@wundayatta If I remember right, people with all kinds of common traits were associated with the devil back in the day. Redheads and left-handed people are two examples that I can think of right away.
@JenniferP You might also be interested in the trickster archetype. It’s a type of character that appears across plenty of different cultures, often an amoral god or supernatural being that can change its appearance and gender.
The trickster is an example of a jungian archetype, a broader category of character types that appear again and again in our storytelling. Maybe they’re based on patterns from real life, or this type of storytelling just comforts us.
A court jester is just one example of the trickster archetype. Others are Zeus disguising himself as a raincloud to seduce a mortal woman, or the character Eames from Inception, a conman who switches genders during the movie.
The tarot cards seem to be based on archetypes, and the jester/ the fool is one of them. IIRC the tarot deck started as a card game in Italy and didn’t pick up supernatural connotations until later.