Doomscrolling, Decks, and the Fool Who Wasn’t a Joker

Where Digital Chaos Meets Ancient Wisdom and the Fool Steps Off the Script

Every now and then, I too fall victim to that utterly pointless habit called doomscrolling. Last week, I stumbled upon a video, thousands of likes, a sea of praise, and a man delivering “esoteric truths” with the certainty of a prophet.

Here’s the irony: chances are you’ve arrived on my blog through social media as well. For that, I’m genuinely grateful. But let me say this up front don’t take my words as gospel either. Question me, double-check me, do your own research. That’s the real path to wisdom.

Now, back to that video. The speaker confidently revealed the “hidden symbolism” of an ordinary deck of playing cards: 52 cards for the weeks of the year, four suits for the seasons, and so on. You know the routine. It’s neat, it’s tidy, and it’s also misleading.

He then pushed it further: tarot, he claimed, is the ancestor of our modern playing cards. Which sounds seductive, but history doesn’t bend so neatly. The truth is simpler: tarot is itself a card game. Those famous “mystical” images we now call the Major Arcana were originally just trump cards like in whist or bridge. And yes, because they were allegories, they carried symbolic weight. That much is undeniable.

But then came the whopper: he insisted that the Fool of the tarot lives on today in the Joker of modern decks. To make the story more convincing, he pointed out that tarot had “more cards” than a standard deck, so clearly our playing cards must be a stripped-down version. Sounds clever until you remember that early European playing decks actually had more court cards than today. Instead of three face cards (King, Queen, Jack), they had four (often King, Queen, Knight, and Knave). In other words, the numbers don’t line up at all.

This is where the whole argument collapses into classic post hoc ergo propter hoc — the fallacy of assuming that because one thing looks like another, one must descend from the other. The Fool is not the Joker.

The facts are clear. The Fool was part of tarot from the 15th century in Italy, an unnumbered, wandering card, outside the rank of trumps. The Joker, by contrast, is a 19th-century American invention. It first appeared around 1860 in the game of euchre as a special trump, and only later infiltrated regular card decks as the “wild card.” Similarities? Superficial. Historical link? None.

And let’s not forget where tarot itself came from. It didn’t fall from the heavens draped in mysticism. It grew out of the Mamluk playing cards (Arabic), which arrived in Europe in the 14th century via Spain and Italy. These decks already had the four suits we recognize today. In 15th-century northern Italy, artists turned them into lavish sets, adding allegorical trump cards called trionfi>>>the direct ancestors of what occultists in the 18th century would romanticize as the Major Arcana.

So no, the Joker is not a fossil of the Fool, and the neat little “52 weeks, 4 seasons” math tricks don’t prove anything. They’re charming stories, but they don’t hold water.

The irony? Even when dressed up as fake history, these myths prove something real symbols are sticky. They cling, they morph, they survive. And sometimes, even nonsense on social media is just another reminder of how much meaning we project onto a simple deck of cards.

Follow this blog and my socials for more in-depth insights into the medieval and Renaissance allegorical perception of the figure of Le Mat.

I’m already lifting a small corner of the veil on my upcoming project with Morgan at Mystery Channel (click here!), diving into the history and symbolism of the Tarot and everything we’ve overlooked. As you can see in the images below, the Fool alludes to secrecy: a European cult figure with deep ties to initiatory pagan-Christian traditions. SSSHHHH… lips sealed.

Björn Meuris, The Symbol Detective