Till

It just wasn't possible to move on from the topic of "fools" without at least mentioning my favorite non-Shakespearean fool as well: Till Eulenspiegel. He is an institution at Carneval (or Fasching or Fassenacht, or whatever one chooses to call it), and he incorporates into a single figure, much that is simply classic in regard to fools.

There most likely was a person who embodied a lot of Till's characteristics and there is some evidence that there was a trickster who roamed through Northern Germany in the late Middle Ages around whom the stories and legends may have congealed. It doesn't matter really. He's a colorful and interesting character who, I believe, has a lot to say to us even today.

When we see him these days, he is most often dressed in a motley; that is a patchwork suit of diamonds or squares, very often in the colors red, blue and yellow (for example, see the Marseilles Tarot Deck) or red, green and blue. In other words, a jumble of contradictions, complements and oppositions. On his head he wears, of course, a fool's cap; that is to say, a cap or hood, often with drooping corners to which bells are attached. Most often these days, the cap as two curved drooping horns with bells at the end. Perhaps these are reminiscent of the devilish tricks he might play, but more often they refer to cuckoldry: a man who's wife is seduced by another, in local parlance, has been "horned". Most importantly, however, at least in my estimation, he carries with him an owl-shaped mirror (in German: an Eulenspiegel; Eule = owl, Spiegel = mirror). Owls, as we all known, are known for their wisdom; the mirror is what reveals us to ourselves. But we should recall that when we look into a mirror, we see everything reversed. And thus appareled, Till - an old Gothic and German name which means "ruler of the people", how appropriate - steps before us.

He is such an appropriate figure when you stop to think about it. His very presence, his dress, reminds of the vagaries of life. His cap reminds us we can all be so easily fooled. His mirror reflects not only on us, but if all is reversed in the mirror, could it be that the reversal of reality (that is, how we see the world) is how reality should be, that we've simply got it all backward? I sometimes think that it is so. And that's what I believe that the figure of Till is telling us.