The Pretty Parasites Tarot · Guide, 2026 edition

Greetings fellow sapiens sapiens, you are about to go on a journey which itself is made of journeys which are made of other journeys still. Indeed, as an old woman once said, "It's journeys all the way down, and up, and side to side." If you are of the genus homo, you are likely taking this journey on planet 22956 (otherwise known as Terra) by using your FOXP2 gene, one of the genes you need to learn to speak. Most of your fellow vertebrates carry a version of this gene. Each copy of the FOXP2 is unique, but yours is the uniquest. When your version of the gene was spliced into mice, their pups really did start calling differently. Give it a few more generations and they will be singing 1930s showtunes and suing for liberation on the grounds that their universal rights are being violated by human scientists, which will of course be entirely correct. So as you can see, your copy of the gene is very special indeed. It not only helps you use language, but also to build a robust ethical system usually deployed exclusively to justify the human atrocities perpetrated against the other living beings on Terra. However, it can just as easily be used to sincerely weigh the costs and benefits any action has to any part in the equation, so that any homo reading these words is capable of at least in theory sympathizing with the oppressed and acting so as to minimize the suffering caused by your species.

To undertake the present journey all you need to do is draw a card from the deck, which tells the story of one particular human on her journey through a single rotation around your home star. Each card describes some event or element of her journey. Whether you think it does or does not pertain to you personally is entirely up to you, but what you consciously acknowledge and what is really going on are rarely one and the same. All any of us can do is strive to better understand our present circumstance. Each card contains an image, and this guide is intended to assist you in the decipherment of that image, but ultimately only you can determine what it means. After you draw the first card and consider its meaning, reflect upon your current situation of which you may be blissfully unaware, especially if your situation is a perilous one. However, if your situation is benign or beatific then the card will help you recognize just how good you have it. You may continue drawing card after card; indeed, although there are 78 cards in the deck, there are an infinite number of ways in which they can be combined and interpreted. For instance, you may draw the card of the Magician from the deck, put it back, reshuffle the deck, and draw it again and again and again without end. Infinity is a type of magic and it is everywhere.

On reading the Tarot. There are as many ways to read these cards as there are ways to read a single life. No life is purely one thing or the other. The hookworm that drinks your blood also quiets your immune system, so thoroughly that allergy researchers have let its larvae burrow into volunteers' skin to see whether it would calm them. It mostly didn't, which is its own lesson about good intentions. As the teenage Mary Shelley so elegantly showed, monsters, like all of us, are doing the best they can with the only intentions they possess. If we can learn anything from what we call "evil," it is to be wary of our own ambitions and desires, our drives and instincts, our belief in our own sense of righteous justice. But I digress. My meaning here is that not even the most seemingly clearcut things are good or bad, but good and bad. Thus, when we look at some aspect of our lives reflected in the cards, we must try to see as much of the picture as possible. What dangers lurk behind the auspicious job indicated by, say, the Ace of Pentacles, or the noble lover joining us in equable union shown in the Two of Cups? Thus, each card (whether reversed or not) is asking us to reflect upon some aspect of our lives, and upon reflection gain a better understanding of who we are and where we're going. One of the best examples of the double nature of each card can be seen in the sixth and fifteenth cards of the Major Arcana—the Lovers and the Devil—which are often depicted by two people standing in the foreground with a larger-than-life angel standing over them. In the Lovers card that angel is Raphael, in the Devil card—Lucifer. The latter is the former in a dark mirror—their isomorphism speaking to a foundational truth. As humans, we tend to be biased towards a positive outcome in the future. This is the hope necessary for crossing uncharted oceans and exploring the galaxy. But without caution, this hope all too often results in hubris with our little waxy wings melting because we didn't bother to factor in the heat coefficient of flying so close to a star.