Ace of Swords

On the Rider-Waite-Smith card a hand comes out of a cloud gripping a single upright sword. A crown sits on its point, hung with a branch of olive and a frond of palm, and below it are bare gray mountains. It's the card of the breakthrough: one clean idea, one decision, the moment the fog clears.

Spider wasps are one family, and a young one. The family itself arose around 43 million years ago, and today there are about 4,855 species, most of them in the tropics. Anoplius cleora is one of the biggest of its genus. It lives on open sand near water, from southern Canada to southern Mexico, and on the dunes of New Brunswick it hunts adult female wolf spiders. It digs the burrow first. Then it finds a spider, stings it still, and drags it home.

That stillness is the point. The spider isn't dead. It's paralyzed and kept fresh, a pantry that breathes, and the wasp lays a single egg on it and seals the door. The Ace of Swords is usually read as clarity, and this is what clarity looks like from the outside: one precise stroke, and a whole moving creature goes quiet.

Here's the riddle. Look at what hangs on the Ace's crown: olive for peace, palm for victory. The wasp gets both. The spider gets the peace. And the crown on the sword's point is the King of this suit, already there in the seed, because the law the King will hand down begins with this first stroke.

The Ace is a gift and a warning. A clear idea really can stop a problem in its tracks. But a mind that's very good at stopping things should ask, now and then, what it's keeping alive in the burrow, and for whom.