I · The Magician

The Magician is genius. Genius doesn't win the game. It changes the rules so thoroughly that its winning looks like luck. A brilliant person or idea is waiting inside something bigger than itself. Don't waste it. Not everyone will like the new rules, least of all the people they were written against.

In ancient Rome your genius was the spirit that arrived with you at birth, and the word goes back to an old root meaning to beget. Keep that in mind, because the Magician of this deck is the greatest genius of begetting on the planet, and it's too small to see.

Wolbachia is a bacterium that lives inside the cells of insects and their relatives. It's in somewhere between two-fifths and two-thirds of insect and other arthropod species, depending on who's counting. It passes from mother to child inside the egg. It can't ride in sperm, which strips itself down to a set of instructions and a tail. So to Wolbachia every male is a dead end, the last stop on a line that goes nowhere. A lesser parasite would sulk. The Magician changes the rules.

Here are its tricks, in order of increasing nerve. When an infected male mates with an uninfected female, her eggs die. Uninfected mothers keep losing broods, so each generation there are more infected ones. In woodlice it turns genetic males into females, which is career advice nobody asked for. In some wasps it settles the question entirely, and the females reproduce without males at all. And on Samoa, in the butterfly Hypolimnas bolina, it killed male embryos until males were about one in a hundred.

This is where the Magician takes a bow. Then the butterflies did what audiences always do eventually: they worked out the trick. A gene that suppressed it spread, and within about ten generations the males were back. Schopenhauer said genius hits a target no one else can see. He didn't mention that the target can learn to duck.

Now the final flourish. In Yogyakarta, researchers released mosquitoes carrying Wolbachia, which makes it hard for the dengue virus to grow inside them, and dengue cases fell by 77 percent. We saw the trick, and instead of ducking we hired the magician.

Galileo, Ada Lovelace, and Évariste Galois, dead at twenty, all changed the rules from inside systems that hadn't asked to be changed. Wolbachia does the same thing without a biography. When you draw this card, work from inside, change the rules, and remember that the audience is always watching your hands.