The Fool: Dressed to the Hilt

[Rosanne]

A River Runs Through It

Thank you for posting Umbrae- I have printed it out. I thought as a little syncronistic titbit - would tell you of a place.
In the highlands of Veitnam, is the very French area called Da Let. Flowing NW of Ha Noi through Da Let is the River Tam or Da Tam. In the tourist blurb I just dug out is things to do in the Mount Voi area of Da let. All these things are on the river.
1. Tia spring were the river rises.
2. The Chaam Temple
3. Aquacultural flower farms and markets (beautiful water lillies)
4. Loa Binh Palace Hotel
5. Da Lat University
6. The Valley of love with the Lake of Sighs/sorrows
7. Easy Riding tours from the Truong Cong Du
8. Old French Colonial Governement Buildings in City Centre.......
How's that for a sequence? The River itself is not listed nor numbered!!! ~Rosanne

 

[Satori]

In the highlands of Veitnam, is the very French area called Da Let. Flowing NW of Ha Noi through Da Let is the River Tam or Da Tam. In the tourist blurb I just dug out is things to do in the Mount Voi area of Da let. All these things are on the river.
1. Tia spring were the river rises.
2. The Chaam Temple
3. Aquacultural flower farms and markets (beautiful water lillies)
4. Loa Binh Palace Hotel
5. Da Lat University
6. The Valley of love with the Lake of Sighs/sorrows
7. Easy Riding tours from the Truong Cong Du
8. Old French Colonial Governement Buildings in City Centre.......
How's that for a sequence? The River itself is not listed nor numbered!!! ~Rosanne

Not sure if this matters, but our favorite Viet Namese restaurant locally is Da Lat, and they do come from the area you describe.

Umbrae, your post is really meaty. I just read it and will need to reread it a few times. Hopefully I won't get picked up by the aliens before I learn some more of what you are talking about, otherwise I am definitely toast.

In the right hands a piano is an orchestra.

In the right hands the unnumbered Fool 'two-steps' across a decagon like it was a parquet floor.

Thanks for that post Umbrae. It dazzles the mind.

 

[Satori]

Elf, I love your point(s). I DO think the Fool is unnumbered for a reason. I've never bought into the "Fool's Journey" and from what I can tell it's something that gets proposed by post-Golden-Dawn occultists (someone correct me if I'm wrong here) and then popularized by the "therapeutic Tarot" writers of the 70s and 80s. Cookie cutter gnosis-in-a-can. It does seem too simple and monoscopic to be reflective of any real specific wisdom. To say "life is a journey" is so general it's almost meaningless... it's a metaphor that has devolved into a cliché. You could just as easily say breathing is a journey from the perspective of the oxygen. One of my favorite things about the older Fools is the feathers and torn clothes. They haven't gotten all cleaned up and friendly: innocent yes, but bonkers too and maybe dangerous. To me, that impulse to sanitize resembles the Victorian mutilation of Faery mythology that gave us sexless winged children instead. Not any Fool I've encountered. Why would anyone or anything that unpredictable march forward in a straight line like a Hermetic Soldier of Individuation?

Love this!!!! Yes!!

I am reminded of something Alan Watts says about God... that omnipotence and omniscience and omnibenevolence get boring. That to keep Itself from going mad (!), God incarnates as a living being who has no idea of their divine origin/nature. It is only when we stop being mortal (XIII!) that we remember our Divine Status: God as Fool, Fool as God. Which in turn reminds me of some other book by someone I can't remember who says that the Fool is unnumbered because he is able to enter the Trumps at any point without warning, which is pretty damn powerful: like "God" the Fool is everywhere and nowhere, knows everything and nothing, possesses everything and nothing.

I love this. God as Fool....Fool as God....which speaks to the idea of divinity within each and every one of us.

And JMD's makes an essential point as well. I do think you're kind of bumping up (via the Excuse, as one does ) against something true about reading: Each of the Trumps represents a matrix which refracts via each of the other cards.

Again, love this. Thanks for putting it this way, startling and somehow, I get it better.

To go back to the "everywhere and nowhere" idea above, aren't we all manifesting archetypal forces at every moment? And thence helping the Universe to create itself.

Anything for the 'verse.
.

Shawn, great great post.
I need to read it again, and comment further, but had to let you know I was shouting "yes, yes!" all the way thru. Cathartic. Thankyou.

 

[Umbrae]

God invented man cuz she loves the stories.

The River Tam I refer to is a character on/in "Firefly" & "Serenity"

 

[Sheri]

Bravo, Elf! I love that take on The Fool's relationship to the Majors!

The Fool, unnumbered and as Shin, is also free to move through the WHOLE Tarot deck, not just the Majors...free to meet the people of the Wands, the people of the Cups, the people of the Swords and the people of the Pentacles - who are all part of The World - he learned their languages from the Magician, and how to deal with them from his trip through the Majors. Just my humble 2p added to this amazing conversation

Regarding your post, Umbrae...I'm just going to stand up and clap profusely! I think YOU might be an alien! A wise and amazing, gin-drinking, kilt-wearing, smokin' alien! Klaatu barada nikto? I wish I knew how to say it in Chinese...then it would fit with the Firefly/Serenity theme

valeria

 

[Sophie]

Love it elf! I want to do it! I wanna be the Fool being the Empress being Death!

Actually, I remember putting the Thoth Death card on my mantelpiece once, and acting it out - the Dance...

It felt bloody powerful. Not just to "read" the card, but to act it. If on top of that we are the Fool...

thanks for that thought, elfie

 

[mollymawk]

Ah, wonderstuff. I always found the 'Fool's Journey' to be far too preconceived as well.

And somebody mentioned Sufism a page or two back. Well, it's a sort of a journey story, but I love midrash--and this is a delightful Sufi-Tarot midrash written by Fairfax Cartwright, called The Temple of Human Knowledge. Journey though it may be, the allegory does give some whole new insights into the cards, and it is absolutely charming.

Great thread!

 

[Rosanne]

God invented man cuz she loves the stories.

The River Tam I refer to is a character on/in "Firefly" & "Serenity"

God loves you then kilted man!! Not that I think you speak in fiction. The 'River Tam' thing was just a flow of thought after I read your post and I remembered Veitnam. Just a little mental ramble I walked from 'French' to 'TdM' to 'flow' to 'River Tam' to 'Veitnam' to 'Tarot' just like a circle hehe.
Elf I love Asian food, and I have loved this thread. ~Rosanne

 

[Sophie]

If the Fool is merely an actor then does he really learn anything beyond what he assumes each Archetype would do. As an actor he creates a vision of the archetype according to his personal understanding of the archetype, just as JMD says we as readers do. We read from our own experience and perception of the Divine, the iconography, the card, the world.

I don't know which is better. Acting or the inhabiting....I myself can only imagine what it might be like to BE one of the Trumps. And I admit to a certain hesitancy to doing this. I have only limitedly done the meditations of inhabiting a card, to visit the landscapes and return armed with some kind of information about what my time there was like.

Eh, but you forget about Method Acting, which is both "acting out" and "being" the character.

I've been thinking about what JMD and Rosanne wrote earlier about trying this out with the various tarot characters, and about Rachel Pollack's Forest of Souls, where she has us jiggle up all the majors and look at the journey of each of them through the rest of them.

Now then, if you are a Method Actor Death, and you are wandering through the 21 other archetypes, and acting them out, both being and acting (I chose Death because I've been drawing Death a lot for the past 3 months, and now more than ever, surprise, surprise), would you not discover something shocking, amazing, familiar and unfamiliar about yourself and the world?

(off to find out)

 

[Satori]

Now then, if you are a Method Actor Death, and you are wandering through the 21 other archetypes, and acting them out, both being and acting (I chose Death because I've been drawing Death a lot for the past 3 months, and now more than ever, surprise, surprise), would you not discover something shocking, amazing, familiar and unfamiliar about yourself and the world?

(off to find out)

OK, now if we don't hear back from Fudugazi what does this mean? That she has indeed learned something or that she is still learning?

Dearest gazi, Today it is indeed freezing cold outside. The wind howls and the sun shines tricking us into thinking his warmth will warm us but only Death waits outside if not dressed for, if not ready for the cold.

I have wondered today about the ones with no home so where does this put me on the cycle? Am I Death and the Hermit both, huddled under a bridge and waiting for a light to come save me, but only Death reaches me, only Death wanders out today jubilantly sitting down with me, eager to wrap her cold, icy fingers around my own?