The Fool
The tarot trump with no number, or 0 in Waite's deck: a young traveller at the edge of a cliff. A. E. Waite's list of meanings starts with folly and extravagance.
Meaning
In the deck A. E. Waite designed with Pamela Colman Smith, a young man in fine clothes pauses at the brink of a precipice, a wallet hanging from a staff over his shoulder, his dog bounding beside him and the sun behind. Waite called him "the spirit in search of experience". Older cards showed a man walking unaware towards the edge while an animal attacked him from behind.
What does the Fool card mean?
Waite's meanings for the Fool are "folly, mania, extravagance, intoxication, delirium, frenzy"; reversed, "negligence, absence, distribution, carelessness, apathy, nullity, vanity". They are his compilation of what fortune-tellers read into the card, which he treated as a lesser matter than its symbolism.
Where the Fool belongs
The card has no settled place. Waite noted that in most arrangements it is "the cipher card, number nothing", and that Court de Gébelin put it at the head of the series as zero. Papus numbered it 21 and gave it the Hebrew letter Shin. In a nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum, Il Matto carries no number at all.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsThe MagicianThe first trump of the tarot, numbered I: a conjurer at a table with a wand raised. A. E. Waite read it as skill, diplomacy and will.
- The same shape in Angel numbers000 angel numberThree zeros, read by angel-number writers as a message about God and wholeness. Doreen Virtue’s 1999 list called 000 a reminder that “you are one with God” and a sign that a situation has come full circle.
See also
The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles, letters and numbers or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed September 27, 2026. How we research
Added .