buffoon – Swimming in the Sea of Time

Let’s start with this – surely one of the most memorable of all tarot cards. I mean – Ouch! What man could ever forget that image? The Fool here is the classical Buffoon – the one the dogs chase and the kids throw stones at. In modern idiom, the one who gets his ass kicked – repeatedly and regularly.

A Buffoon, and a Vagrant. This what happened to vagrants in England until fairly recently: They are to be tied to the cart-tail and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies, then they are to swear on oath to go back to their birthplace or to serve where they have lived the last three years and to ‘put themselves to labour’. For the second arrest for vagabondage the whipping is to be repeated and half the ear sliced off; but for the third relapse the offender is to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal.”^[11]

That third one is my favourite. And notice the continuing presence of the bag/burden which represents Karma, the baggage we all bring into the world with us. Is it these poor fools’ Karma tp be a Buffoon/ a Vagabond in this life? Maybe. But we all bring a certain baggage from our past lives with us when we step out in all innocence into this world.

John Bunyan would, I believe, have called the burden that his pilgrim was lumbered with “Original Sin”, but it comes to the same thing. Here is William Blake’s illustration for “Pilgrim’s Progress”:

Or this. That is quite some load of bad karma!

I’ve been looking at some female Fools to see what artists have made of the notion of female folly. I didn’t find any female buffoons. Rightly not. That is a male prerogative. Mostly they seem to depict little more than youthful silliness – not far removed from the rather androgynous figure in the standard Waite-Smith card above.

But what I really want to get into is the significance of the number (or non-number) nought/zero. There are lots of ones, twos, threes, fours, etc, and on up to the nines, in the tarot pack. (Remember that all the numbers reduce to 1 – 9, so for instance the 13s (Death and the four Queens) all reduce to 4 (1+3=4). But there is only one “0” – The Fool. It is unique. And what does that mean?

The number zero means literally “nothing”, the absence of anything, the opposite of something. But can there be nothing without there being something?