Tarot card meanings · Major Arcana 0
What does The Fool mean in tarot?
In A. E. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), the Fool upright means “extravagance”, and reversed “Negligence, absence, distribution, carelessness, apathy, nullity, vanity”.
Upright
Extravagance.Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part 3
Reversed
Negligence, absence, distribution, carelessness, apathy, nullity, vanity.Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part 3
What does the picture show?
With light step, as if earth and its trammels had little power to restrain him, a young man in gorgeous vestments pauses at the brink of a precipice among the great heights of the world; he surveys the blue distance before him—its expanse of sky rather than the prospect below.Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, Part 2
Where does the Fool fall in a reading?
The Fool belongs to the Major Arcana. On this site you draw three cards, which take three of the places in the ten-card method Waite describes: “This covers him”, “This crosses him”, “This is before him”. The same card reads differently in each place, and the I Ching cast beside it may agree or disagree.
Ask one question. Draw three cards, and cast an I Ching hexagram beside them to see where East and West agree. Free.
Draw three cardsWaite's words are quoted as printed, and left out where they speak of money, law, illness or disaster. The pictures are the 1909 deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith. For entertainment and self-reflection.