Six of Pentacles

The Six of Pentacles shows a merchant holding a set of scales in one hand and dropping coins into the cupped hands of two kneeling beggars with the other. It's the card of charity, generosity, and fair exchange. It is also, if you look at those scales for longer than is polite, the card of who gets to decide what's fair.

Entomophthora muscae infects house flies and their relatives. For a few days the fly carries on as normal while the fungus grows inside it. Then, close to sunset, the infected fly does something unusual. It climbs up to a high place, like a window frame, a grass stem, or the top of a wall. It presses its mouthparts to the surface and gets stuck there. Its wings lift up and out. Then it dies. Over the next hours, the fungus breaks out through the soft joints of the abdomen in pale bands and shoots its spores out with tiny cannon-like bursts, so the dead fly ends up sitting in the middle of a white ring of spores on the glass. If you have ever found a fly stuck to a windowsill inside a little halo of dust, you have seen this card.

The fungus has one more gift to give. Studies of house flies found that healthy males are drawn to the bodies of dead infected females, and more recent work points to chemical signals from the fungus that make the corpse more attractive. The dead fly's final gesture is an offering, and whoever accepts it walks away infected.

The Six asks you to look at giving and receiving. The opportunity here is real. Things can pass from one life to another. Generosity is how a lot of good in the world spreads, and some of what we give away continues long after we're gone. The risk is in the scale. A gift can come with strings you can't see, like obligations, debts, or an influence that will make you do its work. When someone offers you something at the top of the window, in beautiful evening light, it's reasonable to ask what they have to gain.