The Fool card may also indicate the receiving of severance pay (Death, 1S, 5P). Sometimes it can indicate relinquishing or leaving behind all material possessions (Hermit) and continually moving on from one place to the next, having given up a fixed address (KnW).
Knowing they are at the beginning of their journey, with not much to lose, can prompt this all-in archetype to take a big uncalculated risk with a speculative project or investment (Strength). Whether it pays off or not depends on the surrounding or outcome cards.
Health and Well-being
At their best, the Fool represents youth or youthful energy and the vigour that comes from having an emotionally or physically lightened load. Hence this card is great if you are wanting to lose weight.
Due to the archetype’s wide-open boundaries, the Fool is an adept at mediation practices (Temperance) and can easily find great solace, freedom and liberation from painful or stressful health concerns.
However, their carefree, complacent attitude to health and well-being is often only sustainable in the earlier years of life, and can bring much trouble later on unless it is kept in check by the more health-conscious archetypes (Sun, Temperance, Star, High Priestess, Hierophant, Justice).
1 The Magician I
‘It is a fine game to play, the game of politics, and it is well worth waiting for a good hand before really plunging.’
SIR WINSTON CHURCHILL
Personification – Psychology
The Magician is the master initiator of all opportunity and possibility (Aces). Their mode of consciousness, being ultra-agile, flexible, fertile and growth-oriented, i.e. growing away from the darkness (unless this is a layout crossing card) and towards the ‘light’, allows their experience of life to be positively infinite or unlimited.
The etymological line of ‘magic’, which stems from magus, magi, imagery, imagination (Moon), reveals that the source of the Magician’s power is wholly mentalized. Their extraordinary mental skill (3P), particularly in mastering such internally opposing forces as a rampant and intensive ego desire (Devil), is what ensures their success in all endeavours.
Empowered by their deep intrinsic understanding of how the world’s systems work, the Magician skilfully implements this knowledge with the greatest possible, even magical, effect. Their judgement is even resistant to modern ‘scientifically’ objective conditioning. They don’t allow themselves to be defined, as does the modern psyche, by ‘me, myself, I’ as opposed to ‘it, that, you’. Where the modern psyche likes to ‘know’ where it begins and ends, the magical psyche understands that ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’ are a material illusion; that, regardless of our distinctly different material hosts or vehicles, every living organism shares the same animating life-force energy.
The fully enabled magical mode of consciousness is born of a deep and pervading connection to the surrounding world. Seeing everything as an extension of itself, or more precisely as an energetic metaphor of its thoughts, it assumes personal ownership and ultimate responsibility for all its life events and encounters.
When C. G. Jung shunned the modern cult of sense-perceptible science in his statement, ‘I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity [Fool, Pages] of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud,’ he gave us a sense of how and why the magical mentality tends to be misunderstood and misrepresented. Unfortunately, the all-pervasive subjectivity of this archetype is all too often falsely likened to the blinkered experience of a psychological projection, purely because rational and logical thinkers cannot ground it in their concept of ‘reality’. Yet the multi-dimensional magical mentality cannot be bound or limited by the confining presuppositions of third-dimensional ‘realism’.
Spirituality and Philosophy
The Magician’s clock-like hands, in their ‘as above so below’ position, point, literally and figuratively, to the heavenly eleventh hour, the hour of spiritual enlightenment, and the opposite fifth hour, of material Earth challenges. The gesture suggests a divinely timed ‘clockwork’ connection between these two polar positions: that great heavenly gifts come as a result of great earthly challenges, in an infinitely cyclical clock-like motion, pertaining to the cerebral cycles of spiritual development and even reincarnation.
The Magician controls the primitive, enlivening and vital life-force energy that gives birth to all sentient life, whereas the Emperor, who comes second in the tarot’s manifestation hierarchy, manages, directs and channels this energy into finite material and physical ambitions.
Having already learned and mastered their earthly lessons and transcended the drives, ambitions and desires of the ego (Emperor), the Magician works with an all-pervading eleventh-hour state of consciousness to carry out the seemingly impossible in terms of the material and physical world. By reconciling their base and selfish desires (Devil) with this purer, brighter, innocent and selflessly enlightened consciousness, they become a truly clear energy channel and can overcome any material and physical limitations or restrictions. The full clarity of their words, deeds and actions enables a powerful alchemical transformation to take place, leading to full self-realization (High Priestess), spiritual maturation (Hermit), ego transcendence (Temperance) and self-healing (Star). This highly refined, spiritual state of consciousness is the primary prerequisite for the magical skill and ability to physically work ‘reality’ to their advantage (3P).
This archetype also has the singular ability to bring forth shocking and powerful self-transformation. Any conjoining ‘agent’ cards lend fuel to their continually self-instigated process of growth, change and transformation, and by relinquishing the past fully and completely, as if it never happened, they are able to embrace their newly empowered identity wholly and completely (World).
In their full harnessing of the immeasurable potential of a completely freed will, the Magician personifies the most magical of our modern-day privilege empowerments. The intensified concentration of sunlight through a magnifying glass illustrates how their mastered mind accomplishes great things via its expansive, laser-like focus.
The Magician’s position as card number one is explained by the etymology of the word ‘sorcery’, which, coming from the Latin sor, sorstis or sortiarius, means ‘one who influences lot, fate and fortune (by returning to the spiritual source of life itself)’. In returning to the source, the Magician’s multi-dimensional mentality transcends the modern obsession with three-dimensional, sense-perceptible material fact. As an adept of supernatural skills and faculties (High Priestess, 3P), the Magician can enact any passionately desired outcome via their strong psycho-spiritual awareness.
When this card appears in a reading, it is a time to be ultra-careful what you wish for and guard against ungrounded wishful thinking (7C). Projecting negative, harmful or destructive ego intentions onto others in an attempt to control them (Devil) constitutes a truly self-defeating (5S) and self-destructive (10S) enactment of the Magician’s power and influence. Psychically sending negative, harmful or destructive thoughts another person’s way (Devil), even without acting on them, serves only to destabilize your own psycho-emotional health and happiness (Moon), which, paradoxically, then hands your power over to the very person you are seeking to disempower. Impure or negatively motivated desires (Devil) often come with a heavy hidden price attached.
When amongst friendly and constructive cards in a reading, this archetype indicates your actions, words and deeds are wholly aligned, and so magically supported by the higher will of the Divine, the great universal architect, God or the forces of creation (whatever you wish to name it).
Personal Life
The Magician