Magical thinking

"Has the world ever been changed by anything
save by thought and its magic vehicle the Word?"
~ Thomas Mann

 

 

 

 

The Fool is numbered 0; he is nothing, a blank slate, a tabula rasa, ignorant even of his own ignorance. The Magician, second of the Major Arcana, and numbered 1, is the Fool within the Abyss, knowing himself and his ignorance and the transformative power of that ignorance. The Magician is the Fool enabled, energized, created; he is the Trickster God made manifest.

 

Where the Fool represents the seeker after wisdom, the Magician represents the awareness of things unseen. He is not the apotheosis of wisdom - that comes later - but he is on the path, because he is no longer seeking. What we are seeking, we cannot have found, or else we would not be seeking it. The Magician understands that it is more efficient to stop looking and instead focus on seeing. In Rider-Waite, the Magician is crowned with infinity, and girdled with Ourobouros: all things begin and end in this moment of awareness, this consciousness, this satori. The staff of the Fool has transformed into the wand of the Magician; the wand is raised to the heavens, while his other hand points to the earth.

 

The Magician is the bridge between the subjectively real and the transcendentally surreal; he is the Gateless Gate. He is the potential in Man, the aptitude, the capacity. Self-aware, self-possessed, self-sufficient, he is the catalyst: unchanging himself, he changes all. This is the mystery beyond reason. This is the maker and unmaker of mountains and rivers. This is the beguiler of the senses, the deceiver of the mind, the keyholder to the doors of perception. Should we trust him? That doubt is the manifestation of the Unknown; fear of the Abyss keeps us from him, but acceptance of the Abyss - Foolishness - encourages us to take the leap of faith. We take nothing in there with us; we are only ourselves, but fortunately ourselves are more than our selves, since we are parasimplices. The Magician knows this, knows us, intimately; the Magician is us, any of us, when we accept all of what we are - fearlessly, foolishly, fully.

 

The Magician represents, above all, the mystical process by which the unknowable objective is transcended to become subjectively real. This most crucial mystery is the beginning of all magic: it is the creatio ex nihilo, the divine spark without which the world remains meaningless and void.

Fooling about

"A fool thinks himself to be wise,
but a wise man knows himself to be a fool."

~ William Shakespeare

 

 

 

 

The Fool is the first of the Major Arcana - the twenty-two trump cards of the Tarot deck - that we will consider: fittingly, because it is the first, and so, of course, numbered... zero. The twenty-two cards represent what some call "the Fool's journey," which can be represented as the evolution from folly to wisdom (although in the truer transcendental sense, it's the evolution from seeing the folly in the Fool to seeing the wisdom in the Fool).

 

There are a number of illustrations used to depict the Fool; perhaps the most famous sequence is the Rider-Waite deck which dates back to the early 20th century. It shows a medieval "fool," a court-jester-type, strolling unconcerned, head back, a staff slung over his shoulder with his meager possessions in a bag on the end, a dog trotting along by his side. He carries an innocent white rose. He is walking blindly towards the lip of a precipice.

 

Earlier versions from the Italian Trionfi (which was a popular card game; Tarot cards are still used for playing as well as divination) depict a beggar or a wild man, in some cases chased by the dog that accompanies him in Rider-Waite. In some French versions, the Fool becomes a more stylized analogue to the traditional Joker of conventional playing cards.

 

Symbolically, the Fool represents a rich mythological tradition of tricksters, from Kokopelli to Anansi to Loki to Shaitan to Rumpelstiltskin. Like Lucifer - the light-bearer - the Fool is about to plunge into the darkness of the Abyss, which is only implicated in Rider-Waite but represents the Unknown, the darkness of ignorance. Reason recoils from ignorance as the alert man shies away from the abyss; but the Fool is without fear. He accepts the Abyss without needing to interrogate it. He plunges into the Unknown neither willingly nor unwillingly; he plunges into it because it is before him, and for no other reason.

 

Just as zero produces all numbers - creatio ex nihilo - so the Fool produces all the other possibilities through his interaction with the Void. The Fool seeks wisdom, but he does not seek it consciously: he seeks wisdom because he is a Fool. In emptying his mind, he enters the void; in entering the void, he loses material things [his pack], beauty [the rose], and the world [the dog], and finds what the void has for him.

 

Nietzsche said: when you stare into the Abyss, the Abyss stares back.

 

The Fool is mankind subjected to that pitiless reflected stare; Mankind at his core, Mankind compelled by his basest instincts toward acquisition, toward beauty, toward companionship, and toward transcendence. He is both a beginning and an end; a reliquary for wisdom and a dispenser of wisdom; an origin and a goal. There's a reason his number is zero, and there's a reason that zero is represented by a circle. But we'll get around to that.



Creatio ex nihilo

“Abstraction is everybody’s zero but nobody’s nought.”
~ Robert Smithson

 

Zero is believed to have been invented as a number like other numbers by the Indians, somewhere between the fifth and ninth centuries. The idea of ‘null space’ or the ‘void’ was known and used by earlier cultures, but the Indians were the first to produce a symbol that could be utilized in mathematical calculations to represent the void. When we consider numbers today, it is appropriate for us to begin with zero as the unique numerical symbol for nothingness – indeed, when we derive mathematical operations from set theory this is exactly how we do start, with zero as the symbol for the empty set.

If the first number is zero, denoting nothingness, then the second number – one – denotes identity. In set-theoretic terms, it is the set which can have only one possible element (the set of the empty set, in fact). This set-theoretic interrelation between nothingness and oneness is mirrored in the symbolism of the taijitu, and the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo – something out of nothing.

The existence of zero and of one as numbers generates the concept of category; a unitary entity having more than one component subentities. The simplest structure of category is duality – the category that has exactly two elements, as ‘one and zero.’ The numerical symbol for duality is two.

Three elaborates this concept of category further into the more general plurality. Where twoness denotes a paradigm of either/or, a binary system within which ‘one’ may acceptably and completely be defined as ‘not-zero,’ threeness opens a doorway – a Gateless Gate, indeed – onto countable infinities of paradigm in which each element is uniquely itself and cannot be defined in terms of any other element (although it can be defined in terms of all other elements, with reference to the established concepts of nothingness, identity, and duality).

Four, being both the sum and the product and the power of two twos, embodies divisibility. This is a further elaboration upon plurality – with the addition of fourness, we now find that there exist some plural entities which are both entities in themselves and unions of lesser entities. We can, of course, derive numbers along the real number line by defining mathematical operators that utilize this principle more generally – indeed, we could do that when we had only zeros and ones to play with – but fourness is the philosophical symbol that uniquely develops this concept.

These, then, are the numbers which symbolize the essential concepts of being: nothingness, identity, duality, plurality, and divisibility. You probably already realized this, but we have just derived another expression for the Law of Fives.