The awareness of our mortality is a double-edged sword: it may lead to the realization of profound gratitude, that every day is a gift and a miracle, but it may also lead to a heightened awareness of the immense background of death and nothingness that engulfs every star. To the extent that we are alive, therefore, the light has won its vindication over death’s dominion. But Death, the Unconscious, is all around us, even in the physical form of “dark matter.”

Likewise, the beginning of a new year represents an immense gift which opens the door to infinite possibilities—including the ones that may prove to be our downfall. 

Such is the standard image of the Fool from the tarot deck: a youth happily walking toward a cliff, only one more step to make before falling into the abyss. In its mythic dimensions, the Fool represents a certain archetypal constellation in which great danger is combined with free-spirited naivete. This androgynous figure represents youthful innocence, a childlike stranger free from the cares of this world. They strut down a path, with their gaze to the sky, dancing toward the precipice of life and ruin.

The presence of the dog at his side, as if warning the Fool of the impending folly, is an emblem of instinct, the connection to the earth, which the wonderstruck hero sorely lacks. For in its inferior pole, the Fool is indistinguishable from literal foolishness, reckless abandon, and extreme risk-taking. Also closely associated with madness, as in Batman’s Joker figure, the Fool can exhibit a kind of suicidal or even criminal death drive, a compulsion or addiction, which leads the youth to walk over the cliff. The Fool thus contains divine and demonic aspects that must be taken seriously and with great discrimination—lest we ourselves fall into the trap of the Fool!

For the edge of this precipice is quite real today for individual egos as it is for nations. Indeed, it involves the entire social collective of humanity at large. In our own times we are dealing with end-of-time questions such as the ones brought out in books like Hegemony or Survival and The Precipice by Noam Chomsky. There are certain ecological and geopolitical conditions we face today that point to a whole constellation of apocalyptic signs, impending catastrophes at scales that have never been imagined. These existential conditions, aloofness of which drives the Fool to the precipice, seriously put human survival into question. For our present world situation is not simply another period of tensions and confusions like the ones we’ve had in the past. Today we face absolutely unprecedented conditions which our ancestors could have barely imagined in their myths about the end of the world.

In the present horizon of mythic history, it is not an exaggeration to say that we are living in end times, breathing a toxic cultural atmosphere, with mass-scale disasters looming on every side. Taken together, it is hard to avoid the feeling that we are passing through a possibly terminal stage of human history.

Faced with the new horsemen of the apocalypse–Climate Catastrophe (Famine), Nuclear Annihilation (War), New Pandemics (Disease), Social and Economic Breakdown (Death) – our civilization as a whole stands in the situation of the Fool about to walk off the cliff. 

Thus the Fool perfectly mirrors our current existential situation as a species, the understanding of which is made clear by its mythohistorical dimensions. As Campbell states of the primary functions of mythology:

The first function of a mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is: the second being to render an interpretive total image of the same, as known to contemporary consciousness. Shakespeare’s definition of the function of his art, “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature,” is thus equally a definition of mythology. It is the revelation to waking consciousness of the powers of its own sustaining source. (The Masks of God, Volume 4: Creative Mythology, 13)

Joseph Campbell thus credits Hamlet’s speech with the highest honor that a mythologist can give, that of providing a definition of mythology itself. In the culminating volume of Masks of God, Vol 4: Creative Mythology, Campbell comes home to the creative foundation that makes mythology indistinguishable from art. To the question, what is art? Campbell directly answers: “it is mythology itself.” Creative mythology, whose reflective function it is, like Hamlet’s mirror, to imitate in the medium of consciousness the archetypal powers of its own unconscious source. 

Yours, Norland Tellez, PhD Norland Téllez is a visual artist and teacher as well as writer and mythologist, combining the art of story-telling with the power of philosophical thought. He is both a visual development artist and a writer, as well as a story analyst in the realm of Mythological Studies. He attended CalArts and graduated from their character animation department in 1999. Norland went on to pursue his masters and doctorate degrees at Pacifica Graduate Institute, graduating in 2009 with a dissertation on the Esoteric Dimensions of the Popol Vuh, the Sacred Book of the Quiché-Maya. Find more at mythistorian.com.