About Arcane Fools
The Fool, Clown and Court Jester are cornerstones of our methodology.
Arcane /ɑːˈkeɪn/ adjective
Understood by few; mysterious or secret.
Fool /fuːl/ noun
1. A person who acts unwisely or imprudently; a silly person.
2. A jester or clown, especially one retained in a royal or noble household.
Innovation is the fusion of disruptive imagination with real-world problems. Innovating requires us to question status-quo, challenge our pre-conceptions of reality and introduce new ideas.
Medieval kings employed jesters for this purpose - a fool’s role was to notice, embody and play upon the patterns inside the court. To question norms and challenge perceptions. A clown didn’t need reason or lecture - with ridiculousness he presented reality ‘as it is’.
A buddhist master presents his student a zen koan - a clown presents his king with a jest.
When writing about fools and clowns, we do not mean the steriotypical white makeup, big shoes and squirty flower. We mean the kind of fool Blake described with, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." Failure is an art form and a Fool is one who is one on the path to master it.
Who Is Not a Fool?" ["Qui non stultus?"]
—Horace (65-8 B.C.), Satires, 2.3.158
Fools of History
The Fool can be found throughout Medieval and Renaissance Europe, dating back to ancient Egypt and Rome . This architype has inspired the cultural development through the ages, from Shakespeare and Chaucer to Carl Jung. The Fool has influenced art movements like DADA and is associated with occult alchemy and secret societies. In Tarot the Fool is represented as the number Zero, symbolising unlimited potential. In later tarot decks he's also signified by XXII (22) - the highest value card in the deck.
Infact, today we've forgotten that innovative technology was enabled by the fools of history...
The Web as we know it today was envisioned by 19th Century occultists.
Long before the term "astral plane" was associated with the new age era, alchemists in the 1800's used the phrase to describe a world where knowledge could be downloaded and uploaded from the source. They wrote about a reality where individuals could connect collectively across distance. Bravatsky's Akashic Records introduced an idea of "memory of nature". Centuries later we see the fruits of these ideas in Web 3.0 technology.
Then come jesters, musicians and trained dwarfs,
And singing girls from the land of Ti-ti,
To delight the ear and eye
And bring mirth to the mind.
—Sima Xiangru (ca. 179-117 B.C.), Rhapsody on the Shanglin Park
To be a fool is to challenge the way we interact spontaneously with the world around us. Curiosity without fear; perseverance without doubt. We experience when we're in 'flow states. A Fool embodies the spirit of a toddler discovering the world before conditioning sets in. There is no qualification, title or achievement but a life-long practice - “..it involves a balancing act, in which the Fool may stumble and become a fool. It is a cunning way, a way of strange knowledge. It is ‘the Way that Is Not a Way’ - ‘the Way that Cannot Be Named’.”
"The Court Jester [..] is the canary in the coalmine, a cultural thermometer, and it always has to push, push, push the boundaries of society to see how much it’s grown."
~ Joe Randazzo
