The Fools' Pilgrimage: a fantasy on the tarot initiation

Millions of tomes packed with wisdom had ended their existence in flames, and such fate would have also awaited the Tarots, had their unknown but immensely wise creators not designed a deck of cards instead of a book. The fervent believers in various orthodoxies thus overlooked them in their purges. The Tarot trumps are milestones, set to mark the path of the future initiates. Carl Jung described them as archetypes. In dreams, in myths, in fairy tales or songs of peoples of all historical epochs, essentially the same archetypal figures will always appear - the Mother, the Father, the Hero, the Magician, the Wise Man/Woman, the Fool. There are also archetypal situations and concepts - love, birth, death, justice, self-sacrifice, hope, etc. Archetypes in various guises can be found in the twenty-two Tarot trumps. Above them all stands the Tarot Fool as the archetype of an eternal pilgrim. In this novel he takes the dive and then threads his way through the labyrinth of the world.