For Beginners. This deck is based on Greek mythology. I just got it and I love it!! Very nice art work and a nice book.

The Fool

The card portrays a wild youth , the first of the Major arcana, dressed in ragged animal skins of different colours, dancing in ecstatic abandonment at the edge of a precipice. He wears a wreath of vine leaves in his chestnut hair, and bears little horns, like those of a goat, on his brow. His eyes are raised to the dawn breaking in the distance, where the sun can just be seen above the horizon. Around him likes a formidable barren landscape of brown and grey rocks. To his left, hidden in the shadows of the receding night, is the mouth of a cave from which he has emerged. Above it, on a bare branch, perches an eagle.

The eagle is the bird of Zeus, kind of the gods, who watches over the Fool as he prepares to plunge into the unknown. The cave from which the Fool emerges is the past, the dark and undifferentiated mass from which the beginning of a true sense of individuality is about to take form. The goat's horns on the Fool's brow suggest, like the animal skins he wears, that he is like a young animal, driven by instinct, not yet conscious or possessed of understanding.

From June:

In this card the Fool is Dionysos the Twice-Born god.. The story is that he is the son of Zeus and a mortal woman Semele. Her is furious and tricks Semele into asking Zeus to show his true self. She is burnt up in a lightening strike. Zeus saves Dionysos and Hermes sews him up in Zeus' thigh. So he is born. Hera sends the Titans after him to tear him up. Zeus rescues the heart and gives it to Persephone in a potion of pomegranate seeds. Thus he is born again.

The book again:

On an inner level, Dionysos, the Fool, is an image of the mysterious impulse within us to leap into the unknown. The conservative, cautious, realistic side of us watches with horror this wild, youthful spirit who, trusting in heaven, is prepared to walk over the cliff's edge without a moment's hesitation. The madness of Dionysos seems mad only to that part of us which is bound to the world of form, facts and logical order. But in a more profound sense it is not madness, for it is the impulse toward change which comes upon us 'out of the blue', which has no rational basis and no preplanned program of action. ...

On a divinatory level, Dionysos, the Fool, augurs the advent of a new chapter of life when he appears in a spread. A risk of some kind is required, a willingness to jump out into the unknown. The Fool is ambiguous just as Dionysos is, for we cannot know whether we will enter the Fool's perception of the divine or end up merely looking foolish. In this way, amidst ambiguity and excitement and fear, begins the great journey of life portrayed by the Major Arcana of the Tarot.

June

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