Atu 0: The Fool
The Spirit of the Æther
Elemental Trump of Air
Hebrew Letter: Aleph (ox)
Path 11 on the Tree of Life, joining Sephira 1, Kether (Crown) to Sephira 2, Chokmah (Wisdom).
"Know Naught!
All ways are lawful to innocence.
Pure folly is the Key to Initiation.
Silence breaks into Rapture.
Be neither man nor woman, but both in one. Be silent, Babe in the Egg of Blue, that thou mayest grow to bear the Lance and Graal!
Wander alone, and sing! In the King's palace his daughter awaits thee."
What better way to start an exploration of the Tarot than at the beginning? Your first question, when regarding the Fool, may be "Why is this card numbered "0"?" After all, if the Fool is the first card of the deck, shouldn't it be numbered "1"? We don't start counting at zero. Or do we? When I am counting the number of cats in my house, I seem to start with "one, two, three", but that is because the zero is an implied starting point. I don't say "zero" because that would make no sense. There are cats there. If there weren't cats, I would not be counting them. But the idea of zero cats is still very present.
Let's look at other ways that zero can be used in counting. What do we say about a child who has live for a single revolution around the sun? We say that they are "one year old". What about a child who has lived less that one year? Do we say that they are "zero years old"? Well, I don't know about you, but when I was in kindergarten, I referred to my baby brother as "zero years old". Which makes sense to a child, of course. But as we age, we see that the connotations of "zero" are jarring to the intellect. So we substitute years for smaller and smaller units of measurement. "5 months old", "6 weeks old", "3 days old"... it just keeps going down and down and down until finally, we reach the moment of birth. And then, instead of referring to the child as "zero [anything]" we start referring to the length of the pregnancy.
We do the same thing in math and science. We avoid zero unless absolutely necessary. The events of the Big Bang are spoken of in terms of "just minutes after the Big Bang". We have no concept of what that zero point must have been like. Our calculus classes taught us how to get closer and closer and closer, infinitesimally close to zero without equaling zero. And when we do make it to zero? It's as weird and strange as infinity itself. And therein lies the mystery of the Fool.
The Fool is the Zero Point which births all of Infinity
"In essence, there are not really twenty-two trumps, there is only one--The Fool. All the other trumps live inside (and issue from) the Fool."
In Qabalah, there is a concept of three veils of inscrutable qualities of nothingness, known as Ain (Nothing that is so nothing that it negates the concept of nothing-as-the-absence-of-something), Ain Soph (Limitless Nothing), and Ain Soph Aur (Limitless Light). In the dawn of pre-creation, these veils somehow became focused to a single point. This point, this philosophical "zero" is represented by The Fool. At this point, the first Sephira, Kether (The Crown, the Absolute, the Supreme Monad) springs into existence. The Fool is the Nothing that we refer to when we say that "Nothing created God. Nothing is beyond God. Nothing is greater than God."
The Fool's job is not complete, though. For once Kether is formed, the first action that must be taken is the reflection of its Oneness. The mere act of reflection creates Two. And so the Fool must bridge the gap of Kether as it makes the discovery of "This is what I am" and the second Sephira--Chokmah (Wisdom)---is born. And so the Fool, in it's unique position, is both the Nothingness that Everything comes from and the facilitator of such creation.
Divinatory Meanings:
"In spiritual matters, the Fool means idea, thought, spirituality, that which endeavors to transcend earth. In material matters, it may, if badly dignified, mean folly, eccentricity, or even mania. But the essential of this card is that it represents an original, subtle, sudden impulse or impact, coming from a completely strange quarter. All such impulses are right, if rightly received; and the good or ill interpretation of the card depends entirely on the right attitude of the Querent."
