The Major Arcana and The Hero’s Journey: The Fool and The Hermit

And androgyne looks up at the morning sky and dances on the edge of a cliff. He/she could be either going up the mountain or coming down. The point is, He/she is going. The Fool is a card of beginnings, of endless possibilities, the card of the seeker.

And old man stands at the very top of a mountain holding a lantern up against the night and looks down. He has arrived. There is nowhere higher for him to go. The seeker has found what he is looking for.

And to make sure the reader doesn’t miss that these two cards are related, Coleman-Smith and Waite made them the only cards in the tarot deck that place their subjects high up in the mountains at the edge of a drop-off. (The Emperor has rugged cliffs behind him, but he’s not so high up, there’s no drop-off, and he’s seated.)

The Fool (0) and The Hermit (9) are the beginning and the end of the ten-digit sequence that is the base of our number system. Once we’ve gotten to The Hermit, the endpoint, we can continue into another cycle with The Fool, or we can up the ante by adding the number 1 to the 0 to make 10, the Wheel of Fortune. But we always do one or the other.

The take home lesson here is that The Fool is both the beginning and the end of this basic sequence, the Alpha (Aleph) and the Omega. The ending of every cycle is the beginning of the next. With every question answered comes more questions, with every goal achieved comes a new goal, with every death comes rebirth.

We may think we’re finished, but we’re not.