Ace of Cups

The Ace of Cups is the suit's first gift. In the Waite deck a hand comes out of a cloud holding an overflowing cup, and a dove comes down bearing, in Waite's words, "a cross-marked Host" to drop into it. Waite meant the communion wafer. A parasite deck takes him at his word: this is the only tarot card that arrives with its Host already in the cup.

Franky saw the objection coming: rabies doesn't live in water. That was his point: rabies makes its host abhor the most life-giving of the elements. The virus is shaped like a bullet. It arrives in saliva, through a bite, and waits, usually two or three months, while it climbs the nerves to the brain and then travels on to the salivary glands, where the next bite is loaded. Then comes hydrophobia. Trying to drink, and sometimes just the sight of water, sets off violent spasms of the throat and the breathing muscles. The virus doesn't need you to drink. It needs you to bite.

The genus is named for Lyssa, the Greek spirit of mad rage, who in Euripides' Heracles makes the hero kill his own children. Franky's 2022 Ace told that story as medicine: the virus that turns you on the people you love. Human-to-human spread by bite has never been confirmed. The myth was always about us.

There is an old ascetic dream, gnostic and otherwise, of refusing the world's cup, and rabies performs it as parody. So ask what is climbing quietly toward your head, and what it will make you push away. Franky's example was addiction. ("Good job, tobacco lobbyists!") Feelings have incubation periods. Read this card literally once: if a bat or a strange dog bites you, wash the wound with soap and water for fifteen minutes and get the shots that day. Before symptoms, they work almost every time. After symptoms, almost nothing does. In 1885 Joseph Meister, nine years old and bitten fourteen times by a rabid dog, was given Pasteur's experimental vaccine, and he lived.

Thirst is the first gift of the cup; drink while you can still swallow.