Eight of Swords

On the Eight of Swords a woman stands bound and blindfolded on muddy ground, hemmed in by eight swords stuck upright around her, with a castle on a cliff behind. The binding is loose, and the swords don't close the circle. She could walk out, if she could see. It's the card of the trap that's partly in your head.

Remember the Ace. On the dunes of New Brunswick, the spider wasp Anoplius cleora stings a wolf spider still and drags it home. Ceropales bipunctata waits for that moment. It doesn't hunt spiders of its own. When a hunter goes by dragging its catch, a few of them, four to six at a time, swarm it. One lands on the paralyzed spider and slips an egg into its book lung, the folded, page-like breathing organ on a spider's underside. Another may follow the hunter right into its burrow and come out a minute later. Down in the dark, the cuckoo's larva hatches, eats the hunter's own egg, and then eats the spider. The hunters fight back. They drop their prize and fly at the parasites. But the egg is already written into the lung.

The cuckoo's fate follows its host. Where A. cleora thrives, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence dunes, C. bipunctata is common. In Ontario, its probable host has nearly vanished, and the cuckoo was thought gone too. It's a young genus that spread fast, reaching nearly every part of the world in about ten million years.

Here's the riddle. A book lung is a stack of thin leaves, like pages, and the egg is a sentence slipped into them. The woman on the card can't see the swords because she isn't the one who placed them. The spider is caught twice, first by the hunter's sting and then by the cuckoo's egg, and the trap she breathes inside was set by someone she never met.

When the Eight appears, ask whose story is written into your breathing. Some of what binds us is just a sentence someone slipped in long ago. You can read it and walk out between the swords.