The Fool Behind Bars: Tarot, Myth, and the Poetics of Carceral Transformation

• In Event: Roundtable: A Criminology of Tarot: Reimagining Justice Beyond Law

Abstract

This paper explores the Fool’s Journey of the tarot as a mythopoetic framework for narrating, resisting, and transforming carceral experience. Drawing from personal incarceration, literary poetics, and archetypal analysis, the work reimagines the 22 cards of the Major Arcana as stages in a lived and symbolic journey through imprisonment. From the Fool’s blind leap into the justice system to the Tower’s violent rupture of identity and the Hanged Man’s enforced inversion of self, each card becomes a portal into the psychic, spiritual, and systemic dimensions of confinement. The tarot is positioned not merely as divinatory tool but as an underground grammar of becoming—a resistance language for those rendered invisible by the penal state. Through poetic fragments, reflective vignettes, and critical theory, this work assembles a fugitive cartography of the incarcerated soul, suggesting that the Fool, in passing through the prison gates, embarks on a journey not toward retribution, but toward radical reconstitution. In the end, The World is not freedom as return, but as transformation: a circular return that leaves the circle changed.

Author

• Esther Marcella Hoffmann, Pacifica Institute