FAQ — The Fool

Short answer (validated yes/no table): YES, continue on your path with complete confidence. The Fool announces a new beginning — but one that does not begin from nothing: it begins with everything that has already been lived.

Yes, but not a return to zero. The Fool has already been through everything; what he announces is a new beginning carried by acquired experience, not a blank page.

Because he remembers. He has travelled the entire first cycle of the Tarot DAL and looks towards the past with conscious memory of that journey — unlike The Wanderer, who looks towards the future, not yet having lived what he carries.

The Fool is no beginner. He has been through everything — and that is precisely what now allows him to begin again differently. Where The Wanderer is still seeking his path, The Fool shows the way: not through authority, but because he has travelled it to the end.

The Fool holds an open Book and reads aloud what he finds there: the incantations it contains are thereby released and can act. This is one of the rare moments in the deck when the Grimoire — which is the Tarot itself within the fiction of the DAL — is actively consulted rather than simply carried.

The rose he carries is no longer a mystery to unravel: the Book it seals is now open, and what it contains becomes teaching received, integrated, and passed on aloud. This rose is not unrelated to another one encountered much earlier on the path, in Death (XIII).

The five medallions remind us that nothing from this journey has been lost: the first four continue the thread already present in The Wanderer (one for each Minor Arcana suit), while the fifth — a star — symbolises the Major Arcana. Unlike The Wanderer, The Fool has travelled through both the Minor and Major Arcana.

An affectionate companion rather than a guide: the Guide assigns no particular symbolic meaning beyond this joyful presence at his side. A more initiatory interpretation (the dog as a guide) was considered and then discarded during the design process.

Reversed, this card speaks of beginning again too hastily, without the wisdom that should accompany it — believing one is starting from zero when everything has already been learned, and forgetting what experience has cost.

The Fool (22) and The Magician (23) form the deck's second octave, in the Rider-Waite-Smith register, following the first round (The Wanderer to The World, in the Tarot de Marseille register). The Fool marks the entry into this second round.