lesson 25: i pity the fool

Line of three: Ace of Wands (2), The Fool (1), Nine of Wands (3)
Deck: Folk Magic Tarot, Ibiza Tarot
 
It’s been a minute since I’ve done a three-card pull, and because I forgot to write this this weekend and I’m posting it tomorrow, I thought this was a good chance for simplicity. This is a lovely deck that I’d seen on Instagram and I’m so, so attracted to Eastern European sort of folk art that I had to pick it up. It’s really lovely. 
 
I don’t think we’ve seen The Fool much if at all on this blog. And to be honest, I rarely see Fools in readings. I wonder whether this has to do how care-full people are right now. Note the dash. Not a typo. Care-full as in full of care, not cautious. I think The Fool is a card we see during care-free moments, care-less moments; moments of innocence and moments of almost preternatural openness to whatever may come. I don’t know anyone who has had moments like that recently, not of any consequences anyway. Though there’s something fleeting about The Fool, too. We can only retain their state of innocence and lack of expectation for so long. We aren’t naturally suited to the state The Fool has come to represent in the cultural world of tarot. It’s a hard card to get hold of, and in a way maybe that’s apt; this card can’t sit still for long. It’s wily, slippery, evasive, quicksilver. Quicksilver is another name for Mercury and this reminds us that while the astrological association of the card is air, it’s not not also the card that follows: Magician/Mercury, who is also airy. There are esoteric theories that connect the two cards, almost suggesting that they’re the different emanations of the same thing. (If I’m not mistaken, this comes up on Fortune’s Wheelhouse.)
 
I’ve never felt particularly inspired by “the fool’s journey”—this blog’s title, notwithstanding. The idea of it made theoretical sense, but not divinatory sense. First of all, the journey of the fool isn’t the cards that follow it because the deck doesn’t spend much time in order. Second, there’s something sort of negating about the entire tarot somehow being the journey fools take because it is also a card in the deck and has meaning and associations of its own. They aren’t a non-playing character, so to speak; they aren’t not impacting the game’s outcome. And this is true (I think) of the game the cards were made for. 
 
All that said, I’ve always loved this card and I’m sure I’ve shared how I used to wear it as a pendant when I began my tarot journey. I envied the freedom. But, as I’m sure I’ve always said, had I followed my “dreams” at that point, it would have been a fool’s errand in more ways than one. Frankly, there’s a good possibility that if I’d moved to New York and tried to make it in the theatre, I’d be dead by now. I know that sounds dramatic, but I had no idea how sheltered I’d been, how naive I was, how unprepared for the world—particularly the art world—I was. I operated from the very earnest but very dangerous desire to be approved of and loved. My dating experience of the time is, I think, a good way to imagine what my theatre career would have been: I was so desperate to be loved by a man that I went on dates with dudes I had no attraction to, allowed myself to be intimate with guys I wasn’t attracted to and didn’t trust, and twisted myself into a pretzel to make myself right for guys I didn’t really like because I was desperate. Now, apply those tendencies to a career where you’re constantly begging potential bosses and coworkers to live you. Apply them, too, to the fact that the theatre is a world of predators, grifters, and con artists. I mean that’s not the--well . . . I was going to say that’s not the basis of the industry, it’s just a problematic branch. But . . . That’s not entirely true. At any rate, I was easy pickings. A crush on the wrong director, an audition in a strange location  and I could easily have wound up getting offed. I think so much about Venus Xtravaganza, queer/trans icon and known now from the documentary Paris is Burning. She disappeared and was found slain during the production of that film. And we know her name because she happened to be making that doc. There are so many other missing and murdered persons—queer, indigenous, women, etc.—whose names we don’t know. And had I followed my Fool-ish desire, there’s nothing saying I wouldn’t have gotten into a car with a man I thought would love me only to wind up stuffed in the trunk. 
 
I didn’t mean for this to get grim, and clearly that didn’t happen to me—but the point is what that we want is not always what’s best for us. 
 
I feel this acutely today and so it’s timely. I was reminded today that, though I still long for and miss my theatre life, every encounter I have with the theatre these days leaves me feeling shitty about myself. It doesn’t matter that I’m an incredible playwright. (I’ve got a gift, I don’t know why—but I can write a beautiful, hilarious play.) I want so much for it to work because I’m good at it! But truth be told, I haven’t enjoyed the process in years—well before the panny—and I really have had to accept the most garbage behavior from people in that world. Not from everyone, not by a long shot. Just from the people who have the most influence on my ability to get produced. 
 
This maudlin exploration may have turned you off. But I want to highlight that this is all part of this card. 
 
Listen, choices are great, freedom is great, making bold moves and damning the torpedos—all great. Except when it’s not. What we tend not to talk about with this card is consequences. The imagery in the deck and the esoteric associations have elevated this card to a kind of idealistic and totally imaginary non-reality that most of us, unless we’re extremely moneyed and free of any kind of burden (including self-doubt), will never ever experience in any kind of meaty way. Most of this people on this planet cannot experience the kind of thing readers typically say about this card.  We interpret this card through wishful thinking. But it’s not necessarily helpful. Particularly in readings. And, frankly, even in pathworking or intention-setting. If you’re doing spellwork around The Fool and you are not setting careful fucking parameters, then you’re setting yourself for getting exactly what you want—and every single consequence that comes with it. 
 
Boy, he’s such a scold today, isn’t he? 🤣
 
I don’t mean to be. But a thing we have done with tarot—the collective “we” of . . . all this—is that we take the cards and make them into icons. Those icons become ideals and then those ideals become the gap between giving a reading and reciting a wishlist. 
 
Readers, particularly those who read for ourselves, want to know how we can tell that our readings aren’t being overly influenced by confirmation bias. I think one way to tell is if your readings tend only to highlight the best aspects of your favorite cards. If you’re never able to see this or any card through a darker lens, if you’re not able to detect the consequences of answered prayers, then you’re likely giving yourself too biased a reading. Of course, the other part of that is true. If you never get a good reading, probably you’re looking only at the dark side of the card. (This reminds me that one reason I don’t work with reversals anymore is that cards would show up reversed, but it doesn’t seem to make sense for the reading—the reversal felt haphazard or meaningless rather than nuancing the meaning. But, the benefit of reversals is that it stops us from being too hard or too easy on cards. And so if you find yourself giving readings that seem to be always too + or too -, try using reversals and see if that helps!)
 
It’s worth pointing out that one reason people struggle with the court cards is that we will really like one particular card or rank or suit and use that to sum up our own personality—which makes it difficult to then use it to describe other people, or to see it in ways that reflect lives beyond our own. On top that, we can ID the other cards with people we don’t like, and then it becomes hard to interpret the better aspects of that card. The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Hanged Man, The Devil, and The Tower are often given over to this negativity bias. The Emperor and The Hierophant are understandable. We hate those guys. But of course there are times when The Emperor can represent just, like, a good dad. And there are plenty of times where The Hierophant can simply indicate faith or tradition. Every card has layers and shadows and highlights and nuances—whether we use reversals or not. And the cards as a set will influence each other so that we understand how each is behaving. 
 
Thanks for attending maudlin meditations with Tommy Bee. 
 
Anyhoo—let’s talk about context for a moment. The Fool stands not alone, here, but flanked by the Ace of Wands and the Nine of Wands. I had a similar spread this weekend while leading the Re-Learning Tarot course I’m doing. Our topic was Questions We Should Never Ask Tarot and to explore that topic I made everyone in the class read on the question “When am I going to die?” DON’T FREAK OUT. They didn’t read that for themselves, they read for a man we made up. And I didn’t tell anyone that this is a good question and that we should ask it. Instead, I asked the class to do the reading for a fake dude to see for themselves whether there was any benefit. What better way to know than to try? And doing readings for fake people is the safest way you can do that. But the point of that story isn’t the question as much as the spread I got, which involved the Ace of Gardens/Earth/Coins (I used the Japaridze for that), Strength, and the Ten of Gardens. And I explored with the group how there are two ways to read that: 1. They have the strength to sustain the entire journey of life, they will live a long one and die when there’s nothing left. (Strength carrying the ace—birth—through the “entirety” of a life well-lived, the ten.) 2. The client’s constant output of energy (Strength) will mean that go from 0 (ace) to sixty (ten) super fast—spending all their energy and dying young. (In this case, Strength as an entity using up their life force faster.) Which one is correct? Honestly, to know for sure I’d pull more cards. But because the first one—long life—was my first and strongest hit, that’s what I’d decide is true. 
 
Here, we could say that the Fool carries the ace through to the nine—the near-end, but not the end. What does that suggest, given everything we’ve discussed so far?
 
We haven’t talked about the wands, yet. I don’t think wands has been a particularly heavy presence in this blog to date, either. Again, that feels apt: I have no fucking energy, anymore. Going back to my misspent youth, and the fact that I’m a Leo sun, I have major fiery tendencies and wands is the suit I associated with all my theatrical dreams. Luckily, and I don’t know how I managed this, I didn’t pin all my hopes and dreams on that suit. I just got happy when I got readings with lots of wands. “I’m going to be a star!” (As though there’s such a thing as a playwright who is a “star!”) Being young, though, I tended to sum the suit up purely as our meant-to-dos. In essence, I looked at this suit as our raison d’être. Our purpose. Because that’s what I needed it to be, what I wanted it to be, and that’s what I assumed everyone else needed it to be. 
 
I found myself quite limited by that, as time went on, as my skill grew . . . it was like my understanding of the deck improved, but my understanding of wands remained arrested. And I’m not saying that this happens to everyone, but I do know as a person who works with adult learners that when we assign too much import to things they can become impossible to work through or understand. We somehow psyche ourselves out, preventing us from making progress. And it’s usually because we can’t let go of something—a perception, a bias, a cosmology—that has moved from facilitator to barrier. That does happen. Things that helped once can hurt, as anyone who (like me) has in the past experienced difficult with over-indulging in alcohol (hi, lockdown!). Over-identification with things makes people very difficult to move or train. Look at so-called American “identity” politics: men who think everyone is always obsessed with race and gender have such fragile concepts of their own masculinity, they can’t see that by getting so foaming-at-the-mouth angry about other people’s bodies (for example) that they are the ones actually obsessed with race and gender—and they’re suffering for no reason over shit that has nothing to do with them.
 
Not the most elegant metaphor, but you ideally get the point: the more intensely we feel something, the harder it is for us to see it clearly. In my teens and twenties, when I fell for someone I fell hard. I both saw none of their faults and became totally enthralled to the point of losing my identity, and desperately seeking their attention and approval. I was so profoundly insecure, so mooney, so dreamy, so romantic, that I would go to run and errand and find myself taking a route that took me past their houses so that I might “bump into” these various hims. It’s mortifying to think of, now; I hate that and revealing it ain’t much fun, either. But I was lonely. I say all the time I’m so thankful we didn’t have social media when I was that age—AOL instant messenger and later gay-dot-com chat rooms did enough damage to my psyche. But I can only imagine the kind of desperate shit I would have pulled on these apps back then. I shudder to think of it. Literally. 
 
Anyway, feeling too much of something can make it hard to see it clearly. And because of that I had a hard time really understanding this suit. But oddly, that experience I just described—feeling too much of something can make it hard to see it clearly—is a facet of this suit! And I only really just made that connection right now. But that’s a totally fiery tendency. Fire consumes. When we are at fire’s mercy, we may become consumed or consumptive (there’s a word with lots of layers). I had a tendency to become consumptive. And now that I think about it, my learning often takes this journey. I think about my reading habits. I will fully devour every fucking book on a topic that I’m suddenly interested in. I’ve done it with the arts, I’ve done it with tarot, I’ve done it with Hoodoo and Witchery, I’ve done it with the Thoth deck, I’ve done it with just about anything that strikes my fancy. And in these cases, these kinds of concentrated learning immersions, we can see the benefit of this kind of tendency. Becoming consumed by something healthy (a kind of intense hyperfocus, for my ND guys, guys, and nonbinary pals) is the same thing as the unhealthy tendency I had to, like, commit some mild compulsive . . . attention seeking. It’s just . . . good for you. Of course, too much of a good thing can make you cranky—we can get oversaturated, something I also have a tendency to do. But when it comes to learning, you just move on to something else. With people, that’s harder. 
 
Here, the Fool carries the ace to the nine, as we said. We could say, then, that they’re actually not starting from zero—they have a little experience (the ace) that they’re bringing on this heavy path (the nine of wands often shows us someone pretty bruised, and nines are “heavy” generally; they suggest a lot of something). If we want to bring that into our divinatory world, we might say to students that you’re never starting from square one, you’re never free of experience you can use, and when you think that way the path doesn’t seem as daunting. You’ll have more energy (nine wands) to carry you along. 
 
Which is true and quite lovely. 
 
We might say, too, that it is The Fools desire (ace) that sustains (nine) their journey. 
 
There’s lots of ways to interpret this and I think all of them are valid and true. But since I took you on that fucking sob story of my former life, it’s well for me to bring that into the puzzle, here, too. I misquote Yoav Ben Dov a lot and say, “nothing that happens in a reading is an accident.” That’s not really what he said, but it’s what I remember. He was saying, in essence, that everything that happens during a reading is part of the reading—from the time reader and client greet each other to the time the part, everything is part of the reading. The fact that these cards prompted/triggered me to share those stories is part of the reading. Sure, they were meant to illustrate aspects of The Fool that don’t usually get highlighted, but they were prompted by this trio, this spread, and the open question I ask at the start of every post: “What is lesson #?”
 
We may start on a path (the ace) knowing and trust and believing (fool) that it will take us where we want to go (nine) . . . and after taking that long (nine) road (fool), we start to wonder . . . is this really where I wanted to go? The closer we get to our goal (nine), the more we realize . . . it’s too hot (fire) for me here. There isn’t enough air, water, or earth for me here. What I felt I wanted (ace) turns out to be a burden (a typical image on the ten, but that is well set up by the typical nine). The closer I’m able to see what I wanted (that implied ten + the nine), the more I start to recognize that this ain’t it. And only a Fool keeps going somewhere they don’t want to be. 
 
A reminder I really needed today. I cannot tell you how often I feel like the choice I made to give up on theatre has made me feel like a quitter. Like I couldn’t hack it. And when you’re starting out, the “pros” are always like, “If you can do anything else, do it. This isn’t for you. This is a hard industry. Not everyone can do it.” And, really, that’s true. But it also feels like pretentious gatekeeping. And I realize now that, like . . . I couldn’t hack it. I mean, I can handle the writing and the reviews and the actors’ egos and all that . . . but I can’t handle the industry. Not even the corporate bullshit. I’ve dealt with that my entire adult life. I can’t deal with an industry that accepts cruelty, predatory behavior, bullying, fat-shaming, femme-shaming, unpaid internships, the Ivy League-centricity, the racism, all the things . . . an industry in which that’s not only the norm, but just the cost of doing business. Totally fine. Totally acceptable. That’s what I can’t hack. And, for all the shit that corporate america rightfully deserves, I have been treated with more humanity and kindness there than I have in some theatre spaces. 
 
I want it, but I want the ideal (ace) and not the reality (nine). And to keep hoping that reality will bend to my will . . . is foolish. 
 
That’s not really a lesson about divination — but it is a lesson in letting go. And sometimes we as readers need to do that. Sometimes that means taking a little break, sometimes it means recognize that we’re burned out and need a long break, sometimes it means recognizing that the reality of being a diviner isn’t what we hoped it would be and we need to rethink our relationship to it. 
 
My example is extreme. I don’t want you to think you’re going to have to give up tarot the way I gave up theatre. And who the fuck knows if I won’t cave in to my ego and some point and go back? What I mean, though, is more like the experience I had when I “gave up” on tarot years ago: What I really needed to do was go back to “square one” (the ace) and start again. 
 
Because, and this is I think to the key to this spread, the Fool lacks ego.  
 
Despite being surrounded by fiery cards, The Fool doesn’t give a fuck if they have to start again, because they never were that married to any idea. “OK,” they say. “That happened.” Then they go back to one. Not the zero, but one. Because, though it didn’t yield the longed-for results, it generated experience. The Fool can never go back to zero again. In may case, that meant asking myself, “What do I really want from tarot and divination?” The answer to that became Tarot on Earth. And so there’s an example of how restarting a journey already begin can actually yield amazing things! (And this is something I’ve learned in my writing life, too. Often I’ll start a draft thinking I know what it’s going to be, and about a third of the way through I’ll realize that I’m actually writing something else. I’ll throw out everything and start again, but those “lost” pages aren’t for naught—they taught me what I was trying to do.)
 
When I saw the Death card in the Wild Unknown Tarot, I realized that the card is about fertilizer. Everything we go through fertilizes everything we will become. Which reminds me how the astrologer Sue Thompkins (author of The Contemporary Astrologer’s Handbook) explains our sun sign as not so much who we are, but who we’re becoming. 
 
We could think of this three cards as saying something similar. Start again if you have to, or if you want to; what you’ve done so far wasn’t time wasted, it was lessons learned and experienced gained. 
 
That, incidentally, is a reminder I needed today, too. 
 
A read of one’s own
 Here’s a little spread to explore something you may benefit from starting over or “going back to one” as they say on movie sets. 

Position 1 - Something you’re working on that would benefit from a re-start. 

Position 2 - Why/how you’ll benefit

Position 3 - How to deal with the ego hit

Position 4 - Advice on how to restart

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