← Encyclopedia of Tarot · lesson 110/121
The Fool's Journey
The Fool's Journey is a way of reading the twenty-two Major Arcana as a single story. The Fool, numbered zero, sets out on a road; every card after him is someone he meets or something that happens to him, from The Magician at the start to The World at the end, where the journey is complete. Almost every modern beginner's book teaches some version of it, and it is one of the best ways to learn the Majors: each card makes more sense because of the cards on either side of it.
The story in brief
Versions differ in detail, but the outline is broadly shared:
- Setting out. The Fool steps off with a small bag and a dog at his heels, open to whatever comes.
- Being given the tools. The Magician and The High Priestess show what he has to work with: the will to act and the inner knowing that tells him what is worth doing.
- Meeting the world. The Empress and The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers and The Chariot: nature, order, tradition, the first real choice and a first success.
- Testing. Strength, The Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, Justice: patience, solitude, luck and consequences.
- Going under. The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, then The Devil and The Tower: surrender, endings, and the things that have a hold on him breaking open.
- Coming home. The Star, The Moon and The Sun, then Judgement and The World: hope, confusion, clarity, a calling and arrival.
Three rows of seven
A popular way to see the shape, used by Rachel Pollack among others, is to set the Fool apart — he is the one travelling — and lay the other twenty-one Majors in three rows of seven. The first row, I to VII, is about the outer world: what one is born with, those who raise and teach, love, and standing on one's own feet. The second, VIII to XIV, turns inward, to who one is when the world's answers are no longer enough. The third, XV to XXI, is the hardest and most hopeful: facing what really holds one, and the release that comes after.
How old is it?
The idea of an ordered, meaningful series is old; the story of a single traveller is modern. The trumps began as the picture cards of a fifteenth-century Italian card game, drawn from the triumphal processions of Renaissance cities, where each allegorical figure outranked the last. In the 1950s Gertrude Moakley argued that their order echoes Petrarch's Triumphs, in which Love is overcome by Chastity, Chastity by Death, and so on up to Eternity, and the historian Robert Place has argued for a deliberate spiritual allegory in the sequence. Not everyone agrees, and early decks were not all numbered or ordered the same way.
In the card game, the Fool was not really a trump at all, but a special card — later called the Excuse — that let a player off following suit. The idea of the Fool as Everyman walking through every card belongs to the twentieth century, when tarot books began to borrow from psychology and from writers on myth, above all Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), with its pattern of departure, trials, descent and return. The phrase "the Fool's Journey" itself was spread by popular beginner's books and courses from the later twentieth century on.
There is also more than one order. Waite and the Golden Dawn swapped Strength and Justice, making Strength VIII and Justice XI, while the Tarot de Marseille keeps Justice VIII and Strength XI. The story changes slightly with the order, and readers simply use the one their deck follows.
How it helps in a reading
In a real reading the Majors do not come out in order, and one card is not a chapter of anyone's life. The journey's value is that it gives a card its tone. The Chariot closes the first row: drive and early success, but success in the world that the next row will test. The Star comes straight after The Tower: hope, but the hope of someone who has just been through something. Knowing where a card sits in the story often says more than any keyword, and a reader who forgets a Major's meaning can ask where it falls on the road and what the traveller is learning there.