Queen of Pentacles

So you obviously didn't go to sleep. But who says you're not sleeping right now? I mean really, who says. So we may or may not be sleeping right now. And who cares is the question?

— Franky Forlorn

The Queen of Pentacles sits on a stone throne in a garden, holding a coin in her lap and looking at it with great tenderness. Roses hang over her head and a rabbit hops in the corner. She's the generous, practical mother of the suit, the one who feeds everyone, keeps the house running, and knows exactly what everything costs. In this deck she's a whole royal house.

The Hypocreales are a big, varied order of fungi. They have some of the suit's cruelest killers and some of its most useful servants. The insect killers of the Ace and Page belong to it. So do the endophyte in the grass and the ergot on the rye. So does Trichoderma, a mold that parasitizes other fungi, which is used to protect crops and whose enzymes were used to fade denim. And so does Tolypocladium inflatum, a fungus that infects beetle larvae in the soil. In the 1970s, chemists at the drug company Sandoz found that it made cyclosporin, a compound that holds back the immune cells that reject a graft, without the bone-marrow damage of older drugs. Cyclosporin helped turn organ transplants from a desperate experiment into routine medicine. A beetle parasite taught the human body to accept a stranger's heart.

That's the Queen. The Greek word parasitos originally meant someone who eats at the table of another. As Franky puts it, "We might say a parasite is a type of houseguest." The Queen of Pentacles is the one who sets the table. Her talent is hospitality, and in this court hospitality is a tool. You can use it to welcome someone or to take them over. Very often, it's both.

And the sleep? Remember that the Four's ergot is in this family too, and that the most famous dream drug of the twentieth century was made from its chemistry. Who says you're not sleeping right now? Around the Queen's throne, the line between nourishing, healing, drugging, and devouring is very thin. The opportunity of this card is real care: practical, generous, grounded. The risk is the care that controls, or the host who feeds you so that you'll never leave.