00: White Rose / The Fool
The Fool Tarot Card Meanings
It’s Tarot Tuesday! Every Tuesday I will be posting an article diving deeper into an individual tarot card, to help me better understand its meaning, and to help educate others in the process. I’ll also share about the connection between each tarot card and the botanical I paired it with in my Fleurot tarot deck, which is based around the Victorian Language of Flowers.
Today we begin at the beginning, with card 0: The Fool (and in the Fleurot deck, the White Rose).
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Keywords
The Fool | Beginnings, Innocence, Freedom
White Rose | New Start, Wisdom, Innocence, Pure Intentions
This card signifies the beginning of the Tarot journey, which begins at 0 - the number of unlimited potential. In the traditional Rider-Waite tarot deck, The Fool is portrayed as a figure about to step off a cliff, seemingly into the unknown, but gazing upwards at the sky (or universe) without a care in the world. The figure is excited and curious about the new adventure ahead, and ignorant of the challenges they will face along the way.
What I love about The Fool is the freedom that is felt in this innocent adventurer. It’s a great invitation to acknowledge fear, trepidation, or anxiety, and move forward anyway. When beginning down a new path, we innocently believe we have all of the wisdom we need, which gives us the freedom and confidence to step forward into the unknown.
“You are being called to commit yourself and follow your heart, no matter how crazy this leap of faith might seem to you.”
For more in-depth information about the meaning of The Fool tarot card, I highly recommend checking out the description by Biddy Tarot!
The White Rose
During the Victorian Era, people would exchange flowers and plants as a way of sending messages to express their true feelings (ones they couldn’t often express out loud). The system they developed was published in Flower Dictionaries which allowed the meanings of each flower to be widely accepted, and this language was often dubbed ‘Floriography’.
In the Victorian Language of Flowers, each rose color has a slightly different meaning (perhaps because roses grow in so many different varieties and colors, and are often gifted, the colors very naturally began to represent different things). White Rose in particular symbolized new beginnings and pure intentions, mainly because of its association with weddings. It also represents a new start, wisdom, and innocence in many Victorian flower dictionaries.
The Victorian meaning of the white rose alone made it an immediate contender to pair with The Fool card in the Fleurot tarot deck. And I was later delighted to discover that in the Ride-Waite Colman-Smith imagery for The Fool, the figure is often physically holding a white rose in their left hand to symbolize purity and innocence. So, it works pretty perfectly.