XXI · The World

The World is all of us. The other cards concentrate on the reader, the Fool, the individual, but the World stands for everyone. Wherever this card appears in your reading, think of every other being who might influence the outcome. When we talk about the butterfly effect, we focus on the tiniest details while ignoring the invisible people around us. Who haven't you been noticing? Families on the other side of the world, the sanitation workers who see you more than you see them, the animals and plants affected by everything you do, whom you notice only when they're food or friend. Most of the beings you interact with are neither. The world is not here to be your friend. It has its own priorities. You think the NSA goes unnoticed? You have no fucking idea.

The World is the last card of the Major Arcana. A dancer floats inside a laurel wreath, holding two wands, and at the four corners are four creatures: a human, an eagle, a lion, and a bull. The Fool has arrived. The journey is complete.

Look at the four creatures. Toxoplasma gondii can live in every one of them. It can live in practically any warm-blooded animal, bird or mammal, and something like a quarter to a third of all humans may carry it. But it can reproduce sexually in only one kind of animal, the cat. Of the four creatures in the corners of the World, only the lion will do. It can wander from mouse to hawk to fox for as long as it likes, but it can only have sex in a cat.

So it does what it must to get there. Rats infected with Toxoplasma lose their fear of the smell of cats, and some even seem drawn to it. Infected chimpanzees lose their aversion to the smell of leopard urine. In Kenya, hyena cubs carrying the parasite go closer to lions and are killed by them more often. It may raise dopamine in the brain. Whether it changes human behavior is hotly argued, and nobody should tell you it rewires your personality. But the cat-lovers among the World's readers may want to sit with that a moment.

Remember the cat in the Fortitude card? Darwin couldn't believe a good God would design a wasp to eat a caterpillar alive, "or that a cat should play with mice." Toxoplasma has the answer to that. It doesn't make the cat play with the mouse. It makes the rat walk toward the cat.

That's the riddle of the World, and the reason it's called The Invisible Commons. Older philosophers spoke of a world soul, one life moving through all living things. This deck offers a smaller and stranger candidate: a single-celled thing that moves through eagle and bull and human alike, shares each of us with each other, and answers, in the end, to the lion. The dancer in the wreath has been dancing for somebody all along.

To our eyes the world seems infinitely vast, an unlimited horizon. Picture it instead as a bunch of college kids on vacation who don't realize they're the only ones in these here woods. They aren't, of course. Nobody is.

When the World appears, think of everyone you haven't been noticing, the people, the animals, the plants, and the things too small to see. Then remember that the commons runs both ways. You're part of someone else's journey too, and you may not know where it ends. Somewhere at the end of it, very likely, there's a cat.