The Fool’s Journey

The Fool’s Journey is a reading of the Major Arcana as a story of initiation, in which the Fool (Le Mat in the Tarot de Marseille) passes in turn through the twenty-one numbered cards until reaching The World. Popularized in the twentieth century, especially in English-language writing on the Rider-Waite-Smith, this framework turns each arcanum into a stage of growth: learning, trials, crisis, rebirth and fulfillment. It is a teaching and symbolic tool, not a historical rule of the deck.