This is a draft of the first in a series of essays on the symbolism of the Major Arcana in the Tarot and the meanings which these symbols in carry in spiritual and philosophical terms, using Crowley’s Book of Thoth and the art of the Thoth deck by Lady Frieda Harris as the starting points for our discussion. My hope is that I will eventually have a complete collection of essays on the subject available, but the drafts of each essay after this will be available on my patreon exclusively until the final product is ready. In the mean time, hopefully to spark interest in the project, I present my initial essay on The Fool.
The Fool is assigned the number Zero among the twenty-two Major Arcana of the Tarot, a significant attribution which we will later touch on. While Western esotericists have attributed significance to all the Major Arcana, when Aleister Crowley endeavored to explore the symbolism of the tarot in The Book of Thoth, he devoted the most time to discussing the significance of The Fool. From Crowley’s discussions of the card's meaning and the various mythological figures it ties in with, we can find an interconnected web of occult and philosophical concepts which illuminate each other through their juxtaposition, drawing out a variety of overlapping meanings from a single archetypal image.
The foremost attribute of The Fool is divine madness, the actions of such a figure being compelled by forces beyond mere reason. We should take a moment to distinguish this “divine madness” from “madness” in terms of categorized, literal mental illness even though it might parallel the latter in certain instances: the madness we speak of is not a debilitation but eccentricity, a flouting of the “sanity” of the social order. In this sense we are dealing with an entity like the “Holy Fool” or “Fool for Christ,” someone whose actions in defiance of secular norms or rational self-interest are the result of significant spiritual insight. The Apostle Paul repeatedly emphasizes in First Corinthians how worldly wisdom and divine wisdom are often at-odds, and as such divine wisdom appears to the worldly as foolishness. So, if worldly reason is an obstacle to enlightenment and salvation, it can only be overcome by embracing a form of madness. Crowley gives a series of potent examples of “law-givers” whose madness overcame mere reason: “an epileptic camel-driver like Mohammed, a megalomaniac provincial upstart like Napoleon, or even an exile, three-parts learned, one-part crazy, an attic-dweller in Soho, like Karl Marx” - in this sense all truly world-historical figures are Fools, because they overturn the established social order which has long been supposedly justified by reason and natural law.
In turn this madness which frees the Fool from the confines of conventional reason imparts a form of innocence on to them which is like that of a child’s innocence, yet distinct in other ways. The child is innocent due to a lack of accumulated experience, an underdevelopment of reason, but from this state they have the potential to develop rational capacities and possess a "neuroplasticity" making them radically open to new facts and ways of thinking which the calcified preconceptions formed in adulthood do not allow. Meanwhile, instead of lacking the experience necessary to cultivate their rational capacities, the Fool has shed them because they now serve as a barrier to further development, for the same purpose of recapturing that radical openness so that they might receive insight they could not obtain otherwise. This is the reason why Jesus teaches in the Books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke that “whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.” Similarly, the Apostle Paul, again in First Corinthians, calls on the believers to be children in their relation to evil, to shed the calcified behavior of sinfulness, but at the same time to be mature in their mental capacities: to recoup childhood innocence while retaining their intellectual power is as Christ instructed his followers to be as “wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.” In this way the Fool is innocent, unbound by worldly ways, but this innocence should not be confused with mere ignorance.
In the Fool’s innocence, Crowley connects the archetype to Percival, the protagonist of the Grail Romance who can succeed in his quest because he possesses this innocence, the quality which allows him to obtain the Holy Grail and heal the castrated Fisher King, being granted the hand of the King’s daughter in marriage and the crown as a result. The Grail Romance distills the archetypal journey of the hero derived from what Crowley believes was a primordial time in the past when royal status was passed on matrilineally rather than patrilineally. Kingship was obtained not by blood but by the courtship of the crown princess, the representative of the Goddess who imparts sovereignty, so the king was always an outsider and a stranger, a wandering knight or prince who had to undertake a trial to take the position of the old king who once played the same role. This primordial understanding of kingship is preserved in the patriarchal age through Greek and Celtic mythology, where heroes obtained their kingship not by right of their royal or divine descent, but because their deeds win them the marriage of the queen heiress, as well as Germanic fairy tales where the wandering knight or prince must complete a series of trials in their role as suitor.
In this capacity as the divine suitor and bridegroom of the Queen, the representative of the Goddess on earth, the Fool is also the archetypal Green Man, the vegetation god who weds the goddess of sovereignty, which we see in the pairs of Dumuzid and Inanna, Thammuz and Ishtar, Attis and Cybele, Adonis and Aphrodite, or Osiris and Isis. The Green Man is, as a god of vegetation, also a god of fertility, but in this capacity is doomed to lose his life and fertility, inevitably being killed and castrated before being “resurrected” in some capacity. This reflects the succession of kingship from the castrated Fisher King to the wandering knight who heals the wound, restoring the life and fertility of the Goddess’s consort. For James Frazer and Robert Graves, this myth, commonly known as the “dying and rising god” was echoed in the structure of sacred kingship in the primordial past: the ascension of the king was premised with his union with the goddess, represented by the priest-queen, whose reign was allotted for a set amount of time before he was ritually slain, likely by his successor. Thus, the divine personage of the sacred king remains forever virile, his vessel cut down before he can grow old and infertile.
But we must stop here from going too far down this route of reifying the Fool into merely the patriarchal understanding of the hero figure - the emphasis on this archetype of the male vegetation god who dies and is resurrected belongs to the now-gone Aeon of Osiris and to limit our understanding of the Fool to this archetype is to confine ourselves to remain in outdated modes of thinking. The symbolism of the Fool suggests that it is far more than merely the dying-and-rising god but transcends and moves beyond this in the same way the Aeon of Horus is the time when the patriarchal cycles of succession come to an end, finally overthrown by a crowned and conquering hero of a new type. Crowley emphasizes that the Fool is not just the phallic knight but a Hermaphroditic figure, connected to “Zeus Arrhenothelus,” a concept which he appears to be the earliest source for from a cursory glance. This idea of Zeus Male-Female is his reconstruction of the “Original God” which is later split up into gendered pairs and diverse specialized functions. This Hermaphroditic nature of the Original God can be found in the Orphic Mysteries, where the primordial god who emerges from the cosmic egg is the androgynous Phanes, from whom all other gods emanated. In the hermaphroditic Phanes was in turn identified with the ecstatic deity Dionysus, or Zagreus, who was another “dying and rising” vegetation god who was torn apart limb-by-limb before being resurrected. Among the titles attributed to Dionysus were “Dimorphos” and “Diphues” in reference to the god’s hermaphroditic nature.
In the hermaphroditic god Dionysus, the figure of the “Green Man” is directly connected with the archetype of the “madman” through his intoxication and ecstatic nature, which infected his worshipers during his festivals and mystery rites, whose number included women, slaves, and foreigners. In the myths surrounding Dionysus, he is repeatedly regarded as either a madman or a liar for his claims of divinity and inflicts madness on the women in the lives of those who doubt his godhood, transforming them into the violent ecstatic Maenads who compose the core of his retinue. Not only was Dionysus connected to ecstatic madness in his role as god of wine, but in many of the mystery cults he was worshiped with psychoactive plants: in the Dionysian mysteries scholars have proposed that opium was mixed into the wine drank by worshipers, while in the Eleusinian Mysteries where the god was worshiped as Iacchus, it was believed that the sacred drink kykeon was infused with some element which transformed it into a powerful hallucinogen, which scholars have proposed may have been ergot, giving the drink the same effects as LSD, or as Robert Graves proposed psilocybin mushrooms, with the “Vine Dionysus” being derived from the earlier “Mushroom Dionysus.” Considering the relatively low alcohol content of ancient wine, the addition of psychoactive elements in the rituals to produce these ecstatic effects makes sense. To tie everything we’ve discussed together, we find that in the madness brought on by psychedelics there is a renewal of “innocence” - the substances increase the tripper’s openness to new ideas, at least temporarily recreating a degree of the neuroplasticity of youth. In this way the Fool’s madness, innocence, and fertility are all intertwined, the deconstruction of the ordered mind of preconceptions creating the fallow ground from which original and creative ideas may sprout.
In addition to this identification with Dionysus, the hermaphroditic Original God Phanes was known as Metis, a goddess whose name was Ancient Greek for wisdom, serving as its personification, who could supposedly take on any shape or form. As the progenitor of the gods in her capacity as Phanes, Metis can also be understood as the equivalent of the Gnostic entity Sophia, whose name was the Hellenic Greek word for wisdom and who was the progenitor of the archons, the wicked entities which ruled the celestial bodies and controlled the physical world. Another entity considered equivalent to Phanes was the god Mithras, the solar deity worshiped in an orientalist Roman mystery cult. In his subterranean mithraeum, inscriptions have been found entitling the god as “Mithras-Phanes.” Like Phanes, Mithras was born out of an egg, or sometimes a stone, and both the Orphic and Mithraic mysteries involved the ritual sacrifice of a bull, making it probable that the older Orphic mystery school influenced the development of the Roman mysteries. While these equivalencies of Phanes appear disparate, we find them reconciled again in the alleged mystery religion of the Knights Templar and the interpretations various occultists have taken of their strange idol, Baphomet.
The mainstream interpretation of the name of the Templar idol Baphomet is that it is a French linguistic corruption of the name of Muhammad, effectively accusing the Knights Templar of having converted to the demonized orientalist understanding of Islam held by the Catholic Church at the dawn of the 14th century. But other interpretations of the name would influence the understanding of Baphomet which would go on to hold sway over modern occult practices. A common interpretation of the heresy of the Knights Templar was that they had embraced gnosticism: in the late 18th century the German bookseller Christoph Nicholai, a member of the infamous Order of the Illuminati proposed that the idol’s name was actually derived from the Greek phrase baphe metous, meaning “Baptism of Wisdom,” signifying the Gnostic mystery religion of the Templars. This interpretation of Baphomet and the Templars was later championed in the early 19th century by the Austrian orientalist Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, who described the Templar goddess Metis, or Sophia, as a hermaphrodite who represented unrestrained sensuality, like the hedonistic Dionysus equated with the androgynous Phanes. This interpretation of Baphomet as hermaphrodite would be immortalized in the god’s most famous depiction by Eliphas Levi, who drew out this idea into the deity being the ultimate symbol of alchemical opposites: man and woman, human and animal, sensual and spiritual, reflecting the Hermetic principle of unity in contradiction, “as above, so below.”
Crowley would bring in the interpretation of Baphomet as Mithras, the god’s name being a corruption of Pater Mithras, while continuing to emphasize the nature of the entity as the “Divine Androgyne.” In the Gnostic Mass, Crowley would also describe Baphomet as “the Serpent and the Lion,” incorporating another aspect to our ever-accumulating motley patchwork through which we understand The Fool. The symbol of a lion-headed serpent, known as the Chnoubis, was a recurring element in Hellenic Egyptian magic, Gnosticism, and the Mithraic mysteries, often representing the power of the Sun and medicine but for Crowley’s purposes it was a representative of the divine power of the spermatozoon. This ties back into the rest of the Fool’s motifs through a particularly infamous passage of Crowley’s writings where he stated “a white male child of perfect innocence and intelligence makes the most suitable victim” for ritual sacrifice. This deliberately shocking apparent call for human sacrifice is made humorous when we realize that in Britain at the time, any direct reference to a sexual act in literature was illegal as a form of obscenity, but Crowley’s innocuous prescription of masturbation becomes perfectly acceptable in the eyes of the law when it is reframed as advocacy of infanticide! Again, here innocence signifies the fact that the sperm is nothing except pure potential, a sexless entity which has the possibility to develop into any number of forms. As the Union of Opposites, Baphomet, and by extension the Fool, is the potential which results from the union of sperm and egg.
Speaking of the egg, and considering all this talk of potentiality, it may be useful to introduce a concept from well after Crowley’s time to further illuminate the archetype of the Fool. In their collaboration Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari propose a concept which they describe as the Body without Organs, derived from the writings of the schizophrenic artist Anton Artaud where he laments that the organs of the body impose “automatic reactions” which constrain human activity from the ideal state of freedom. As such a Body without Organs would operate without the constraints of the parts which compose the whole limiting possible functions: we might think here of the goddess Metis and how she could freely transform herself into any number of shapes, or alternatively we might consider one of the examples Deleuze and Guattari provide of the egg. The egg is a literal body without organs, a mass of proteins undifferentiated by structure brimming with potential, the innocence of the Fool. Unlike the common egg, the body without organs is not predestined by nature to a set purpose: what emerges from the cosmic egg is not a creature fixed in predictable form, but Phanes-Mithras, the being of infinite potential from whom all things proceed. If we conceive of the Body Without Organs in the psychological sphere as Deleuze and Guattari did, the kind of person whose mind operated in this way would inevitably be seen as consumed by madness, totally unstructured in their thoughts. But at the same time this mental chaos would allow them access to limitless creativity, the virile potential of mad Dionysus. Thus, the Fool is the means by which we understand the Body Without Organs: madness, innocence, fecundity, ecstasy, infinity, and potential without ending brought together into a single concept.
We now attribute a final name to the Fool, Harpocrates or Horus the Child, who Crowley called The Babe in the Egg of Blue, a title which might call to mind the cosmic starchild at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey who signifies the post-human future. This figure is significant to Crowley’s concept of the Aeon of Horus, the time in which the predestined cycle of the “dying and rising god,” the archaic form which the Fool took in the Green Man, is broken by the “crowned and conquering child,” the new form of the Fool in Harpocrates. For the individual, Harpocrates is a representation of the Holy Guardian Angel, the ideal and fully realized self, the entity which you become from following your True Will. This can be understood as a form of predestined path, but as we have established Harpocrates the Fool is a Body Without Organs: to understand the Holy Guardian Angel as a fixed form would be contrary to the radical possibility which it is supposed to represent. Harpocrates is the God of Silence, his right hand raising his index finger up to his lips, recalling the mute fool Harpo of the Marx Brothers. In this silence is the infinite potential of the unspoken word, the “pregnant pause,” the cryptic response of Dionysus to the King of Thebes when he was asked the nature of truth. It is the Zero, the cosmic egg from which anything and everything can hatch.
When we describe the Fool as Horus the Child then, we recall the earlier discussion of the innocence the Fool represents, and how this innocence is distinguished from the innocence of the child even as it parallels the latter. Kenneth Grant, one of Crowley’s disciples, informs us that this “crowned and conquering child” of the Aeon of Horus should not be understood as a literal child, but instead connects it to the mythological figure of the dwarf, a physical manifestation of the “inner child” representing the upsurge in radical creativity. If we were to understand this neoteny, the retention of neuroplasticity into the stage of mental maturity, in an embodied symbol ala Grant’s dwarf, this could be understood as a human with the neotenous attributes which have distinguished their species from other primates even more exaggerated: a larger head, a flatter face, and shorter limbs. In effect, we would end up with something resembling the Grey aliens of popular culture, or the entity LAM who Crowley summoned when invoking his Holy Guardian Angel. This form symbolizes how the realization of the True Will is the greater form of the ecstatic childlike innocence which the various mystery schools attempted to recreate using psychedelics in conjunction with ritual.
In culmination, we find that the Fool is the void of Zero, as empty-headed as we would expect, but that this emptiness paradoxically contains all possibilities within it - like the Baphomet, all opposites and contradictions somehow exist within an unstratified whole. Attempting to reach this state of radical potentiality is inherently fraught - without discretion and care in the journey for freedom one can end up in the exact opposite position, trapped in a perpetual state of sterile repetition. But all quests have an inherent danger, and not refusing to embark is to accept the fate we seek to avoid, the loss of potential. From this place of innocence let us proceed, carefully and bravely, into the world of limitless possibility to see where our will takes us.