Tarot Club: The Fool

Jumping into the unknown

Death Becomes Her is a weekly newsletter exploring Tarot and its relationship to creativity. You can read more about why I started it here, but the cheat notes are that I believe unleashing creativity starts with getting up close and personal with ourselves. As a student of Tarot, I have unlocked multiple outlets for creative expression that otherwise might have remained out of my reach.

For me, reading the Tarot begins with accepting there are realms of knowledge that exist outside of our human understanding - just as there are realms from which we can draw creative inspiration and beauty. I’ll be exploring these ideas each week by a) focusing on a close up study of a chosen card as well as an overview of the numbers, sequentially moving through the Majors and Minors; b) providing Tarot prompts for creative work; c) sharing a spread for you to add to your repertoire, and; d) a dedicated weekly chat thread for everyone to discuss, share and learn together.

Let’s shuffle!

---

Hello Tarot lovers! Welcome to this week’s newsletter. Today we’re talking about optimism, great leaps into the unknown and how to find the courage to set out on a new path. There’ll be creative prompts, a suggested spread and some music, food and reading suggestions to accompany the energy brought forward by this week’s cards and themes.

What A Fool Believes: main character energy

Pamela Colman-Smith’s depiction of The Fool, 1909

Keywords: Beginnings, faith, setting out, open heartedness, untainted vision, joy, the space between this earthly plane and the cosmos

Note: These are the keywords I associate with The Fool. As you become more intimately familiar with your cards and your own readings, you’ll know which words work for you.

I wrote about The Fool (Major 0) in this early post (and I encourage you to re-read the parts specifically where I reference Rachel Pollack and her teachings on the ‘0’ that demarcates The Fool from the rest of the Majors) but we’re going to go a little deeper today into what this wonderful naïf energy means for YOU.

When I say ‘naïf’, I don’t necessarily mean childlike or infantile. To me, The Fool’s capacity for greatness lies in the faith they show in possibility. While some people would certainly call that naive, I think throwing yourself into possibility is one of the most beautiful acts of courage we can do as artists and creatives. To believe in the unbelievable is to be willing to leap from a cliff and allow for the magic of the unknown to catch you. To decide for yourself that the only way to move forward is to actually move, and to trust that sometimes all is not what it seems.