The numbers on the cards determine which cards trumps others. There's a card numbered 20 and one numbered 21. I'm just saying that it never occurred to me that I should insert the Fool between the cards numbered 20 and 21. To me, there are 21 Trumps plus the Fool. A wild card. I find it interesting that other game players automatically think of the Fool as coming after 20 and before 21.
I am not sure they all would - as Huck has already admitted one could argue that the fool is the best card to hold*(1) - it sounds as much a rationalization as anything else to me, an interesting idea but I don't buy it (as yet).
Although I'm sure Lévi was aware of the Kabbalistic connection to Fire, he stresses Shin as the Astral Light, which he also identifies with the Devil Card. It's all there in his text. The Astral Light is the key to his whole occult philosophy. We don't have to make up reasons for him.
Yes, I was about to reiterate that myself, for Levi the devil is not the devil but Baphomet, an emblem of the astral light.
It might also be pertinent to note again that though a catholic*(2), Levi did not believe in eternal damnation but in universal salvation - one could even infer from certain extracts of his works that he thought the concepts of hell and purgatory (and 'The Devil'?) were part and parcel of the hallucinations of madness. However, allowing them a measure of rhetorical veracity, as fable or parable, then his belief in universal salvation would mean that after final judgment even 'the devil' would have redemption, so there would be no splitting in two, but redemption for all, including those in 'hell'.
(Nonetheless he may prefer to present, or appear to present, the orthodox view in order to 'prevent injury' - he had after all already served three prison terms for his religious and political beliefs, and changing into the robes of a Master of Magic from that of a social reformist might also entail a different approach, as he wrote:
Treat the habits of ordinary life as others treat the weaknesses of childhood. Amuse the crowd to prevent personal injury, but never address it except in parables and enigmas; such has been the mode of conduct of all the great Masters of Magic, and in such an attitude there is wisdom.)
Kwaw
*1. Indeed, if memory serves me right there is a tarot appropriati poem of the mid-sixteenth century which concludes 'I take the best card, the fool, for myself.' (Of the appropriati poems, a lot of them seem to order them as de Mellet, going down from 21 with the fool coming last, after the trickster.)
*2. I suspect Levi uses the word catholic in the sense of universal - it is clear his ideation of a 'universal religion' bears little relation to the actual Roman Catholic church.