The Fool’s Journey

The Fool’s Journey is the story of the trumps of the major arcana of the tarot. The paths of the trees of void emanation follow and expand upon this tradition.

The Fool’s Journey begins at zero and moves by the paths through the influences of the spheres. The journey is distinct from emanation yet inexorably interwoven with it. While emanation shows formation of reality, the Fool’s Journey plots a path for existing within it.

The key insight of the Fool’s Journey is that the tree itself is a map of a journey. Like a graph in mathematics, the tree is walked. Starting from the first sphere we traverse each path only once using a simple method: at each step, traverse the unwalked path with the lowest emanation number.

In addition to other correspondences of the tarot, walking the Fool’s Journey gives directionality to each path. Some are anterograde, moving forward from an earlier sphere to a later sphere. Others are retrograde, moving backwards from later to earlier. This provides insight to reading the cards in averse as this indicates movement along the path in the opposite direction.

Several trees are walkable in this manner. The first three are walkable in a trivial manner. The first interesting walkable tree occurs with the tree of Sense, jŏth-tŏi. The next occurs with the tree of Desire, ät-thĕl. The final is the tree of Kia, fĕ-shĕr.

The twenty-nine paths of the tree also correspond to the twenty-nine days of the lunar cycle from new moon with Fool through the full moon of Devil to the completion of the cycle with Angel .

Meanings of the paths as relates to Tarot is covered in the Major Arcana.