The Library

For one who has a worm in him (KYP T875)

For one who has a worm in him. Recite it over some spearmint and make it into a crown for his head.

A whole cure, one line long, from a small papyrus spell-book. More than a thousand years ago the guest inside the body already had a name, and the answer was to crown the host. The deck agrees with the scribe on one point: you treat the worm by honoring the person it lives in.

Historical text; not medical advice.

Translation by Korshi Dosoo, Markéta Preininger and Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin; transcript by Edward Love. KYP T875, P. Mich. Inv. 593, 5th–7th c. Link: KYP T875.

Contains information from the Kyprianos Database, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). Line numbers omitted.

Horus's belly-ache (KYP T144)

[He] cut it without a knife, he cooked it [without] fire, he [ate it without] salt, and he ached, and the area around his navel [was in pain]. …you could adjure the three hundred sinews that are around the belly: ‘Let every sickness and every suffering and every aching that is in the belly of NN son of NN be healed at once, it is I who recite, it is the lord Jesus who grants healing!’

A god eats something he shouldn't have, sends a one-eyed demon to fetch his mother, and Isis brings the words. Then the charm hands the healing to Jesus without a blink. Every stomach-ache is a small myth, and every mother has been called out at night for one.

Historical text; not medical advice.

Translation by Korshi Dosoo, notes by Edward Love, edited by the team and Roxanne Bélanger Sarrazin. KYP T144, Berlin P. 8313, 651–800 CE. Link: KYP T144.

Contains information from the Kyprianos Database, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). Line numbers omitted.

To dissolve the sinews (KYP T32)

Content note: a curse wishing bodily harm.

Let my voice come to you (pl.), they who dissolve the sinews and the ligaments and the joints, that you might dissolve the sinews of NN, forever!

"NN" is a blank: fill in your enemy. Our parasites take a body apart quietly, joint by joint, and this scribe wanted the same power in words. The scribe left the blank because there was always someone.

Edition by Edward O. D. Love from Erman's transcription, team revision. KYP T32, Berlin P. 8321, 651–800 CE. Link: KYP T32.

Contains information from the Kyprianos Database, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). Line numbers omitted.

Heart and flesh (KYP T300)

Content note: coercive, non-consensual "love" magic.

…so that as soon as I give them ⟨to⟩ NN [and] she eats or drinks from them, you will bind her heart and her flesh for me for all time …

A love spell that works the way a parasite does: slipped into food, swallowed, and meant to rule the body from inside. It belongs on the shelf beside our Devil as a warning. Wanting to own someone is the oldest infection there is.

Translation by Korshi Dosoo, checked and completed by Edward Love, team revision with a minor edit by M. Preininger. KYP T300, Berlin P. 8320, 651–800 CE. Link: KYP T300.

Contains information from the Kyprianos Database, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). Line numbers omitted.

A woman whose children have died (KYP T1328)

Content note: the death of children.

21. A woman whose children have died. Draw the seven powers on a sheet. Bind ⟨it to⟩ her right forearm. Bind another ⟨to⟩ her left forearm. Certainly, her child will ⟨not⟩ die. Offering: mastic.

Recipe number twenty-one, in a handbook written over a scraped-off book of church readings. It was written for any mother who had already buried children and was afraid to love the next one. Whether it worked is not the point. What lasts is the binding: arms held, a promise written down, someone saying certainly when nothing was certain.

Edition by Edward Love, edited by K. Dosoo and M. Preininger, team revision. KYP T1328, P. Heid. Inv. Kopt. 686, 951–1000 CE. Link: KYP T1328; the manuscript can be seen at Heidelberg.

Contains information from the Kyprianos Database, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). Line numbers omitted.

The dead one's suffering (KYP T554)

Content note: death and a curse.

Truly (?), these are the six powers of Death, they who bring every sickness upon every man. I adjure you, O dead one by this bone (?) that I will place under your back that just as you have suffered, you will bring your suffering upon …

Written on a cow's rib and found in a tomb shaft at Asyut, this curse asks the dead to act as a carrier: take what you suffered and pass it on. The victim's name is lost, which is a mercy. Grief is tempted by this spell at least once. The cards here are about the other choice: carrying it yourself.

Translation by Korshi Dosoo, based on Jochem Kahl's edition, with Dosoo's corrections, team revision. KYP T554, Asyut "Magical Bone", 601–1000 CE. Link: KYP T554.

Contains information from the Kyprianos Database, which is made available here under the Open Database License (ODbL). Line numbers omitted.

The Mistletoe's Relations

In the case of the misseltoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to the other, it is equally preposterous to account for the structure of this parasite, with its relations to several distinct organic beings, by the effects of external conditions, or of habit, or of the volition of the plant itself.

A parasite is never just one relationship. Darwin picked the mistletoe to show that a single plant could need a tree, a bird and an insect all at once, and that no theory of mere habit could explain it.

Source: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1st ed. (London: John Murray, 1859), Introduction, p. 3. Text: Project Gutenberg. Public domain in the US. Pairs with: Wands (parasitic plants): Ace or Page of Wands A note from 2026: Mistletoe is a hemiparasite: it makes its own sugar and takes water and minerals from the host. Not every mistletoe has separate sexes or insect pollinators, though European Viscum album has both.

Public domain in the United States.

One General Law

…it may not be a logical deduction, but to my imagination it is far more satisfactory to look at such instincts as the young cuckoo ejecting its foster-brothers,—ants making slaves,—the larvæ of ichneumonidæ feeding within the live bodies of caterpillars,—not as specially endowed or created instincts, but as small consequences of one general law, leading to the advancement of all organic beings, namely, multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

Darwin closes his chapter on instinct by gathering the cruelest habits he knows, the cuckoo, the slave-making ant and the wasp larva inside a living caterpillar, and refusing to call them designed.

Source: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1st ed. (John Murray, 1859), ch. VII "Instinct," closing paragraph. Text: Project Gutenberg. Public domain in the US. Pairs with: Major Arcana: Judgement or Wheel of Fortune A note from 2026: "The advancement of all organic beings" is Victorian faith in progress. Modern evolution has no built-in direction, and selection is about reproductive success more than strength.

Public domain in the United States.

Quite at Home

I opened fourteen nests of F. sanguinea, and found a few slaves in all. Males and fertile females of the slave-species are found only in their own proper communities, and have never been observed in the nests of F. sanguinea. The slaves are black and not above half the size of their red masters, so that the contrast in their appearance is very great. When the nest is slightly disturbed, the slaves occasionally come out, and like their masters are much agitated and defend the nest: when the nest is much disturbed and the larvæ and pupæ are exposed, the slaves work energetically with their masters in carrying them away to a place of safety. Hence, it is clear, that the slaves feel quite at home.

Darwin dug up fourteen nests of the blood-red ant and found captives in every one, working beside their captors as if they had never lived anywhere else.

Source: Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1st ed. (John Murray, 1859), ch. VII "Instinct," on the slave-making instinct. Text: Project Gutenberg. Public domain in the US. Pairs with: Swords (ants): Seven or Five of Swords A note from 2026: Biologists now say "dulosis" or "social parasitism." The captives were stolen as pupae and imprint on the raiders' nest scent, so "quite at home" is chemically true.

Public domain in the United States.

The Massacre of the Males

Before the bewildered parasites are able to realise that the happy laws of the city have crumbled, dragging down in most inconceivable fashion their own plentiful destiny, each one is assailed by three or four envoys of justice; and these vigorously proceed to cut off his wings, saw through the petiole that connects the abdomen with the thorax, amputate the feverish antennae, and seek an opening between the rings of his cuirass through which to pass their sword.

Every autumn the hive turns on its drones. Maeterlinck, a playwright, wrote the eviction as an execution.

Source: Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life of the Bee, trans. Alfred Sutro (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1901), Book VII, "The Massacre of the Males," sec. 95. Text: Project Gutenberg. Public domain in the US. Pairs with: Swords: Ten of Swords, or Major Arcana: Justice A note from 2026: Workers mostly push the drones out and let them starve rather than cutting them apart. The eviction follows the autumn nectar shortage, and the "envoys of justice" are poetry.

Public domain in the United States.

Equality in the Presence of the Maggot

The chemistry of man's final dissolution is eloquent enough of our emptiness: there is no need to add imaginary horrors. The worm of the sepulchre is an invention of cantankerous minds, incapable of seeing things as they are. Covered by but a few inches of earth, the dead can sleep their quiet sleep: no fly will ever come to take advantage of them. At the surface of the soil, exposed to the air, the hideous invasion is possible; ay, it is the invariable rule. For the melting down and remolding of matter, man is no better, corpse for corpse, than the lowest of the brutes. Then the fly exercises her rights and deals with us as she does with any ordinary animal refuse. Nature treats us with magnificent indifference in her great regenerating factory: placed in her crucibles, animals and men, beggars and kings are one and all alike. There you have true equality, the only equality in this world of ours: equality in the presence of the maggot.

Fabre spent his life watching insects in his own yard. Here he looks at the blowfly and finds the only democracy he trusts.

Source: J.-Henri Fabre, The Life of the Fly, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1913), ch. XIV "The Bluebottle: The Laying." Text: Project Gutenberg. Public domain in the US. Pairs with: Major Arcana: Death A note from 2026: Some flies do reach buried bodies: phorid "coffin flies" (Conicera) dig down to them, and forensic entomologists record it.

Public domain in the United States.

Destruction Crumb by Crumb

Pain is a patent of nobility; it is more pronounced in proportion as the sufferer belongs to a higher order. In the lower ranks of animal life, it must be greatly reduced, perhaps even nil, especially when life, in the throes of evolution, has not yet acquired a stable equilibrium. The white of an egg is living matter, but endures the prick of a needle without a quiver. Would it not be the same with the chrysalis of the great peacock, dissected cell by cell by hundreds of infinitesimal anatomists? Would it not be the same with the pupa of the flesh fly? These are organisms put back into the crucible, reverting to the egg state for a second birth. There is reason to believe, therefore, that their destruction crumb by crumb is merciful.

Watching tiny wasps eat a fly pupa from inside, Fabre tries to talk himself into believing it does not hurt.

Source: J.-Henri Fabre, The Life of the Fly, trans. A. Teixeira de Mattos (Dodd, Mead, 1913), ch. XVI "A Parasite of the Maggot." Text: Project Gutenberg. Public domain in the US. Pairs with: Swords: Three or Nine of Swords A note from 2026: Whether insects feel pain is still debated, and the evidence for pain-like states in insects keeps growing. Pupal tissue does partly break down during metamorphosis, but it does not "revert to the egg state."

Public domain in the United States.

Death's Artisans

The two corpses, already decomposing, have begun to smell. Whoever approaches with eyes that do not see turns away his head and passes on. The observer stops and lifts the remains with his foot; he looks. A world is swarming underneath; life is eagerly consuming the dead. Let us replace matters as they were and leave death's artisans to their task. They are engaged in a most deserving work. To know the habits of those creatures charged with the disappearance of corpses, to see them busy at their work of disintegration, to follow in detail the process of transmutation that makes the ruins of what has lived return apace into life's treasure house…

Two small corpses on a path. Most people walk past. Fabre stops, lifts them with his foot, and looks.

Source: J.-Henri Fabre, The Life of the Fly, trans. A. Teixeira de Mattos (Dodd, Mead, 1913), ch. IX "The Greenbottles," opening. Text: Project Gutenberg. Public domain in the US. Pairs with: Major Arcana: Death or The Hermit; or Pentacles

Public domain in the United States.

The Mushroom

The mushroom is the elf of plants, At evening it is not; At morning in a truffled hut It stops upon a spot As if it tarried always; And yet its whole career Is shorter than a snake's delay, And fleeter than a tare. 'T is vegetation's juggler, The germ of alibi; Doth like a bubble antedate, And like a bubble hie. I feel as if the grass were pleased To have it intermit; The surreptitious scion Of summer's circumspect. Had nature any outcast face, Could she a son contemn, Had nature an Iscariot, That mushroom, -- it is him.

Dickinson's mushroom arrives overnight, leaves before you trust it, and is cast as nature's Judas.

Source: Emily Dickinson, "The Mushroom," Poems by Emily Dickinson, Second Series, ed. T. W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891), Part III "Nature," no. XXV. This is the 1891 Higginson–Todd text only. Text: Project Gutenberg. Public domain in the US. Pairs with: Pentacles (fungi): Page of Pentacles, or Major Arcana: The Magician A note from 2026: The overnight arrival is accurate: the mushroom swells quickly from fungal threads that were already in the soil.

Public domain in the United States.

The Worm in the Grasshopper

The grasshoppers in the meadows below the city of Philadelphia are very much infested with a species of Gordius, probably the same as the former, but in a different stage of development. More than half the grasshoppers in the locality mentioned contain them; but those in drier places, as in the fields west and north of Philadelphia, are quite rarely infested, for I have frequently opened large numbers without finding one worm. The number of Gordii in each insect varies from one to five, their length from three inches to a foot; they occupy a position in the visceral cavity, where they lie coiled among the viscera, and often extend from the end of the abdomen forward through the thorax even into the head; their bulk and weight are frequently greater than all the soft parts, including the muscles, of their living habitation. Nevertheless, with this relatively immense mass of parasites, the insects jump about almost as freely as those not infested.

Joseph Leidy, Philadelphia's great microscopist, opened grasshoppers from the meadows below the city and found worms up to a foot long coiled inside insects that went on jumping almost as freely as the rest.

Source: Joseph Leidy, A Flora and Fauna within Living Animals, Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1853), Introduction, p. 6 (footnote). Text: Internet Archive scan. Public domain in the US. Text note: Copied from the scan's OCR and checked word for word against the page image. One OCR error was corrected ("Grordit" to Gordii). Pairs with: Cups: Four or Eight of Cups, or Major Arcana: The Hanged Man A note from 2026: Hair-worms are their own phylum, not true nematodes. Leidy did not know the life cycle. We now know the worm drives its host toward water, and the adult escapes into it.

Public domain in the United States.

How Parasites Get In

The intestinal canal of animals is most frequently infested by entoparasites on account of the ease with which their germs enter with the food. Aquatic animals are more troubled by entozoa than those which are terrestrial, because the water affords a better medium of access than the air. Terrestrial animals, on the other hand, are more infested by ectoparasites because their covering of hair, wool, and feathers is more favorable to their protection and reproduction. A low degree of organic activity and slowly digestible food favor the development of entoparasites, and hence they are more frequent in the relatively sluggish herbivora than in the carnivora. Comparatively indigestible food, and such as contains but a small proportion of nutritive matter, from its long retention in the alimentary canal, favors the development of entozoic and entophytic germs more than that in which the contrary conditions prevail. Animals subsisting upon the endosmosed juices of the tissues of other animals, and of plants, are rarely infested by parasites, as in the case of the hemipterous insects, aphides, etc., because such food is necessarily free from parasites or their germs. Entozoa themselves, on this account, are not infested.

Leidy sets out the doors by which parasites enter a body: with food, through water, and under hair, wool and feathers.

Source: Joseph Leidy, A Flora and Fauna within Living Animals, Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1853), Introduction, p. 13. Text: scan or ebook. Public domain in the US. Text note: Copied from the scan's OCR and checked word for word against the page image. Line-break hyphens were rejoined and one footnote mark was removed. Pairs with: Cups: Page or Two of Cups, or Major Arcana: Temperance A note from 2026: Several claims here have not held up. Sap-feeders such as aphids do carry parasites and symbionts, parasites can have parasites of their own, and plant-eaters are not reliably more parasitized than meat-eaters.

Public domain in the United States.

Every Wound Healed

The sad memory of departed friends is soon incrusted over with sublime and pleasing thoughts, as their monuments are overgrown with moss. Nature doth thus kindly heal every wound. By the mediation of a thousand little mosses and fungi, the most unsightly objects become radiant of beauty. There seem to be two sides to this world, presented us at different times, as we see things in growth or dissolution, in life or death. For seen with the eye of a poet, as God sees them, all are alive and beautiful; but seen with the historical eye, or the eye of the memory, they are dead and offensive. If we see Nature as pausing, immediately all mortifies and decays; but seen as progressing, she is beautiful.

Two months after his brother John died, Thoreau watched moss and fungus grow over monuments, and wrote about grief.

Source: Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, ed. Bradford Torrey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), Journal, vol. I (Writings, vol. VII), entry for March 13, 1842. Text: scan or ebook. Public domain in the US. Text note: The editor's footnote marker was removed. Pairs with: Pentacles: Six of Pentacles, or Major Arcana: Death or The Star A note from 2026: None needed. It fits the modern picture of fungi and mosses as the woods' first colonisers and recyclers.

Public domain in the United States.

Rooted in Other Minds

So, if our light-and-air-seeking tendencies extend too widely for our original root or stem, we must send downward new roots to ally us to the earth. Also there are parasitic plants which have their roots in the branches or roots of other trees, as the mistletoe, the beech-drops, etc. There are minds which so have their roots in other minds as in the womb of nature,—if, indeed, most are not such?!

After quoting Asa Gray on aerial roots, Thoreau wonders whether some minds live on others the way mistletoe and beech-drops do.

Source: Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, ed. Bradford Torrey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), Journal, vol. II (Writings, vol. VIII), entry for May 20, 1851. Text: scan or ebook. Public domain in the US. Text note: The "?!" is Thoreau's own. Pairs with: Wands: Two or Page of Wands, or Major Arcana: The High Priestess A note from 2026: Mistletoe is a hemiparasite: it makes its own sugar and draws water and minerals through a haustorium, not true roots. Beech-drops (Epifagus) is a full parasite on beech roots.

Public domain in the United States.

The Parasite Is No Idler

Well, since I have been studying the Bee who endows her family with the property of others, I have not yet seen anything in her that points to slothfulness. On the contrary, the parasite leads a laborious life, harder than that of the worker. Watch her on a slope blistered by the sun. How busy she is, how anxious! How briskly she covers every inch of the radiant expanse, how indefatigable she is in her endless quests; in her visits, which are generally fruitless! Before coming upon a nest that suits her, she has dived a hundred times into cavities of no value, into galleries not yet victualled. And then, however kindly her host, the parasite is not always well received in the hostelry. No, it is not all roses in her trade. The expenditure of time and labour which she finds necessary in order to house an egg may easily equal or even exceed that of the worker in building her cell and filling it with honey.

Fabre defends the cuckoo-bee against the charge of laziness. Whatever else it is, it works for a living.

Source: J.-Henri Fabre, The Mason-Bees, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1914), ch. IX "The Theory of Parasitism." Text: scan or ebook. Public domain in the US. Pairs with: Swords: Seven of Swords, or Major Arcana: The Chariot A note from 2026: Fabre was arguing that parasitism did not evolve. The evidence now says it did: cuckoo bees evolved from nest-building ancestors many times, and their closeness to their hosts, which Fabre noticed himself, is part of the proof. His point that parasites work hard stands.

Public domain in the United States.

How to Die

It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould!—painted of a thousand hues, and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last resting-place, light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but merrily they go scampering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot, ordering no iron fence, whispering all through the woods about it,—some choosing the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering beneath, and meeting them half-way. How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.

In "Autumnal Tints," printed five months after he died, Thoreau watches the fallen leaves go back into the ground and takes them as teachers.

Source: Henry D. Thoreau, "Autumnal Tints," section "Fallen Leaves," in Excursions (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863); first printed in The Atlantic Monthly, October 1862. Text: scan or ebook. Public domain in the US. Pairs with: Pentacles: Ten or Four of Pentacles, or Major Arcana: Death A note from 2026: Thoreau does not name the decomposers. The "subtle chemistry" that turns leaves into soil is done mostly by fungi and bacteria.

Public domain in the United States.