is that like inspiration, like spirit, like air, he takes hold and carries us off without regard for any imaginary restraints, and reminds us that all restraints are imaginary. He ravishes us, like Faust's magick... impregnating us and sullying us and ennobling us. He's the madness and magick that lets us take sips of the Divine all around us at every moment if we're strong enough to do so.
S
