Between the Zero and the One
The Wheel of Fortune, The World, and the Pure, Unutterable Unmade
The number 10 has been on my mind lately. In terms of Tarot numerology, 2026 is a ‘10 year’, which means it is associated with the Major Arcana card that is numbered 10: The Wheel of Fortune (WoF), or Fortune in the Thoth Tarot. This is calculated by adding together the digits of the relevant year, so we have 2+0+2+6=10. And we don’t have to stop there – in fact, we can find out more about the WoF by reducing the 10 further and looking for what we’ll consider to be another, related Major: 1+0=1. If you know your Tarot, you know that the Major numbered 1 is the Magician/Magus. And he is definitely part of the equation. But 1 and 0 are special. It seems to me that there’s room here for something … where there wouldn’t be if our year was, say 2127, which would give us 12 -> 3 and The Empress. So I’ve been turning all this over in my head for a few weeks, to see where it goes.
When we’re exploring a Tarot card, we start with the surface image. There’s a reason the cards are illustrated the way they are – to give us a starting point for our deep dive. The basic meaning behind the WoF card is that of the ups and downs of life. Sometimes you are sitting pretty on top of the Wheel, and sometimes you are being ground beneath it. That’s how life feels from the usual perspective. And there is a randomness to it and a vulnerability because the Wheel spins as it wants to – based on whim or fate – guided seemingly by a separate, external deity or power.
It’s not the whisper in your ear
It’s not the banging of the drum
It’s not the person that you were
It’s not the person you become
It’s not where you’re headed to
And it’s not where you’re coming from
The only life you’re gonna live
Is out between the zero and the one
Let’s look a bit deeper. Above we figured out that the Major related to the WoF is The Magus, which is numbered 1. The reason I challenge it as the Wheel’s only potential partner is that if we are looking Qabalistically for a card that represents 1 as ‘first’ energy, which means we are looking at the Tree of Life, is it the first card? What about The Fool, which in the usual order, comes before The Magus? In my opinion, there are two ‘first’ cards, and they are discrete and one at the same time. An expression of the unity behind duality. The reason I think so is in the beautiful, vastly complex nature of the numbers 0 and 1, especially when they are paired together.
In one sense The Fool is the first Major, plotted as it is to the first path (top right in the image above). The Sephiroth are numbered from 1 to 10 and the paths are subsequently numbered from 11 to 32 because it helps us understand the whole Tree of Life metaphor as a process, an unfolding. But at the top of the Tree of Life, with the first three Sephiroth – Kether, Chockmah, and Binah – a lot happens at the same time. Energy doesn’t really come down in order from Kether to Chockmah, then Binah. It emanates from Kether to both at once. So we can fairly question whether there is a ‘first one’ at all.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Three points, at once; The Word, or the Logos, is represented by The Magus. It/he is the conceptual symbol for the Divine which descends from the Absolute, throughout all of created existence and ultimately into our material bodies. The Word, before it brings us to life, before it is a concept in the Magus, is with God in Kether. That means The Fool is the stage in between those two – the space where the Word is in the process of descending – not Kether, but not-not Kether, not yet. It’s hard to explain because it’s hard to imagine – all these words and images are here to help us talk about what really cannot be talked about. We do the best we can.
The Dao that can be named is not the eternal Dao; the name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The Fool is a special card with a fascinating history that I won’t dive into too much here, but it is assigned the number 0 because it doesn’t actually have a set place in the order of the Tarot. Nowadays we usually number it 0 and put it at the beginning, but historically it wasn’t numbered at all. Even if we keep the 0, it does double duty – it is the connection between The World at the ‘end’ of the Majors and The Magus at the ‘beginning’. It is our exit strategy, and our dramatic re-entrance.
In this respect our nervous system and 0/1 computers are much like everything else, for the physical world is basically vibration. Whether we think of this vibration in terms of waves or of particles, or perhaps wavicles, we never find the crest of a wave without a trough or a particle without an interval, or space, between itself and others. In other words, there is no such thing as a half wave, or a particle all by itself without any space around it. There is no on without off, no up without down.
We might see The Fool as both 1 and 0 – both first and last – just as in the binary relationship between 1 and 0, 1 is ‘on’ and 0 is ‘off’. The Fool is the living alternation between existence and non-existence. Sometimes it exists, and sometimes it doesn’t, but even when it’s ‘off’, it is still all-potential, eternity.
But for this to work, it must be in an ongoing relationship with the 1.
The World is interpreted in a reading as an ending, or more helpfully, the conclusion of a cycle. In esoteric circles, it is associated with the recognition and fulfillment of our Divine Will – a vast concept that really needs its own article, but is expressed variously as our life path or our purpose on earth, both as an individual and our true identity as something simultaneously simpler and greater.
When the World Dancer, a 1 figure, steps through her wreath, a Zero figure, the ‘off’ and ‘on’ come together – obviously that isn’t something that can happen on this side of creation because this is a dualistic world. We have to have one or the other. This union of the two is how we know that something really amazing is happening – the World dancer becomes The Fool. Or we might say that she re-emerges as The Fool. It is the alternating between the two that makes the Wheel of our lives turn.
The WoF is usually illustrated using the medieval image of the Wheel of Fortune – the one where we’re clinging to the edges for dear life as it spins around and around. So it might seem odd that the card is associated with Jupiter – luck and benevolence. Maybe this is a clue that we’re looking at it wrong. Maybe from the wrong perspective …
So much of your identity is built upon patterns of becoming – better, wiser, more compassionate, more courageous – that you imagine enlightenment to be the pinnacle of that becoming.
It is not.
It is the being that rests at the centre around which a lifetime of becoming swirls.
One of the lessons of the Fortune card is that we are not on the edge of life’s wheel, being spun around by someone else. Believing that to be true is part of the illusion of our existence here. We misunderstand who we really are, thinking we are individuals, separate, and our lives a series of events which happen *to* us. If that is the ‘I’ we accept as true, then yes, we are being spun around totally out of our control.
The way to escape it – and the drastic ups and downs that disrupt life so completely – is to remember that we are really in the middle. We learn (again) that we are truly sitting in the hub of the Wheel. Our home is there, calm and undisturbed by whatever is going on around us. Which of course allows us to deal with those events in a calmer, more helpful way. Still, we have to keep an eye on the appearance of duality and remember that while we sit in the centre, and can be less affected by the activity around the edge, we are not separate from those events:
You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean.
We instinctively see the movement of the WoF as circular. But what if, at the same time, there was movement from the hub, outward? A centrifugal force that originates in the centre, where you are really You, along with the rest of us? It’s an interesting thought, and one you come across now and then, in the form of ideas about us creating our own world, and, even more fascinating, what seems to be a recent discovery in Quantum Physics that our decisions have a retroactive effect. At any rate, there is an energy of emerging from the Wheel of Fortune, of stepping through.
Which is exactly what happens in The World/ Universe, the final card in the series of Majors. In the RWS, the World Dancer is shown stepping lightly through a wreath – a victory wreath, it looks like, but the point is that it is a circular shape. If we look at the Thoth Universe, we see that Lady Frieda Harris and Aleister Crowley have been clearer about the deeper meaning of that wreath.
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
The Thoth Dancer steps through a Zodiac Wheel. In the most recent episode of TABI’s Tarot World podcast, we were discussing The World card and I mention that the World Dancer “steps through the Made universe into the Unmade; she’s stepping through the portal [of the wreath/Zodiac] and then coming back as The Fool … this is a beginning within an ending.”
Binary code was formalized in the 17th century, but the spiritual, esoteric relationship between 1 and 0 is not a new idea. In the art of Ancient Sumer, we see rulers holding a ‘rod and ring’ as a symbol of divine authority. There are a lot of ideas about what they symbolize, but they do all come down to a similar dynamic. One recent paper suggests they represent the interplay of Time and Eternity, i.e. the Made world where time exists, and the Unmade, where it does not. The important thing about it for our discussion here is that they are held together in one hand. They are ‘conjoined’. We are not to understand them as two discrete symbols (Inanna has two hands, after all), but one thing. It is the blending that brings the power.
One and 0 are of each other’s nature in a very special way. In Qabalah, we see all numbers as coming from the previous one and anticipating the next one, but not as intimately as 1 and 0, which drive endings and beginnings for everything in a way the other numbers do not. When a Sumerian queen holds the rod-and ring; when the World dancer steps through the Zodiac wreath and The Fool emerges from three rings; when the binary code speaks in 1s and 0s; when the wave emerges from the ocean and then returns to it, these are the expression of the Divine coming and going, and changing form.
So, to go back to our original question – which Major should be associated with the WoF, The Magus or The Fool – I would say both because they are inseparable. They are, like 1 and 0, manifestations of the same thing. On the Tree of Life, the paths of The Fool and The Magus both spring from Kether, the very first Sephira at the very top, a place so divine and inconceivable for us that some Qabalists prefer to ‘start’ their work with the Tree with the next Sephira – leaving Kether to the pure unutterable Unmade.
Quotes: “Between the Zero and the One” song by Dawes; Gospel of John 1:1; The Dao de Jing, opening line; Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Chapter 2; Shiv Shegupta, Substack Note, December 30, 2025; Alan Watts, from Cloud-Hidden, Whereabouts Unknown; Seneca; Gwen Enstam, co-host of TABI’s Tarot World podcast Episode 22, quote compiled from two sections and edited for print; Mary Abram, “A New Look at the Mesopotamian Rod and Ring: Emblems of Time and Eternity”, December 2011
I love the quote You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean.