The Fool’s journey as a map

A story added late

The twenty-two Major Arcana did not begin as one traveller’s story. In the Italian courts of the fifteenth century they were the trumps of a card game, the trionfi, ranked so that each one beat the cards below it. Different cities ranked them in different orders, and the Fool stood outside the ranks altogether. In the French game, still played today, it is the Excuse: a card that lets you skip following suit rather than win a trick.

Reading the whole sequence as one traveller’s road is a twentieth-century idea. Popular American teaching books of the 1960s and 1970s walked new readers through the Majors this way, and Sallie Nichols’s Jung and Tarot (1980) read the same sequence as a psychological path of growth. The phrase “the Fool’s journey” spread with this teaching in the later twentieth century. It is a teaching device, and a good one, but it is not a doctrine the card makers held, and nothing on the cards requires it. Olivia’s card pages use it in their number notes, in the Waite-Smith order Olivia follows, with Strength at VIII and Justice at XI.

How the map is drawn

The shape is simple. The Fool, card 0, is the traveller, and each numbered Major from The Magician at I to The World at XXI is a place on the road and something met there: a teacher, a test, a pause, a light. Olivia’s page for The Fool calls zero the number that sits outside the sequence, and the Fool the traveller who passes through every Major.

Many teachers go a step further and lay the twenty-one numbered cards in three rows of seven, with the Fool set apart above them. One common reading runs like this. The first row, The Magician to The Chariot, meets the outer world of skill, care, rule and choice. The second, Strength to Temperance, turns inward; the Temperance page notes that it is often read as the row of inner work. The third, The Devil to The World, meets the larger forces and the great lights. Treat this as one way of arranging the cards. Other teachers draw the lines differently, and the rows are worth keeping only while they help you see.

A map, not a timetable

The device earns its place in a reading because it gives each Major neighbours. When a Major appears, look at the cards on either side of it in the sequence and turn them into questions. What came just before this, and has it been done? What does the next step ask, and is anything in you already reaching for it? The neighbours add context to the card you drew. They are not cards you drew.

What the map does not do is set a course. A card at XIII does not mean you are more than halfway through anything, and drawing Temperance tomorrow would not confirm a step completed. You stand at many places on the map at once: beginning something at work while resting in the Hanged Man’s pause in a friendship. You can return to a place you have already been, and a higher number is not a better one. The World is a wholeness, not a prize, and its page notes that the traveller who arrives there is free to begin again.

So use the order to ask, never to rank or to schedule. If a sentence you are about to say contains “next” or “soon”, turn it into a question about the present.

The traveller is the one looking

The most useful part of the story is its hero. The Fool is not a figure standing apart from the other cards; the Fool is whoever looks at each of them for the first time. Any Major can be read as a question put to that traveller: what is met here, and what does it ask of someone who arrives with a light pack and no map yet?

Olivia’s art gives this a thread you can follow by eye. The Fool strides towards the rim of a lapis cliff, face tipped straight up at a large gold eight-pointed star. At card IX the Hermit holds out a lantern at chest height with a small gold eight-pointed star inside it, eyes cast down past the outstretched hand. At card XVII a great gold star hangs at the centre of the sky above a kneeling figure pouring water. The star the Fool looks up at is carried in a hand, then shines over the water. The Symbol Trail called The star, “A light to steer by”, follows stars through seven cards from The Fool to The Star; the Hermit’s lantern is yours to add. This is a way of looking, not a claim about what the carver intended.