Episode 77: What a Fool Believes: On the Unnumbered Card in the Tarot

[Music] [Music] Rabbi Ramesh Shapiro was 16 years old when his mother asked him very seriously if he was the Messiah. He lied and told her no. Since then Rami has studied Zen Buddhism under a Japanese master, written nearly 40 books, and built a global spiritual community as what you might call a Zen Rabbi. He believes that God is everyone and everything that religions are languages, that no language is true or false. But the more of them you speak, the closer you get to whatever the truth actually is. Consequently, Rami has spent his life learning to speak Judaism, Zen, Hinduism, Sufism, and Christianity. Our conversation with Rabbi Rami went everywhere. He told us why ten years of meditation didn't work because it can't. He explained how narratives become addictions, and how he uses poorim cookies over eaters anonymous, and chanting a passage from Deuteronomy to wrestle with the ego. We talked about the Gospel of Thomas and why it was left out of the Christian Bible because of course we did. But the question we kept circling back to is this. If you already have everything you're looking for, why can't you stop looking? All of this and a whole lot more this week on Gods, Ghosts, and UFOs, where we talk about all the things they said weren't real. Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and JF Martel. For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to WeirdStudies.com. Hi, welcome to Weird Studies. I'm Phil Ford. I'm sitting outside in my backyard recording this introduction because my wife is teaching cello inside the house, and I figured you wouldn't mind the sound of birds chirping in the background. Anyway, from the very beginning, JF and I have been mentioning the tarot, en route to discussing other things. This week, we finally start talking about the tarot itself. Now, that's such a vast topic. It seems absurd to tackle it all at once. So this episode is about only the first card of the tarot, the fool. Though actually it's not exactly the first card. In the earliest version, still widely used, the fool is unnumbered, a fact whose significance we spend a lot of time unpacking in the conversation that follows. We also talk about holy fools, fools in love, fools in literature, and what a fool believes the yacht rock hit by the dupy brothers. But behind it all is the enigmatic figure we see in the tarot, striding off on his unknown adventure with a bindle on his shoulder, dressed in motley, and with an animal nipping at his heels. Exactly what kind of animal it is, varies according to which deck we're talking about. There are thousands of variants. Variants of what, you may well ask. What is the tarot anyway? It's a deck of cards that emerged from obscure origins in the European Middle Ages. The earliest decks date from the 15th century, though some version of the cards were doubtless in use earlier. How much earlier no one has yet been able to say. The cards were, and are, used for games, just like the modern 52 card deck, which developed out of the tarot. Like modern playing cards, the tarot has four suits, discs, staves, cups, and swords numbered from ace to ten, along with court cards, kings, queens, etc. There are differences I'm glossing over here, but the main difference between modern playing cards and the tarot is the set of 22 cards called the trumps, or, if we're being occult here, the major arcana. Arcana means mysteries, and that is exactly what these cards are. They have names like the hanged man, the tower, justice, the wheel of fortune, the empress, and the devil. They include strange pictures of dogs, being at the moon, of death harvesting a field of corpses, of an angel calling the dead dejudgment, of lovers enacting some ambiguous scene of rivalry. It's not surprising that whoever contrived the modern playing card deck got rid of them. They are radioactive with dreams, and you don't need fevered surrealism to play old maid. Skeptics like to point out that there's no evidence people used the tarot for divination until the 18th century, but to me it is inconceivable that such images were only ever used to pass the time in idle amusements. To look at those cards is to peer into fathomless depths. Colin Wilson wrote about the tarot in his book The Occult, which we discussed in episode 63, and Wilson spends a fair bit of time considering various explanations of the hanged man, which shows a fellow with an oddly serene expression hanging upside down by one foot. After turning over one speculative theory after another and coming to no definite conclusions, Wilson writes, quote, "I dwell upon this problem because such speculation is the best possible introduction to the tarot pack. It so obviously means something. Whoever created it, or constructed it, meant something quite definite by its symbols. And perhaps one day a historian may discover that some early tribe of gypsies originated in a country where the local duke punished malfactors by hanging them upside down by one foot. But at the moment the mystery remains impenetrable, and one can only stare in bafflement at the cards and try to let the intuition work upon them." Excellent advice, which J.F. and I try to follow in this episode. We mention lots of books and what not as we follow the fool on his mysterious errand, as is our want. But at the end the fool remains the fool, still walking, still mysterious. There is no explaining these cards, much less explaining them away. You can only play with them. I hope you enjoy our game. I should mention our Patreon, but I find that I've been going on for rather a while, and perhaps you're impatient to hear the conversation I've been setting up for the past few minutes. Fair enough. You know what Patreon is, and all you really need to know is that you can support weird studies by going to patreon.com/weirdstudies, and signing up to one of our free tiers. You'll find scads of writing and bonus audio that our listeners are kind enough to say they enjoy. You don't have to join up, but it'd be cool if you did. OK, on with the show. [Music] So I have a gambit, an opening gambit, the fool's gambit. I'm going to tell you about a dream that I had. A couple of weeks ago, right around the time that I suggested that we do a show on this topic, the fool, the unnumbered card of the major arcana of the tarot. And I had a dream that it was kind of weird because I was the point of view character, like the person whose eyes I was looking out of in this dream was a kind of magician, like stage magician. But the acme of a stage magician, like somebody whose leisure demand is so perfect and so accomplished that it is indistinguishable from real occult magic. And in my dream, I'm that guy, and I'm just the slickest motherfucker. You know, like I have this power and this confident ease that I know that I can do anything or say anything that I need to and the particular moment in order to make happen what I want to have happen. And what's weird is that that's not who I actually am who I actually am, Phil Ford or the stand in night side version of Phil Ford is actually the person I'm talking to. Okay. And that guy is sort of a jackass. Like I don't remember the first part of the dream, but that guy, meaning me, has done something presumptuous and stupid. And the magician, like I said, I'm, it's as if I'm playing a video game and I'm playing that character, like these point of view character. The one thing I remember from this dream is that me, the magician, telling off the version of me that just fucked something up, saying with emphasis on every word, don't put words in my mouth. And when I say mouth, I reach out and pull out of this guy's mouth, a playing card. And from my subjective point of view is magician, like I'm doing something that is like a traditional bit of stage magic where you like pull a ping pong ball out of someone's ear because you're You have it up your sleeve or something. Except, you know, I'm the point of view character, and from my point of view, I just manifested that card. So it's sort of stage magic, sort of impossible magic, right? And I turn the card over and it's the Joker, which is of course the playing card equivalent of the fool, an unnumbered card that stands outside of the numerical order and the otherwise organized structure of the card deck. And that's the dream. And so I wanted to throw that to you, interpret that dream for me. Well, you were the magician. So you were the first card. You were playing the card of the first card. Card number one of the tarot, or column one, the magician, or in the Marseille deck, the battler, which means like a fairground conjurer. Yeah, the battler is the magician, the maize, the fool. And Crowley makes an interesting connection between the two by saying that the fool is the prepubescent male figure. And then of course, he becomes-- this is just one of the many permutations-- but he becomes the magician when he hits puberty. And of course, that's what the stick represents, right? There's a phallic symbol or phallus. And so you were the alpha magician telling the fool. And this is-- I interpret the trick. Were you surprised by the Joker? Were you surprised to pull that card out? It was just sort of like, this is fucking awesome. It was like a feeling of delight at being able to do this. Were you showing him the fool? Or were you looking at the fool? Was it-- I was looking at it, but also showing him and some shadowy observers. Not quite real, but they were present. Did you see the face of the card before you showed it to him in the audience? Put it this way. I think what you're trying to ask is did I intend to pull out the Joker? Was that something that I did intentionally? And no, it was a total surprise and yet had the feeling of absolute rightness. Which as I've argued in the diviner's time piece is almost the cognitive signature of magic, that blend of totally surprising and absolutely fated. It's interesting, because I can't help but interpret the other you, the you that was basically the volunteer that you pulled out of the crowd to bring on to the stage and do this trick. I can't help but see him as the fool in this story. So picturing the magician telling the fool, don't put words in my mouth. And that's where I'm having trouble digging any further. I think we should circle back to it. I think that by the end of this conversation, your dream will make perfect sense. OK, fair enough. So that's how I'll answer the gambit. Excellent. I wanted to start with a quote from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, which you may have seen when you were reading the fool chapter in meditations on the tarot, a journey into Christian hermedicism, which is a masterpiece of Christian hermedicism. It's such a crazy book. But anyways, he has an epigraph of the beginning of his fool chapter. And he places the fool interestingly between the 20th and 22nd card. So he turns it into card number 21, even though it's unnumbered. He puts it between judgment and the world. But his reasons for doing that are very interesting. And he maintains that the fool is necessarily unnumbered, a kind of zero, but a zero that's not just a zero, of course. But anyways, he has an epigraph of the beginning, quote, from Saint Paul, "Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise for the wisdom of this world as folly before God." It's easy for us, for we modern people, to think, yep, everyone reading Saint Paul's letter back then was pretty foolish in terms of their understanding of cosmology and biology and politics. But you have to imagine this line hovering above all of history so that it's equally valid today. So that Saint Paul, if he lived today, would say to us, if you think you are wise in this age, you must become a fool so you can become wise for the wisdom of this world as folly before God. In other words, in gaining true wisdom, according to Saint Paul, one necessarily will appear as a fool to the people of the world. That there is a connection between madness and wisdom, because true wisdom always manifests in any historical epoch without exception, always manifests as madness. That, to me, speaks to the meaning of this card and the reason why it's unnumbered. It doesn't have a place in the series because the fool almost kind of hovers above the entire series. And in fact, some people have interpreted the fool in the tarot as the protagonist that undergoes the journey from one arcane to the other and culminating finally in the world. So that the fool is kind of the character who's going to go on this tarot journey, this self to whom all the events of the ensuing cards happens. Correct. And so you could almost imagine telling a story, the fool goes wandering. The first person he meets is a magician. And the magician says, don't put words in my mouth. For some reason, we have yet to ascertain. And then moves on to the second, the high priestess, and so on and so forth. And each time presumably learns something, and then finally, the world is the completion of the journey. And the journey from the fool to the world, if you're thinking of zero as happening before everything, and the world is happening at the end of this process, then you see the transformation of the one card into the other as a kind of image of enlightenment or spiritual progress, spiritual awakening. And that is one of the fundamental meanings that is attached to this card-- Right. --that it's a card simultaneously of foolishness, of true foolishness, that you can associate this card with things that in common place existence, we think of as foolish. But you can also think of this as a card of the highest initiatory wisdom. Right. In his book, "Meditations on the Terror of the Anonymous Author of the Book," because he remains anonymous to the end. It's one of those strange texts, right? "Meditations on the Terror." It is such a rich, crazy-- You wonder who-- I mean, I just picked it up for the first time in preparation for this episode, and it completely blew me away. How rich it is, how profound it is. Yeah, the breadth of knowledge and wisdom involved is astounding to say the least. But in his chapter on the fool, he spends most of the chapter-- at least a second half of the chapter-- explaining how the fool is both-- Well, I can actually read a bit. Sorry, short. He says, "The Arcanum of the Fool has a double meaning. Indeed, it can be understood in two different ways as a model and as a warning at the same time." So you were just saying that the fool appears as both the absolute beginner, the actual foolish character who doesn't know his ass from his elbow. And also, the figure of the final state of awakening or of full wisdom. He goes on, "For on the one hand, the card teaches the freedom of transcendental consciousness elevated above the things of this world. And on the other hand, it clearly presents a very impressive warning of the peril that this elevation comprises, lack of concern, inadequacy, irresponsibility, and ridicule in a word madness." Again, the word madness. And Crowley, in his writings on the fool, he insists on this thing about madness. That the savior always appears first and foremost as a madman or as a mad person. But then he always qualifies it divine madness. And of course, that's a-- oh, I guess an oblique reference to Plato's dialogue, "The Fadres," in which Socrates distinguishes normal insanity, let's say, from divine madness, which is the madness of the gods, a kind of foolish wisdom or a wise madness. And of course, the fool represents that dialectic and can function in a tarot draw, either as an indication of warning about how foolish you're being or as an kind of exhortation or an invitation to engage in some process in order to gain true wisdom. And the same card might mean both or one or the other. And the fact that it's a number, it is also interesting, because we tend to put the fool at the beginning, because it's the zero card, right? But of course-- And we're accustomed to putting the zero at the beginning of a sequence-- Even though-- 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, et cetera. And yet, zero does not belong before one. It doesn't belong anywhere among numbers. We could easily have developed a convention where we would count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 0, 6, 7, 8. Now, we could have put the zero anywhere. It's arbitrary that we put it at the beginning. It just makes sense because we kind of remove it from the sequence altogether by putting it at the beginning on a phone. It's at the end on a traditional telephone. And the fool is the has that character of kind of an absolute, indesoluble, irreconcilable ambiguity and paradox that it animates and gives life to the kind of the whole tarot sequence. The zero seems to imply or one thing it seems to imply is that the fool is in some ways, perhaps he's the person or the self to whom all of the states and conditions represented in all the ensuing arcana to whom those things happen. But then at the same time, you could also say, yeah, but he's a fundamentally different order of being from those things. He stands, he also stands entirely apart from them, not only apart from those things, but apart from everything that the fool is a kind of like a cosmic singularity. That's where we ended up in the Sunrop episode where we talked about the Joker as the card that transcends the deck, right? It is an ascense, the figure of transcendence. There are ways in which you could argue the magician represents transcendence or the world represents transcendence, judgment, perhaps, but there's something about the fool where it's like I was saying, he kind of just hovers over the whole series or underneath it, which makes them fundamentally different. Now, it's interesting as there are arguments, like the argument that the anonymous author of meditations on the tarot, the argument he makes is, I mean, I think this is a sort of a weak argument, but I've heard it before, that if you take the fool out of the numbered series of major arcana, then you only have 21 arcana. And it is a long, established convention in hermatism for there to be 22 cards such that you can associate each of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet, apparently. You can associate a letter to each card, and you can also associate a card for each of the 22 pathways on the tree of life, the Kabbalists tree of life. And while I kind of love that aspect of the hermetic tarot where the tarot becomes almost like a kind of calculator of correspondences between different esoteric systems, and thereby becomes very powerful as a means of generating divinatory insight, at the same time, it also sounds a little bit like you're trying to make the fool fit into an ordered schema that you have your own reasons for perpetuating. But the fool is precisely that which does not fall into any ordered schema, which is a point in fact that the anonymous author of meditations on the tarot makes, that he's like Till Eugenschpiegel, a figure of Dutch folklore, a trickster figure who sets about upending all forms of structure, a kind of carnivalesque figure, a figure of overturning of established orders. And then from that point of view, the zero of the fool, or the unnumbered, you got to realize actually, before I even say that the fool has a zero, in the Marseidek, it doesn't have a number at all. There's a bed at the top where the number should go, but there isn't a number. And that's different from like, for example, Crowley's deck or the right or right deck, which actually give a zero. Right. And that's a key distinction because the oldest tarot decks we have don't use Arabic mumerals at all. They use Roman numerals in which zero doesn't exist. So that's a really important point. But I mean Crowley also made the argument that the 22 major arcana of the tarot correspond to the 22 paths of the tree of life. He just associates the fool card, not with Shin, which is the letter that the author of meditations on the tarot chooses for the fool, but with Alef, the first letter. And he says that as a symbol of Alef, the fool is, its number is zero, he says. It represents therefore the negative above the tree of life, the source of all things. It is the Kabbalistic zero. It is the equation of the universe, the initial and final balance of the opposites, air in this card, therefore quintessentially means a vacuum. Now here in Crowley's system, that's where I start to get uncomfortable, because the fool seems really integral to the structure. Whereas the almost arbitrary reasons for which the author of meditations of the tarot chooses Shin, which is the letter of love to represent the fool, I think speaks to his mercurial nature better. I'm not saying the ones right and ones wrong. I'm just saying that it's almost like you could choose any place in the deck for it, or none at all. And it doesn't make a difference. You're always making the same. Yeah, maybe unless you insist that it's the zero card, maybe that's the only case where I would say, well, but zero is not a number. So what does it mean to be the zero card? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. There's I think also a particular reason why Crowley likes the idea of this card being zero. And it's not just that then you have 22 arcana that you can then map onto the 22 pathways and 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. It's also because one of his fundamental formulas in some way the most profound is the formula zero equals two. And this is a very difficult doctrine to put into words. He tried repeatedly and in magic without tears, which was originally a series of letters to students where he is explaining his magical theorems in the most concrete and down to earth possible way. He's still trying and he still sort of like can't quite do it. You know, he he's still trying and still to some extent not succeeding because it's something that just can't quite be noodled out. But suffice it to say for Crowley, fundamental mystery of existence that the fool personifies is how do you get something from nothing? How do you jump from zero to one? And this is actually something we were talking about in the 2001 episode. We're talking about what it is that the monolith gives the apes. What kind of evolution we're talking about? You know, what that monolith allows the ape to do is to imagine a world where tapers fall because they've been struck with a weapon. See, he's imagining something that isn't there. And before he encountered the model, if he couldn't imagine what wasn't right there in front of him. And so we were talking about how like the difference between the one condition and the other is like the difference between zero and one. A million and infinity times zero is still zero. So how do you get from zero to one? How do you go for that matter? Because you could go, how do you get from zero to three billion? It doesn't make a difference. The difference between zero and three billion is the same difference is between zero and one. Right? You're going from nothing to something. And so this is bringing back a motif of jumps of level, of impossible leaps across voids, which occupied us for much of the Bergsson episode last time, where we're talking about Bergsson's idea of intuition as more than simply the sum of all the possible snapshots or perspectives or views upon an object that to move from analysis, which is the accumulation of views and perspectives and symbols that approximate a real thing, you can multiply those perspectives almost infinitely and still not arrive at the thing itself. What is required of the metaphysician is a jump across like a short hop across an infinitely wide void between all of those approximations and the thing itself between zero and one. Right. And for Crowley, the figure of the fool is a figure of that impossible movement across the void. Right. And in the writer Wait Deck, the fool is helpfully portrayed as walking towards a precipice. And the idea is that the fool will just keep walking over that will not fall. Right. Of course, that's if the fool is properly calibrated as the good fool, not the fool that ends up falling down the cliff because he was in look where he's going. Again, and on that in that writer Wake card, there is the intimation of leaping of a causal jumps of quantum leaps. And just to reemphasize again, that scene from 2001, you have a hominid who is imagining a world in which weapons exist. This is a world that does not exist for it at all. So there is a plain causal sequence that will lead to the world that the hominid is currently in and to the world where they have weapons. They will choose bones, they will train each other, practice or whatever and then use the bones. And then of course, then there'll be nothing miraculous about it. The miracle happens in the hominid's ability to without even having to think through the causal sequence that will lead to the weapon, just to imagine the result. And then of course, the causal sequence required to get there will reveal itself. It's the leap from an is to an ought that's so strange. And the fool I agree, I think, and Crowley, it's very clear that the fool is a representative. of this almost, he's almost a kind of a stranger figure that comes from outside with the new, capital NU, and makes something new possible. He compares the fool to the early kings of like ancient, ancient kingdoms where patrilineal kingship wasn't around yet, kings had to become kings by conquest. The royal blood was passed through the daughter, and the king had to fight his way and be elected as king. I mean, some of the early Norse kingdoms functioned this way, others as well. So the king was always a stranger from the outside, someone who didn't know the ways of this place. He had to come in, he had to break in, and so it crully describes this king as the fool. And of course, in many Arthurian legends, if you have the fool that becomes the king, the outsider that becomes the ultimate insider that sits atop the pyramid, you have Arthur, that no one thought would become king, he's the one the public scallop are out, or you'll have Parcifal who starts off a total fool and ends up at the end. The Redeemer of the community was quite. Well, I'm talking about. Yeah, I'm talking about Richard Wagner's. Yeah, there are many versions of Parcifal. Parcifal, but yes. But regardless of the version, he's always a sort of salvific figure. Salvific figure that first appears as a fool. In some legends, I think he was raised in the woods, right? Yes. His mother didn't want him to be a knight. So there's a cool passage here in Crowley's book of Thoth. In his book of Thoth, where he describes the symbol of the great fool. He says, "The world is always looking for a savior, and the doctrine in question, the doctrine of the great fool, is philosophically more than a doctrine. It is a plain fact. Salvation, whatever salvation may mean, is not to be obtained on any reasonable terms. Reason is an impasse. Reason is damnation. Only madness, divine madness offers an issue. The law of the Lord Chancellor will not serve. The law giver may be an epileptic camel driver like Muhammad, Megalomaniaque provincial upstart like Napoleon, or even an exile, three parts learned, one part crazy, an addict weller and so-ho like Karl Marx. There's only one thing in common among such persons. They are all mad that is inspired. Nearly all primitive people possess this tradition, at least in a diluted form. They respect the wandering lunatic, for it may be that he is the messenger of the most high." Quote, "This queer stranger let us entreat him kindly. It may be that we entertain an angel unawares." This idea of the man and motley, the guy who dresses with all the colors, who doesn't wear the livery of this or that station. It's just he doesn't fit anywhere in the social order. Coming in from the outside is always the one who will bring the new, who will bring the bone. [Music] [Music] That zero equals two formula is kind of a way of in quasi-mathematical terms, creating an image or like an idea of manifestation, two being a kind of figure for what the Buddhists call the 10,000 things, all the things of the dusty world, manifestation, stuff, the distinctions that we make between different things in our ordinary consciousness and our ordinary practical life. And there is a common idea in especially kind of more new age-tinge, mysticism, although it extends back a long ways well before anything we call the new age. Where you think of two as something that emerges from one, that there's a kind of a wholeness, oneness, the all is one, you know, for example, the absolutist monism of someone like Hagel, is an idea of a unity from which all multiplicity is apparently derived or perhaps fictively derived. But the point that Crowley wants to make, and in this respect, I quite agree with him, is that you can't stop at one. There's also zero. And zero is an important number. This is where it gets a little bit tricky to put in the words. Actually, there's a passage from one of Lionel's Stel's books written under the name Ramsey Dukes, which I'm going to just try and find. I'm going to pull it off myself. This is a book called Words Made Flash, which is a very early thinking through of what's come to be known as the simulation theory. Very interesting book, unjustly neglected. I sometimes wonder if the people who are famous for having supposedly invented the simulation theory might have found a dog-eared copy in a Soho-used bookstore and quietly lifted some of his ideas. Or maybe it's just a case of convergent evolution, who knows. And any of it at first, didn't they? Oh, did they? Well, I wouldn't be surprised. He says, "I begin with a philosophical exploration. I'm not going to try and explain the larger context for this. I begin with a philosophical exploration. The idea of simple elements having potential for creating complexity, you know, manifestation unfolding from some more unified and simple substrate. An undifferentiated space is a sort of zero in its own terms. It is tempting to argue that it is not a zero but rather a unity for it is surely one space. But we can, in fact, only recognize that oneness by stepping outside or mentally separating ourselves from that nothingness and looking back at it. As soon as the first difference split or mark is made within that nothingness, it is defined a unit. However, the existence of that one mark creates a duality, the marked and the unmarked. But this implies a trinity, the marked, the unmarked, and the implied duality between them. But this implies a quaternity. The marked and the unmarked, their duality, and the trinity which includes them, and so on. The apparently harmless act of making a distinction is like cutting a slit in nothingness through which the infinity of integers tumbles into existence. Yeah, you read this when I are Philip K. Dick episode, do you remember? Yeah, it was a long time ago. I had a vague idea that I've read this before, yes. But I'm fond of quoting it because for one thing, it is a remarkably rational account for something that is almost impossible to put in words that happens in meditation, which is a kind of abiding in nothing which dissolves the moment you make the first mark, the first distinction, the moment that you can even formulate the thought, aha, emptiness. Yeah, the 10,000 things come back, right? Yes, you cut a slit in nothingness and it all pours out. Right. And this cutting of a slit into nothingness and seeing how manifestation just emerges. That is something that phenomenologically happens in contemplation. But I think it also is the key to understanding that zero equals two formula of croleys. Croleys are aware that there's this impossible thing that happens in the universe with the universe tumbles forth out of a slit cut in nothing. And there's a book that had quite a vague in the late 60s, early 70s, a mathematical book called "Laws of Form" by fellow named Spencer Brown. There's a whole interesting story that goes with that. Alan Watts was much taken with this book and people who have better handling of mathematics and symbolic logic than I do can perhaps understand it better. But what Lionel is doing in that passage is basically laying out the first few pages of "Laws of Form" which uses a kind of Boolean algebra to come up with a system for representing things that fundamentally belong to a kind of mystical experience. A lot of acid heads in the 60s like "Laws of Form" because they like to say that it was the one book that approximated some of the insights had in acid trips. So another way of thinking through the 0 equals 2 equation thingy is to think in terms of what we were discussing at the end of our Berkson episode just recently. That was Crowley's insight that concepts negate each other. Below the abyss. So below the supernal realm, where things are in some way, from our perspective, at least unified or involved in a grander, transcendental unity, down here concepts negate each other completely. And I remember I brought up James' idea that every concept was binary, right? Concepts are necessarily binary. They're necessarily digital entities because they negate everything that's not them in a particular series. Think of the spectrum of color, the colors of the rainbow. Well, purple is purple, but I can't tell you what purple is. I can only tell you that it's not red, not blue, not the other colors. And then I end up with, ah, that's purple. So this was an insight that was central and haggle system. Concepts negate themselves on a deeper level and negate each other. And concepts, if they're binary, concepts belong to a way of thinking that is necessarily and irrevocably dualistic. And this is one of the big criticisms of delos that Alain Bediyeu, this other French philosopher made, is that delos in his attempt to come up with a essentially kind of pluralistic/monistic oneness kind of metaphysics ends up being just as dualistic as everybody else because the virtual and the actual, you know, the rhizome and the tree, everything comes down to a kind of dualism. And there's just what Crowley is saying. And he says this in several of his texts, that there is no way out of dualistic thinking, if by thinking we mean regular cognitive thinking, regular cognitive conceptual thinking is necessarily dualistic. But on a deeper level, above in the abyss, all of those conflicting concepts equal zero, right? They equal the zero that is the null, the void out of which all things emerge. So that's maybe that's another way of understanding the equation, but that's my, it might be better expressed than that. Interpretation is two equal zero, which would mean the same thing, right? So yeah, we started abstract. I'd like to bring it down to the fool in literature, the fool in society, the fool structurally. I found some really cool ideas about this. Or what the fool actually looks like in the tarot. Yeah, maybe we should cue to that dubie brother's song now. What a fool believes. [SINGING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Yeah, OK, so let's think about that. Foolishness in that concept, because we started off saying that the fool can mean ordinary foolishness of a sort that we recognize in our everyday life, or it can mean this kind of very exalted, parsofallian foolishness that is itself kind of ultimate wisdom, a kind of initiatory knowledge, however you want to characterize it. And before the show, I was playing what a fool believes by the dubie brothers. I was sharing that over Zoom with JF. It's a great song. And it is a great song. And what's about is a guy who has this whole picture in his head about something he thought that he and this girl shared long ago. And he has all these nostalgic stories about how they were back in the day. And this is just some shit that he's imagining. And he's talking to this girl. And she's just kind of embarrassed for him because he's wrapped up in his fantasies. It's what a fool believes. [MUSIC PLAYING] And so that kind of very everyday foolishness is also what the fool in the tarot means. And I think that if we look at it anthropologically for a second, I think we can see why it's not so mysterious why the fool card, the fool Trump in the tarot, would represent ordinary foolishness and also divine foolishness at the same time. Because both are from the perspective of the worldly structural standpoint. Foolish. They stray from a path. They stray. They're wayward ways of being. The fool whether he's the-- or she is the divine fool, or just the regular fool, is straying from the established structures. And therefore, is running a risk. But the risk might be worth it. It's like, it depends on what the outcome is. So in the trickster figures that we find in mythology, which in my mind, participate of the same archetype. And so the trickster is slightly different from the fool. But the trickster is basically a fool who is driven by maybe a sort of malevolence. But even then, the trickster is always kind of in a way innocent. You think of Mr. Punch in the Punch and Judy Show. He does awful things. But somehow he's innocent. He kills the devil at the end. And all the children can play. Like the trickster exists beyond good and evil. In his book, The Trickster in the Paranormal, George P. Hanson-- this is a wicked book-- that I found out about this book, Watching Hellier. They bring it up in there. He pulls out a few kind of key concepts from the work of the anthropologist Victor Turner. And also Turner's predecessor, Arnold Van Genep, who wrote about what they called liminality, communitas, and anti-structure. So if we think of things in those terms, liminality-- liminality is a term that's recurred for us a few times. I mean, we've used that term in different contexts. Liminal means on the fringe, on the edge, in between-- betwixt in between state, between either two states in time or two places. The crossroads is a classic liminal zone, because it's neither here nor there. It's a place between places. Anti-structure for Victor Turner is a term that signifies those processes within a society that remind us of the arbitrary nature of all social systems. So you'll have a strict hierarchical society, but you'll have a carnival week where all the rules disappear. And in disappearing, in the fact that the rules can disappear and yet the world continues to exist, everyone has to come to terms with the fact that the rules are ultimately arbitrary. But somehow this carnival is necessary for maintaining the structure. It actually replenishes-- It replenishes structure. By permitting chaos, you replenish structure. Yeah, which is why I like his term anti-structure instead of chaos. Chaos feels like it's totally outside. But anti-structure just tells us the chaos belongs. It's part of the structure. It's like the full and the terrible. It's outside. It has no number, but it's necessary for the number sequence to happen. Yeah. And then, Communitas is what happens when social structures dissolve, and you feel a kind of universal identification with humankind. You feel this togetherness. I've experienced this a few times in my life. One was after Ayahuasca at the end of the second night. I felt this tremendous sense of community with the people there, but also with just everybody would ever live this crazy psychedelic oneness feeling. And this happens in times of festival. Like I've experienced another context, much more banal. Like going to a music festival as a kid or a grateful dead show in the '90s, where I go and all of a sudden, it's like everything's fine. Everything's right with the world. Everything's as it should be. And I'm part of this big community. There's no word that better describes this type of community that you feel you belong to in those instances than church, right? The kind of church, even though it's not Christian, or it's a pagan kind of church. So the Communitas is what happens in times where anti-structure dissolves the arbitrary rules of the govern life. And for Hanson, the full or the trickster is a figure that brings anti-structure into the fold, into the mix. So the full is the representative of an outside that is necessary and part of the inside of a social system. It's kind of hard to explain. So I dig that. It actually, you're reminding me of a passage in a book that is much more obscure than it should be. Even though it's been continuously in print since the '30s and had quite a vogue in its day, it's a book called The Importance of Living by a Chinese intellectual named Lin Yutang. Right. Don't know if I've mentioned it on this show before. This is a book that Helen, my wife, gave me as a present last year. And I absolutely love it. Yeah, it's one of those books. It's easy to underestimate because aspects of it seem so dated. It's somebody who is telling us constantly of what Chinese people are like in this very essentializing way that many people have pointed out. It seems to be more of a self-portrait of Lin Yutang himself than a portrait of an entire people, the attempting of which would probably be a fool's errand. But for all that, I think it's actually very-- I see what you think. Yeah, there we are. Yeah, actually totally unintentionally. But I love this book. It articulates a wonderfully humane and good-humored vision of philosophy. And maybe one of these dates will actually do something with this book. But for now, I want to-- just talk about one of the things that is most important about this book, a kind of almost a lynch pin of Utah's way of thinking about things is the figure of the scamp. For him, the figure of the scamp is the figure of humanity at its most exalted. It is the highest form to which human beings can aspire. The scamp, the Nair duel, like a bomb, somebody who is floating through life, sort of like the good soldier's fake, getting out a scrapes through a kind of trick-strish dumb wit, false staff, false staff, yeah. But I would rather read what Utahing has to say about it than try to paraphrase it. So here's what he writes, "To me, spiritually, a child of the East and the West man's dignity consists in the following facts which distinguish men from animals. First, that he has a playful curiosity and a natural genius for exploring knowledge. Second, that he has dreams and a lofty idealism, often vague or confused or cocky, it is true, but nevertheless worthwhile. Third, and still more important, that he is able to correct his dreams by a sense of humor and thus restrain his idealism by a more robust and healthy realism. And finally, that he does not react to surroundings mechanically and uniformly as animals do, but possesses the ability and the freedom to determine his own reactions and to change surroundings at his will. This last is the same as saying that human personality is the last thing to be reduced to mechanical laws. Somehow, the human mind is forever elusive, uncatchable and unpredictable, and manages to wriggle out of the mechanistic laws or a materialistic dialectic that crazy psychologists and unmarried economists are trying to impose upon him. Man, therefore, is a curious, dreamy, humorous, and wayward creature. In short, my faith in human dignity consists in the belief that man is the greatest scamp on earth. Human dignity must be associated with the idea of a scamp and not with that of an obedient, disciplined, and regimented soldier. The scamp is probably the most glorious type of human being, as the soldier is the lowest type, according to this conception. It seems in my last book, my country and my people, the net impression of readers was that I was trying to glorify the quote "old rogue." It is my hope that the net impression of the present one will be that I am doing my best to glorify the scamp or vagabond. - Ah, that's fantastic. - Yeah, and he jumps over a couple sentences. In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, by the way, he wrote this in the 1930s, but this all feels pretty fresh to me. In this present age of threats to democracy and individual liberty, probably only the scamp and the spirit of the scamp alone will save us from becoming lost as serially numbered units in the masses of disciplined, obedient, regimented, and uniformed couilles. The scamp will be the last and most formidable enemy of dictatorships. He will be the champion of human dignity and individual freedom and will be the last to be conquered. All modern civilization depends entirely upon him. - That is truer than he would have ever imagined at the time, I think, because if you look at the evolution of culture, let's say, in the West after the 30s, you have the rise of the beatniks of the counterculture movement. It seems like a lot of advances were initiated by scamps in the last 100 years. So I think that's true. Also, as you were reading there, and he's distinguishing humans from animals and who are we to say that animals? We certainly know that they do dream. I don't know if they interpret their dreams, though. I don't think they do. But I've often heard human beings described as underdeveloped animals. We permanently remain in a fetal stage with our big heads and our sporadic hair growth and all of this stuff that we're just malformed animals. And our rather undifferentiated equipment. We haven't developed claws, we haven't developed rumour-cable eyesight like eagles. We don't have any special things, which is this sort of like largely hairless, bulbous-headed ape. - Right. - But we have all this ability to adapt and become things. - Exactly. - Which is the fool's prerogative to adapt and become things. In every story about a fool, the fool often will find itself, will usually it's a him, but it could be a her. The fool will find himself on a journey, just stumbling upon one thing after another. And slowly the story takes shape through this almost kind of episodic process of encountering things on one's way. And often the fool doesn't really really, doesn't really know where he's going to begin with. There's something of the human story in there. Like we all kind of experience our own lives that way. It's one thing after another. I don't really know where I'm going. I don't really know what the point is. We're kind of all fools at the deepest level. And I guess historically collectively, you can look at the human story as the fool's journey as well, right? - Yeah. - From ape to star man or whatever. But again, I keep feeling like we keep drifting up into the ether, like a state fair balloon that a child has let go and is now watching climbing up to the skies. I'm sure this has happened to you as a father going to a circus or something you buy a balloon for your kids and of course they let go immediately. - And then they cry and you have to say, "Well, I told you to hold on to it." - Yeah. - A lot of good that does. Yes, as if we keep floating up into the ether. What does any of this stuff got to do with being a fool in the normal vernacular sense that we mean? Like for, let me give you like a concrete instance. What do we mean? And getting back to the dooby brothers. What do we mean when we talk about a fool in love? We all know what that means. You know, if I want to give you an exalted example from literature might say Gustav on Ashienbach in Thomas Mons novella death in Venice who is the most dignified creature imaginable, a famous writer whose novels are taught in schools everywhere and a man of great and imponderable dignity who finds himself in the utterly undignified position of falling in love with a boy he sees at a each side resort and eventually chooses to rather than escape a cholera epidemic chooses to stay with the young man. Not that he's with the young man, he just wants to be able to look at him while he's playing on the beach. He never even plucks up his courage to say hello to the guy. And we would look at them be like, that's a fool. That's a foolish, foolish man. That's a fool in love. And you know, actually I'm going to drop in the Patreon one of my music episodes, which is all about Benjamin Britton's opera death in Venice where I go into all of this stuff in detail. But one of the things I do at the beginning of that podcast is talk about how Ashienbach, although this is fine literature, at the same time Ashienbach is kind of a figure almost an every man figure like who hasn't been in a situation where they sought certain dissolution and destruction like where you know that going back to this terrible partner like an on-again, off-again girlfriend or boyfriend who you've been feuding with for years. You know that they're bad for you. You know you shouldn't see them again. You know you shouldn't let them back in your life. But God damn it, you just can't stop doing it. And you keep making the same fucking mistake over and over again. Or somebody, you know, like Ashienbach, this is another figure of somebody who's living a stayed, respectable existence and love breaks in from the outside. And it's almost more like a mental illness than you know anything that you would see in a romantic comedy, right? It's like a pastelence that ruins a person's life and causes a person to overthrow their career, their family, their friends, everything. They lose everything for love. That's also a fool in love, right? What's any of this stuff got to do with all the highfalutin stuff we've been talking about in this show? - Well that's why I brought up the anti-structure stuff. - Oh, put words in my mouth, bro. (laughing) - That's why I was bringing up the anti-structure stuff because in a way, if we live, think about Thomas Mann's death in Venice, what do we see? We see a almost tragic comic process by which a man meets his undoing through his own choice because he chose to stick to his passions and to follow his heart to the end. But in that tragic comic unraveling, we see, I think we sense, the tragic comic nature of all endeavors that we see that we're all gonna die in Venice in the end. His choices are mad only because they don't respond to the expectations that we have arbitrarily come up with to depict a properly lived life. - Right. - It's like another example from literature is Prince Michigan from Dostoevsky's The Idiot, which is a crazy book. Of all of Dostoevsky's books, it's the weirdest. Not because of what happens in it, but because of how it's structured. Also because of what happens or what doesn't happen in it, this Prince Michigan character is basically a good soul, a good person, a person who's actually good, thrown into the cesspool of vipers nest that is St. Petersburg in the 19th century. A little bit like the film Being There, right? with, oh yeah, like Chantzy. Yeah, right. - Yeah, what's the name of the actor again? I forget the actor. Peter Sellers. - Oh, Peter Sellers. - And being there, Prince Michigan and the idiot floats through St. Petersburg. Everyone feels this crazy attraction to him. Everyone's trying to convince him that their point of view is the correct one. And all these intrigues are unfolding around him. And he just kind of like a lotus flower just floats through the whole thing, creating all this chaos because of his, just his mere presence is enough to throw everything into a pebble. And at the end, doesn't meet a particularly happy end. Nevertheless, he somehow wins. Not only does he win, he redeems the world. That's the book where Dostoevsky wrote the line, Beauty will save the world. This beautiful man through his innocence, through his goodness, is able not only to resist the temptations and the follies of this world, but somehow through his presence redeems the follies, redeems the evils, somehow makes this world a world you'd want to exist in. - But that seems like a kind of emotion from, that's a holy fool that's a motion from folly to wisdom. But it seems to me that there's also the motion from wisdom back to folly is just as important. And something you were saying before you were talking about the idiot, just before that, something in that reminded me of a passage in an Alejandro Jodorovsky's commentary on the tarot. So Jodorovsky's probably best, God, actually, I can't even tell exactly what he would be best known for because he's a sort of a Vognarian, polymathic, pleuriform creator in multimedia. So he directed a couple of very weird films, El Topo and the Holy Mountain. He was going to direct an insane and extravagant version of Frank Herbert's Dune before the gig was taken away from him. But he managed to get like Orson Wells and Salvador Dali was gonna be the emperor of the university. He had all this crazy ideas and almost none of it was made. But there is a script like a storyboarded script that apparently has been floating out there for years as a kind of Samas Dutt. And there's a wonderful documentary called Jodorovsky's Dune, which argues that much of the sci-fi fantasy landscape since the mid-70s. - And Hollywood. - Yeah. - Yeah, and Hollywood has been nourished by the subterranean stream of Jodorovsky's Unmade Dune. So he's known for that as well. He's known for creating comic books or writing stories for comics, the Incal, which he did with Mobyas, which is a masterpiece. He's done all kinds of shit and he also's written books about magic, psycho magic, a very good spiritual autobiography. I don't know, he's done a lot of things. One of his things is Tarot. He is a lifelong devotee of the Tarot and particularly of the Marseille deck. He tells a story in his commentary on the Marseille tarot of meeting Entre Breton and showing him a Tarot deck from a huge collection he had at the time and Breton looking at these cards with contempt and saying, oh, these symbols are pitifully obvious. These are not true Tarot decks. There's only one true Tarot and it's the Marseille. And Jodorovsky says that he threw all of his other Tarot decks in the trash and from thence forth, only accepted the Marseille tarot is the true tarot, which whatever. Well, I don't know. I just speaking of foolish wisdom, my daughter, when she was very young, she was five or six, she wanted a Tarot deck. So I had her choose a deck and she actually chose the Marseille deck, which is the least impressive. It's the bejusth of them all. It's the bejusth, but I think Jodorovsky/Breton actually had a point that there is something so strange and mysterious about these images, partly because they're not trying to be strange. They just are what they are. They almost seem like natural formations, like rock formations or something. Correct, yeah, exactly. There are certainly creations of like an anonymous creativity and probably collective. They seem like emanations of a collective mind, which is probably what they are in any event. So I'm sort of getting off of my topic, which has never happened before on this show. At the beginning, he tells a story of how he came to know the Tarot and he tells a lovely little story and I'm gonna read part of it. He says, "I first met the cards when I was seven years old living in Tokopia, a small Chilean port town nestled between the glacial Pacific Ocean and the mountainous plateaus of Tarapaka, the driest region on earth, where not a drop of rain has fallen in centuries." That's such a cool first sentence already. Like a storybook picture in your head. And he tells a story of how this is a very hot and dry part of the world and people would just close up their shops until five o'clock and then open them again. And when he was seven years old, his father decided that he'd reached the age of reason and could accompany him to a pool hall because where all the business owners in this small town would go and they would play pool. And this is a pool hall owned by a guy named Crazy Abraham who Hodorovsky describes as a Lithuanian Jewish widower who had washed up here under mysterious circumstances. And so Hodorovsky talks about how the billiards games of his father and his friends didn't interest him at all. The only thing that interested him was watching Crazy Abraham playing with a tarot deck. And he writes, "Crazy Abraham was obsessed with building large castles out of cards. He would leave these huge and imposing constructions, no two of which were ever alike on the bar counter, far from any drafts until he got drunk and intentionally knocked them down only to immediately begin building another. Jaime, who was Hodorovsky's father, would mockingly tell me to ask the loony why he did this. Smiling sadly, he would give a child the answer he did not wish to give to adults. Quote, "I am imitating God, little one. The one who creates us, destroys us and with what's left of us, he rebuilds." - Wow. - Wow. (laughs) That's fucking beautiful. - It is. And it seems to me that movement from nothing to something as I would insist back again, to build something and destroy it and then from what's left to build again. That's what the tarot means in a certain sense. But also, I feel like that's the motion of the fool that in our folly we do things like, for example, Ashinbox folly, I would argue that the ending of the death and Venice is a happy ending because he got what he wanted. - Yeah. (laughs) - And we are the richer for it. - Yes. There is a kind of purer-wild way of looking at life. I always thought, like, whenever in my 20s, when people were breaking up and people were looking for their spouses, right? And you'd hear about two people breaking up and oh, how horrible it is. And I never, I'm like, well, yeah, they broke up or that person was mountain climbing and fell to their death. No one should ever mountain climb. You know, that type of thinking, like, because bad things happen, nothing should, or like in Toronto when I was living there in like 2001, some kid had gotten hurt in a play structure. So overnight, the city just dismantled all the play structures in town. So that this would never happen again. That kind of attitude. - That's some Canadian shit right there. - But it's typical of a kind of like, we want to make sure this never happens again. It will always happen again. Everything horrible you can imagine will happen again and again and again. If you're gonna live, it needs to be in spite of that, not against it. You can't fight that. Anti-structures, part of the structure. Chaos is part of the equation. The fool is part of it. The good and the bad, you know? Maybe the fool is the one who's able to see this and say yes. - Right, yeah. Or maybe it's not, it seems to me, maybe, I wouldn't quite agree with the, is able to see this and say yes, because that assumes a certain degree of self-reflexivity, of reflecting upon your own behavior. But it seems to me that the parcifalian fool is precisely somebody who succeeds where all the other knights of Amphortas' order fail because he has no self-reflection at all. He doesn't even know his own name. - Consider subscribing to Weird Studies on iTunes, Stitcher, or another podcast service. You can also follow us on Twitter or support us on Patreon. Music for the podcast is composed and performed by Pierre-Heeve Martel. Thank you for listening. [Music] [Music]