XX · Judgement

Judgement is conscience. No one, not a single thing, can overrule your own sense of justice. You are your final judge.

In the old decks, Judgement is the end of the world as a rescue. An angel blows a trumpet, the coffins open, and the dead climb out with their arms raised, naked and grateful. It is the card of resurrection. This deck asks the question the painters avoided: are you sure it's you who climbs out?

The Alcon blue lays its eggs on gentian flowers. The caterpillar feeds for a few weeks, then drops to the ground and waits to be found by Myrmica ants. It smells like their own larvae, so they carry it home and raise it as one of their own. It spends the winter in the nest and then pupates there, a small sealed coffin in the dark at the center of a cathedral of ants.

The wasp Ichneumon eumerus goes looking for these nests. When she finds one with a caterpillar inside, she walks in. The ants should tear her apart. Instead her secretions make them attack one another, and while the congregation turns on itself, she lays an egg in the caterpillar and leaves. When the trumpet sounds and the coffin opens, what climbs out is a wasp.

In one Polish forest, three of every four butterfly pupae held a wasp, about 4,500 wasps to 1,460 butterflies. On that judgement day the righteous were outnumbered three to one, and they were not the ones who rose.

Franky's card says you are your own final judge. The wasp's trick is to make that true of everyone at once. She doesn't fight the ants. She makes each ant judge its neighbor, and a crowd judging itself is very busy. If Justice was the crowd, Judgement is the crowd turned inward, and that is always the safest moment to rob a church.

The last irony belongs to the judge. Elsewhere, for the form of the butterfly that lives on dry grassland, models of habitat loss suggest the wasp is in more danger than the butterfly, because it needs everything the butterfly needs, plus the butterfly. Every reckoning depends on its sinners. Drain the meadow, and the first to vanish is not the sinner but the angel with the trumpet.

The 2022 draft paired Judgement with the Moon, and the parasites keep the pairing. On the Moon card a worm dressed as a caterpillar drives a snail into the light. Here a caterpillar dressed as an ant is opened by a wasp. One is a lie told to birds and the other a lie told to ants, and both end in daylight, and in someone else.

When Judgement appears, ask what you expect to rise from whatever you've buried, and whether you'd recognize it. Then look around your own congregation. Who is busy judging whom, and what walked in while they were doing it?