Seven of Cups

Every deck paints the Seven the same way: seven chalices floating in cloud, one holding a jewel, one a snake, one a laurel wreath, one a little shrouded figure, and a dreamer below who can't tell which is the prize. Readers call it illusion. The ocean calls it Tuesday.

A liter of seawater holds billions of viruses, and most of them are hunting bacteria. Some of their favorite prey are cyanobacteria so small that the most abundant one, Prochlorococcus, wasn't described until the late 1980s, which means the planet's lungs were hiding in plain water while we were busy inventing the Walkman. The phages that infect these cells have done something exquisitely rude. Some of them carry their own copies of the host's photosynthesis genes, so that once they're inside, the lights stay on. A cell that stops making energy stops making viruses, so the virus keeps it running, still photosynthesizing, still green, right up until it bursts. What you see from a satellite as a healthy green bloom is partly a factory whose owner has already been replaced, still waving from the window.

The gnostics would recognize the arrangement. Here is a world of light, and the light is real, but it's being kept on by something that is not the world and does not love it. The kind news, and it is kind, is that the bursting feeds everyone else: the broken cells return nutrients to the sea, and a sea without viruses would starve. Illusion isn't a flaw in the system. It is how the system eats.

So when this card comes up, look at your seven cups and ask which of them are still glowing on their own power. Some of your best options are lit from inside by somebody else's plan, and they will look healthiest the day before they pop. Still, the Seven is abundance too, and you are allowed to dream. Say it plainly to yourself before you pick: some light is only borrowed.