a FooL's errand

Every story begins with a fool, inasmuch as we choose to accept the story’s premise.

Consenting to be fooled by the storyteller’s craft, we allow ourselves to journey through imagined realms, relive epic deeds, and penetrate the mysteries of creation.

Or, escape...
Humans, it has been observed, possess remarkable powers of self-deception.
And sometimes the fool is a devil in disguise.

In any case, a kind of trick is played - a method of fooling oneself into a degree of belief necessary for evoking the power of dream within our waking lives, weaving together a reality unto itself, no matter how absurd.

Neither truth nor lie, the fool is a cipher - arranging from a mere jumble of letters or utterance of sounds, an architecture of meaning we may choose to inhabit, or ignore. The story stands or falls on its own, an artifact of human interpretation that survives the ages only so long as we find it compelling enough to be retold. The lifespan of any myth as determined by our willingness to believe. And belief, though sometimes stubborn, has a way of adapting to novel conditions - changing the premise, hatching new stories, rewriting ancient themes.

Yet the fool remains.

A constellation known to the ancient Hebrew as Kesil, the “Fool” was in Jewish lore: Nimrod - the founding King of Shinar, where from the city Babel rose a Tower to reach the heights of Heaven. Midrash legend elaborates upon the Biblical tale, punishing Nimrod for the construction by pinning him forever to endless night, affixing him to the sky with the belt of stars we ascribe the Hunter, Orion - a FooL for all the World to see.

Opinions may differ as to what his Tower was meant to represent.

From a literal standpoint, there could of been a crumbled ziggurat from which the story evolved - a heap of rubble older than memory explained away with the words of foreigners and an admonition from above.

As etiology, Babel’s edifice collapses with a birth of languages, serving as rationale for the peopling of Earth and their mutual distrust of one another. Taken to extreme, this Biblical tale posits a wrathful deity, akin to a war god, who smites humanity for daring to work in concert.

Yet, during the time of their Babylonian captivity, the Hebrew changed their alephbet from a collection of pictographic glyphs (resembling the symbols still attributed their letters) to the sequence of box script characters from which the contemporary Hebrew alephbet is presently derived. Perhaps the tale of Babel’s fall is an adapted memory, alluding to this confusion of letters - an influence which proved to outlast the Babylon empire.

From an allegorical perspective, the Tower is poised precariously between our potential as a species and the limits of our ambition. For reasons unexplained, YHVH, having observed that humans working in unison were capable of achieving anything that they could agree upon, messed with our ability to reach collective consensus.

YHVH said:

“Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
-Genesis 11:7 ≈ π/2

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Like a circle, divided.

Does the 11th chapter of “Beginnings” portray an edifice whose construction must beget a fall? Surely, anything built to reach heaven’s door is doomed to crumble before the humbling power of the presence behind “the Name”, insofar as an ego confronted with the ultimate totality of all being would, in theory, dissolve before this realization of the infinite.

In this sense, the Tower may serve as a symbolic edifice comprising personal conviction - the architecture of one’s worldview as constructed through a lifetime. Whether demolished by mystic union with the divine, or cast away like corporeal form at the moment of death, this temporary housing is inevitably torn down every time it is built. In its wake lies the confused Babel of mixed up letters, spread across creation, concealing an ancient unity.

Survivors interpret the event from its ruins, unable to articulate an experience which, by its very nature, is beyond words - transcending mortal logic & reason in ways that language or text can only allude to. Without the pretense of assumption, there is no edifice of belief - there is only the eternal wisdom of knowing nothing. And, despite the ancient rabbis’ scorn, Nimrod, the FooL accused of building Babel’s Tower, reached heaven nonetheless. Being the King responsible for its construction, is he not also be the mystic for whom the Tower has outlived its’ purpose?

As icons of the Tarot deck, the Fool and the Tower are cues to consider the poetry of this myth - an esoteric riddle at the root of interpretation itself. Naturally, scholars will disagree as to whether this was intended, but that may be ‘the point’ - the only means of honestly appreciating the irony of Babel’s Tower among Tarot’s 22 trumps. It may also be why the fortune tellers have long intuited it a card of ill-omen.

Like the Chariot, and Judgment, the Tower is drawn from an apocalyptic episode within Biblical tradition - catastrophic upheaval of accustomed surroundings triggered by a divine intervention to correct unjust conditions. Nimrod erects a Tower in Babel that cannot breach the threshold of heaven, while Ezekiel’s account of the “Merkabah” heralds a prophecy of the First Temple’s destruction at Babylonian hands. His vision of YHVH’s “Chariot” portrays a power no edifice could ever capture, just as the Holy of Holies never truly housed anything more than a Name.

To behold the Divine, all such mediums are abandoned.

No matter how many times the Law is written, or the Temple rebuilt, they are always fated to be destroyed, as if to fulfill some allegorical purpose for the edification of future generations: a lesson written in time for any who would approach the throne of heaven.

“Judgement” refers to a different order of cataclysm, foretelling a resurrection at the fall of Babylon - an apocalypse characterized not by a building razed, but by the end of a morally-bankrupt civilization, the very context wherein our actions are appraised. Certainly precedent was already set with the story of the flood, but there is a thread linking each instance of apocalypsos depicted within the Tarot. The Tower & FooL, the Chariot, and Judgement each share in common an etymology rooted in Babel/Babylon/Βαβυλὼν.

As a set, they tear apart the boundary conditions of form from 3 distinct vantage points.
TOWER: a bridge between heaven & earth collapses, splitting the many from the one.
CHARIOT: the vessel of YHVH transcendent of his Name’s physical dwelling.
JUDGEMENT: the ethos of the World made anew, outmoded ways abandoned.

What cannot be contained by the Tower of human industry, or housed within a golden Cube of shared rituals & belief, is encrypted within the whole of the World - one whose divinity lies concealed behind the veil of perception, beyond the medium of perception itself. Where stories of Tower & Chariot view their events from afar, the opening of one’s eyes to Revelation bears witness to an apocalypse from within its’ edifice. The veil as lifted from oneself: Truth looking ‘out’ unto Truth.

Thus, a FOOL-
who knows nothing, is nothing.
Zero.
A no account pun on Nimrod’s punishment.
And a cipher to boot.

He is a King who takes his place among the stars, ascending a Tower by Chariot to open our Eyes, revealing an ancient secret hidden in plain sight. Yet, to behold this mystery is to let one’s Tower fall.

Like a circle, complete.

Kwaw has also written on Orion, the fool: http://newsletter.tarotstudies.org/2006/04/fool-alef-orion/

A feast of fooLs

When the icon of the fool was chosen for the deck, he had long played a role in the folk culture of Europe that had meant more than mere idiot. He was himself a herald to the ludic rites of carnival - those feast days of medieval holiday descended from celebrations of dimly remembered pagan tradition. Presiding over time outside the austere norms of feudalism and orthodoxy, outside the confined structures imposed upon medieval folk culture, he was a master of ceremonies when church and state allowed merriment among the people, when authority itself was turned upon its head and made the fool.

Mikhail Bakhtin said:

Certain feasts acquired a tinge depending upon the season when they were celebrated. The autumn feasts of Saint Martin and of Saint Michael had a bacchanalian overtone and these saints were patrons of winemaking. Sometimes the individual traits of the saint would serve the development of degrading rituals and spectacles. Thus on the feast of Saint Lazarus in Marseilles there were processions with horses, mules, asses, bulls, and cows. The people masqueraded and danced in the streets and squares performing the “great dance” (magnum tripudum). Probably this arose from the fact that Saint Lazarus belonged to a cycle of legends of hell which had a material body topographical connotation, hell representing the lower stratum. He was also linked with representing the theme of death and regeneration. This is why the feast could absorb some elements of ancient local pagan celebrations.

Laughter and the bodily principle were legalized in many other drinking parties, as well as in other private celebrations or public entertainments...

...But we must here stress once more the essential relation of festive laughter to time and the change of seasons. The calendar aspect of the feast of kings was revived and experienced in its popular form of laughter outside the church. Here appeared the relation to the change of seasons, to the phases of the sun and moon, to the death and renewal of vegetation, and to the succession of agricultural seasons. In this succession all that is new or renews, all that is about to draw nearer is emphasized as a positive element. And this element acquires a wider and deeper meaning: it expresses the people's hopes of a happier future, of a more just social and economic order, of a new truth. The gay aspect of the feast presented this happier future of a general material affluence, equality, and freedom, just as the Roman Saturnalia announced the return of the Golden Age. Thus, the medieval feast had, as it were, the two faces of Janus. Its official, ecclesiastical face was turned to the past and sanctioning the existing order, but the face of the people of the marketplace looked into the future and laughed, attending the funeral of the past and present. The marketplace feast opposed the protective, timeless stability, the unchanging established order and ideology, and stressed the element of change and renewal.

The material bodily lower stratum and the entire system of degradation, turnovers, and travesties presented this essential relationship to time and to social and historical transformation. One of the indispensable elements of the folk festival was travesty, that is, the renewal of clothes and of the social image. Another essential element was the reversal of the hierarchic levels: the jester was proclaimed king, a clownish abbot, bishop, or archbishop was elected at the “feast of fools,” and in churches directly under the pope's jurisdiction a mock pontiff was even chosen. The members of this hierarchy of fools sang solemn mass. At many of these feasts kings and queens were elected for a day, as on Epiphany and on St. Valentine's day. The custom of electing such ephemeral kings and queens (rise pour riré) was especially widespread in France, where nearly every popular banquet was presided over by them. From the wearing of clothes turned inside out and trousers slipped over the head to the election of mock kings and popes the same topographical logic is put to work: shifting from top to bottom, casting the high and the old, the finished and completed into the material lower stratum for death and rebirth. The changes were placed into an essential relation to time and with social and historical change. The element of relativity and of becoming was emphasized, in opposition to the immovable and extemporal stability of the medieval hierarchy.

Indeed, the ritual of the feast tended to project the play of time itself, which kills and gives birth at the same time, recasting the old into the new, allowing nothing to perpetuate itself. Time plays and laughs! It is the playing of the boy Heraklitus who possesses the supreme power in the universe (“domination belongs to the child”). The ascent is placed on the future; utopian traits are always present in the rituals and images of the peoples festive gaiety. Thus were the rudiments that were to flower later in the sense of history as conceived by the Renaissance.

Summing up, we can say that laughter, which had been eliminated in the Middle Ages from official cult and ideology, made its unofficial but almost legal nest under the shelter of almost every feast. Therefore, every feast in addition to its official, ecclesiastical part had yet another folk carnival part whose organizing principles were laughter and the material bodily lower stratum. This part of the feast had its own pattern, its own theme and imagery, its own ritual. The origin of various elements of this theme is varied. Doubtless, the Roman Saturnalia continued to live during the entire Middle Ages. The tradition of the antique mime also remained alive. But the main source was local folklore. It was this folklore which inspired both the imagery and the ritual of the popular, humorous parts of the feast.

Lower- and middle-class clerics, schoolmen, students, and members of corporations were the main participants in these folk merriments. People of various other unorganized elements which belonged to none of these social groups and which were numerous at that time also participated in the celebrations. But the medieval culture of folk humor actually belonged to all the people. The truth of laughter embraced and carried away everyone; nobody could resist it.” - Rabelais and His World

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His latin name, cifre, was synonymous with nothing, a word that had also come to mean zero within the medieval taxonomy of numbers. And during the 'ordinary time' of the calendar, this was how he was to be generally regarded: as someone of no importance – a fool whose ultimate worth amounted to nothing. Being an iconic symbol for the humor of the day who reveled in the travesty of societal norms, perhaps his was a name which alluded to an even deeper meaning behind the role – that by his mockery he served to cancel out the inequities of an otherwise rigid feudal society that leaned heavily upon the working poor and merchant classes. This fool signaled those festive occasions when everyone, even those in power, could relax their strict observances of 'the law', celebrate the bounty of their lives, and have a good laugh together.

It may even be that it was humor that guided the wordsmiths to apply his name to cipher, for by his inversion of customs he may also have betrayed the arbitrary nature of any code. His folly being our own whenever we abide by any rule. And, were it safe to assume a tradition of pun and synonym were likewise attached to this character, we might even draw connection to the Hebrew fool, “Kesil”, by way of Ensifer – the latin name for Orion's stars. For this 'sword-bearer' of Roman astronomy possessed the instrument of cleaving any metaphor from nothing: a blade which may part the opposing twins from whose juxtaposition meaning itself is made. Thus he implies a unity divided, much like the people scattered by a Tower's fall.

Yygdrasilian said:

His latin name, cifre, was synonymous with nothing, a word that had also come to mean zero within the medieval taxonomy of numbers.

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In 14th century Italian the Latin word zefirum (or cefirum, as Fibonacci called it) changed to zefiro/zevero. In the venetian dialect this was shortened to zero, from whence it came into English. The latin word zefirum itself is derived from the Arabic root sifr, meaning empty, without anything or nothing. In French this became 'chiffre' which in English became cipher'. Cipher, though originally connected with the hindu/arabic zero, in time came to denote all 10 arabic/hindu numerals.

The Hebrew root [SPhR or SFR] can be found in several Hebrew words such as for example those we find in the Sefer Yetzira [SY]:

Books [Sepharim]
Text [Sepher]
Number [Sephar]
Communication [Sippur]
[SY 1:1]

And also of course Sefirot. The word Sefirot in the SY introduced a new noun into the hebrew language, meaning among other things 'counting'. According to Kaplan it is derived, like the English 'cipher' and 'zero', from the arabic a'sfr.

Outside of the SY, the oldest known reference to 'ten sefiroth of nothingness' is in a midrash of the latter half of the 8th century, when Hindu numbers had already been introduced into the arabic world. The age of the SY itself is estimated by most scholars as belonging to between the 2nd and 6th centuries c.e. Some date it as late as the 10th. In all probability there is an 'old' core text, maybe as old as the 2nd century. By intention or by error over the centuries it was added to or possibly commentaries included by error or intention of scibes. If the word 'sefirot' as used in the SY is connected to the arabic root a'sfr as translation for the hindu 'sunya' [zero], it is unlikely these references are prior to the 750's. According to some scholars the sephiroth chapter is the last of the additions to the SY, being added to the core text sometime between the 6th and tenth centuries.

The connection with the Arabic root sifr (nothing) and Sefirot seems on one level of interpretation to be made particularly clear in the SY which explicitly and always refers to the Sefirot as "Ten Sefirot of Nothingness" [SY 1:2 et al, though it should be noted BLI MH (without things) has several alternate interpretations]. If also goes on to say [SY 1:4]:

Ten Sefirot of Nothingness
Ten and not Nine
Ten and not Eleven

On one level and perhaps the most obvious is that we simply interpret this as meaning that there are ten sefirot, no less and no more. On another level however I believe we could also interpret it as:

Ten not nine = 10-9 = 1
Ten not eleven = 10-11=-1
And 1-1=0

Thus reiterating the statement "Ten Sefirot of Nothingness".

"And before one, what do you count?" [SY 1:7]

Language and history testifies to the 'nought' value of the fool, and the association of the fool with 'ass' (an emblematic symbol also figurative of nothingness, naught, a zero).

The fool or worthless fellow in 13th century french was called a 'cipher', a nothing or zero. In the (15th century) steele sermon 'nulla', worth nothing. The ass-eared Bishop of Fools was named Bishop Nullatensis.

In Old English a 'nowt' [from Norse] is a fool, nought and an ox [as Hebrew aleph is an ox and Ain - nothing].

In 12th and 13th centuries vagrants, worthless fellows and criminals were marked with a Theca [a circle with upwards chevron in centre], a symbol for nothing in numerical computations.

The festival of fools was also known as the feast of the ass. The connection between folly, ignorance and the ass go back to classical roman time, we may see it repeated in Boethius, possibly the vehicle of the Christian neo-platonism references we see in the tarot sequence.

"Dost thou understand, or art thou dull as an ass to the sound of my lyre?" wrote Boethius.

On good and evil fortune [a source for the idea of animal figures upon the wheel of fortune?] " Boethius wrote:

"In like manner, wickness itself is the reward of the unrighteous. Unrighteousness degrades the wicked below man's level. Thou canst not consider him human whom thou seest transformed by vice. The covetous man surely resembles a wolf. A restless, wrangling spirit is like some yelping cur. The secret fraudulent schemer is own brother to the fox. The passionate man, frenzied with rage, we might believe to be animated with the soul of a lion. The coward may be likened to the timid deer. He who is sunk in ignorance and stupidity lives like a dull ass. He who wallows in foul lusts is sunk in the pleasures of a hog."

Or as the King Alfred anglo-saxon version has it "And the dull man who is too slow thou shall call an ass more than a man." [as by Trans. into modern English by Samuel Fox]. Boethius Latin original: Segnis ac stupidus torpet: asinum uiuit.

Because Balaam was foolish, a foolish beast in the ass spoke with him, because he despised God Who spoke with him. Thee too let the pearl reprove in the ass's stead. The people that had a heart of stone, by a Stone He set at nought, for lo, a stone hears words. The Pearl IV. 2-- Seven Hymns on the Faith, Ephraim Syrus

All wordly wealth for him too little was;
Now hath he right nought, naked as an ass.
Sometime without measure he trusted in gold,
And now without measure he shall have hunger and cold.
Lo, sirs, thus I handle them all
That follow their fancies in folly to fall.
From English Tudor play 'Magnificence'

"Fortune's fool possesses no principles: these derive from the perception of sequence, the fit, the immitiagable relation of things...

"...To say, blandly:

Now then, we'll use
His countenance for this battle,

or

That eyeless head of thine was first fram'd flesh
To raise my fortunes,

or

All with me's meet that I can fashion fit, to say, in effect, that human beings are so many ciphers, their sum a point d'appui 'To raise my fortunes', is to make a cipher of oneself. For if a man cannot percieve the operation of sequence, if he miscalls it flux presided over by a blind and whimsical goddess, what is he then but a prisoner in flux.

The wise man for his part perceives that chance and caprice are only the facade of things. So perceiving, he turns hsi back on Fortune. He understands, with Plutarch, that 'as for the power of Fortune... it bringeth downe those men that of their owne nature are cowards, fearfull and of small courage'. He knows that, in all last things, Fortune's power is conditional."

From Shakespeare's Poetics In relation to King Lear by Russell Fraser:
http://www.archive.org/stream/shakespearespoet010348mbp/shakespearespoet010348mbp_djvu.txt

a fool's PaRaDiSe

In Renaissance imagination a medieval folk humor flowed.

The lineage of the fool in the practice of conundrum may provide our key to penetrating what meaningfully coherent designs lay behind the earliest decks' creation. A game within a game for the chosen and lucky few versed enough with their studies to read the play of puns.

In the spirit of carnival jest, the “zephero” may have blown with the western wind – the force of “nothing” exerted from that direction unto which the World turns. In addition to its symbolic ties with the Ox, the letter Alef has, like Zephyros, been imbued with the element of Air.

In Sandro Botticelli's Primavera (c.1482) he gusts upon his sister, the Greek nymph Chloris, as vines sprout from her mouth, growing out to entangle her Latin counterpart, Flora – a riddle in rhyme of the cipher behind the confusion of tongues. A commission for the Medici, this riddle is posed in an orchard of golden fruit. At the opposite end of the painting is a youth stirring up storm clouds with a wand, as if to bring the lighting bolt of Zeus down through the branches of the trees. Unto this direction, the allegory flows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primavera_(painting)

Beside Flora stands the goddess of love and beauty, Venus, in whose planetary aspect another golden fruit may be known. For, in her alignments with Earth & Sun, a pentagram is traced upon the ecliptic – a geometric form containing the golden mean at the heart of every apple. In the symbolic interplay of letters within the Cabalists' tree, this apple is found in the Eye of the maker - an esoteric secret alluded to in the name of Jewish exegesis, PaRDeS - an “orchard” formed by an acronym for its' practice:

Peshat, the literal meaning of biblical text.
Remez, its symbolic value.
Derash, the questions they evoke.
Sod, their mystic revelation.

Above the goddess, a Putto aims his arrow at the 3 Graces – a trinity of virtues who appear within the earliest known deck. Perhaps, like the cardinal virtues who roamed among the earliest decks' ranks, they serve to ask us where virtue truly belongs. As with the golden section revealed by the morning star, Aristotle asserted in his Nicomedean Ethics that they lay at a harmonic mean between extremes.

Is this why the Putto also aims his arrow where Lovers meet?

In another commission for the Medici, Pallas & the Centaur, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallas_and_the_Centaur) Botticelli painted a curious symbol, one also bound to the origins of Tarot: Borromean rings embroidered upon a dress barely veiling the goddess of cunning - who devised a system of Justice for Orestes - as she comforts the wounded centaur, Chiron. And it was he who sacrifices his own immortality for the sake of Herakles – the hero tasked in his 11th labor to steal the golden apples of Hera's orchard. His constellation kneels upon the slayed guardian of those trees, Ladon, a Draco of “strong flow” coiled around the polar axis of the World.

When used as a cipher for the Hebrew alphabet, the numerical sequence of Tarot is in sync with a method of using the letters' attributed symbols as puzzle pieces that may be fit together to find the golden mean. Perhaps such a use of language, derived from an esoteric use of letters, informed artistic traditions in the Renaissance imagination - a riddle played out in the apocalyptic carnival of tarrochi triumphs - commissioned allegories composed of emblems whose meaning played out in the mythological conundrums of a fool drawing parodies from the fairy tales of antiquarian study.

Is, then, our fool's PaRaDiSe a mappaemundi for an esoteric teaching cleverly lurking within the artworks of the Renaissance and celebrated through the feast days of ritual calendar?