The Fool’s dog
Older Fools were tramps with a dog snapping at them. On Waite’s card a small white dog leaps beside a young man at the cliff’s edge, a spirit in search of experience.
In the tradition
Older Fools were vagabonds, often chased or bitten by a dog as they went. Waite kept the dog but changed the mood: his Fool is a young man on a height, with the sun behind him, and the dog plays rather than attacks.
His other details are the wallet over the shoulder, curiously embroidered, and the rose in the hand. The sun, he says, knows whence the Fool came and whither he will go.
Sources
- A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910). Waite's own guide to the deck he designed with Pamela Colman Smith, with each card's divinatory meanings.
Updated October 9, 2026.
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