I’ve actually always had a thing for the Fool archetype, on par with the 23 bit. My biggest hallucinogenic experience was maybe 5 years ago, with DMT alongside an Abramelin anointment where I had to focus on guides from the tarot. The hermit I chose, the fool chose me.
In virtually every DMT encounter, trippers meet what’s widely been described as neon elves, with giant manga eyes always beaming, somehow wordlessly enduing with this air of absolute friendliness. Many posit that they represent other-dimensional beings trying to present as passive a form as possible, like they want to teach us, but even more they want to share the playground with us exactly like kids making pals in the sandbox.
So I have no religion or theology, but I treat the Fool as symbolic of whatever it was I encountered, and of experiences in my life both after and before that specific occurrence. If we each have our own deity, mine is an absurdist.
Days ago, my mom was briefly more cognizant than she’d been in too many weeks. She is faaar from healed, but her mental state is showing a big advancement towards status quo once again.
She remembered very little of what she herself said or did in this time of confusion. She does however recall aspects of things that happened to her. The way she put it, a part of her remained aware of how she was verbally confusing the present with past and dream, but that was an outer shell misrepresenting her intent. Inside, she was trapped. Not in a scary way but in a kind of play-room, with what she called Lollipop Guild elves who were rolling balls with her, amusing her, etc. She said the blankets were tiny as though the elves were not actually her size, but were pretending to be her size so she wouldn’t be scared. She had wanted desperately to find her own children, but the elf-kids would watch the outside with her, to help her see elements of what her outer shell was experiencing while comforting her from the full effects of humiliation and torture received while entrapped in the healthcare system of small town, USA. Since admittance the hospital has brought additional ailments into her life and dramatically worsened her health, particularly by this extremely abrupt devolution of her emotional and psychological state in question. Which had nothing whatsoever to do with her reasons for seeking help in the first place, though quite a lot to do with the pricey poisons administered inside.
But she went to her non-figurative happy place. A truly devout and life-long Roman-Catholic, mind you. Her dream-self playing with the elf-kids never felt threatened by the elf-kids, but if there had been anything remotely angelic about them she would have described them in those terms. Yet she categorically did no such thing.
If her inside-self had somehow stayed fully connected to her outside shell, she’d be even more scarred from the malnutrition, dehydration, being alone and unattended for hours on end when not bullied and demeaned by overpaid doctors, etc. They protected her from that. Whether they came from her head or my head or the head of something else entirely, is beyond us all. I can’t talk about it with anyone locally, but I took the intermingling of fantasy with (a hard) reality as even more reassuring than the sudden though insufficient improvement to her health. It abides, the fool, like a trail of moonlight leading us out of the darkened woods of myth.
Maybe if my mom could explain her thoughts better I’d see less to feel familiar about. That’s possible as well, I realize. The biblical Job wrestled angels, and one person’s angel is another person’s demon, right? They could all be our own higher forms from beyond our weird obsession with the imagined progressions of time or the breadth of space. Maybe our species are one and all more schizophrenic than we’ve been led to believe. Maybe all of existence is merely the science experiment of an incomprehensibly alien 5th grader from some other realm.
Or perhaps what we know and accept as reality is, in actuality, less mysterious than even our richest imaginations would allow us to believe.