Before the Fool was anything symbolic he was a rule. In the fifteenth-century Italian card game from which the tarot descends, the card called the Matto was not a trump at all. It was an excuse: played to escape the obligation to follow suit or to trump, it took no trick of its own and could not be captured. That is why the Marseille pattern gives it no number. The zero is not an ancient silence about the unmanifest. It is an eighteenth-century addition, made once the cards had been recruited for divination.
The game itself is well documented and genuinely old. Trump cards, carte da trionfi, appear in Italian court records by 1440, and the oldest surviving examples are the hand-painted decks made for the rulers of Milan in the middle of that century. What is not documented for roughly another three hundred years is anybody using them to tell fortunes. The earliest known evidence of tarot cards read as an oracle is an anonymous manuscript of about 1750. The Egyptian origin story, the Romani origin story and the claim of a lost priestly book are all later inventions, and none of them has a manuscript behind it.
This matters more for the Fool than for any other card, because his modern meaning rests entirely on his zero. Read him as the number before one and he becomes potential, the soul before incarnation, the first step of a journey. Read him as the piece that sits outside the sequence and takes no tricks, which is demonstrably what he was first, and he becomes something stranger and arguably better: the one card on the table playing by different rules from everything else. Both readings are in circulation. Only the second is attested in the fifteenth century.