Pretty Parasites Tarot — Guide, 2026 Edition

Work-in-Progress Sample, October 1, 2026

By Franky Forlorn and the Firm

This is a draft sample of the 2026 edition of the Pretty Parasites Tarot guide, shared for discussion and not yet for publication. It collects the introduction, all twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana, and all four suits: the Wands, the Cups, the Swords and the Pentacles. The text is still being edited and fact-checked, so expect changes.

Introduction

Greetings fellow sapiens sapiens, you are about to go on a journey which itself is made of journeys which are made of other journeys still. Indeed, as an old woman once said, "It's journeys all the way down, and up, and side to side." If you are of the genus homo, you are likely taking this journey on planet 22956 (otherwise known as Terra) by using your FOXP2 gene, one of the genes you need to learn to speak. Most of your fellow vertebrates carry a version of this gene. Each copy of the FOXP2 is unique, but yours is the uniquest. When your version of the gene was spliced into mice, their pups really did start calling differently. Give it a few more generations and they will be singing 1930s showtunes and suing for liberation on the grounds that their universal rights are being violated by human scientists, which will of course be entirely correct. So as you can see, your copy of the gene is very special indeed. It not only helps you use language, but also to build a robust ethical system usually deployed exclusively to justify the human atrocities perpetrated against the other living beings on Terra. However, it can just as easily be used to sincerely weigh the costs and benefits any action has to any part in the equation, so that any homo reading these words is capable of at least in theory sympathizing with the oppressed and acting so as to minimize the suffering caused by your species.

To undertake the present journey all you need to do is draw a card from the deck, which tells the story of one particular human on her journey through a single rotation around your home star. Each card describes some event or element of her journey. Whether you think it does or does not pertain to you personally is entirely up to you, but what you consciously acknowledge and what is really going on are rarely one and the same. All any of us can do is strive to better understand our present circumstance. Each card contains an image, and this guide is intended to assist you in the decipherment of that image, but ultimately only you can determine what it means. After you draw the first card and consider its meaning, reflect upon your current situation of which you may be blissfully unaware, especially if your situation is a perilous one. However, if your situation is benign or beatific then the card will help you recognize just how good you have it. You may continue drawing card after card; indeed, although there are 78 cards in the deck, there are an infinite number of ways in which they can be combined and interpreted. For instance, you may draw the card of the Magician from the deck, put it back, reshuffle the deck, and draw it again and again and again without end. Infinity is a type of magic and it is everywhere.

On reading the Tarot. There are as many ways to read these cards as there are ways to read a single life. No life is purely one thing or the other. The hookworm that drinks your blood also quiets your immune system, so thoroughly that allergy researchers have let its larvae burrow into volunteers' skin to see whether it would calm them. It mostly didn't, which is its own lesson about good intentions. As the teenage Mary Shelley so elegantly showed, monsters, like all of us, are doing the best they can with the only intentions they possess. If we can learn anything from what we call "evil," it is to be wary of our own ambitions and desires, our drives and instincts, our belief in our own sense of righteous justice. But I digress. My meaning here is that not even the most seemingly clearcut things are good or bad, but good and bad. Thus, when we look at some aspect of our lives reflected in the cards, we must try to see as much of the picture as possible. What dangers lurk behind the auspicious job indicated by, say, the Ace of Pentacles, or the noble lover joining us in equable union shown in the Two of Cups? Thus, each card (whether reversed or not) is asking us to reflect upon some aspect of our lives, and upon reflection gain a better understanding of who we are and where we're going. One of the best examples of the double nature of each card can be seen in the sixth and fifteenth cards of the Major Arcana—the Lovers and the Devil—which are often depicted by two people standing in the foreground with a larger-than-life angel standing over them. In the Lovers card that angel is Raphael, in the Devil card—Lucifer. The latter is the former in a dark mirror—their isomorphism speaking to a foundational truth. As humans, we tend to be biased towards a positive outcome in the future. This is the hope necessary for crossing uncharted oceans and exploring the galaxy. But without caution, this hope all too often results in hubris with our little waxy wings melting because we didn't bother to factor in the heat coefficient of flying so close to a star.

The Major Arcana

0 · The Fool

Strengths: self-reflection, journey, curiosity, time, hope, experimentation

Risks: betrayal, instability, naiveté, entropy, absconder, error

Card: There is a new journey afoot. Be brave. Be curious. Curiosity is the sine qua non double-edged sword. Without it, we cannot intelligently move forward. But moving forward, intelligently or not, always poses new risks and challenges. What might these be? Look around. Be cautiously optimistic.

Philosopher: You

You are the Fool. This might be confusing since aren't all these cards supposed to be about you? Isn't everything really just about you? Would the world even exist if you suddenly disappeared? As far as the Tarot goes, it is definitely all about you, so wouldn't having a specific card that's supposed to be you be a little redundant? Well, young grasshopper, if the Tarot is like an arcane mirror held up to your narcissistic soul, then the Fool is a double mirror. Having the Fool in your reading means that perhaps it is time to reflect upon your own reflection. Of all the chimera and doppelgangers that populate a Tarot deck, the Fool may be the most sensible one of them all, because unlike the rest of the gang, she is perfectly ready to admit her ignorance. She is a ray of light breaking through the musty cavern of that cave that will live in philosophical infamy. If you get this card, take this as an opportunity to reflect upon the lies and misconceptions you perpetrate upon yourself on a minute by minute, day to day, birth to death basis. Not that this will somehow make you magically aware of them all or even give you the power to change your devious behavior, but that by recognizing your own malarky you will think a little less highly of yourself and in consequence be a little more forgiving, a little more practical about your expectations and potential, and look at the universe with just a little humility—condemning neither your own failures nor those of others, for the World is a cruel angel that neither loves nor cares about anything you do. You are but a traveler, but it is up to you whether you are the obnoxious, self-entitled tourist or the curious mendicant, whose only desire is to wonder at the day that God has wrought and to respect his fellow travelers—be they vegetable, animal, or mineral. Although today the Fool is commonly considered to be the first card of the Major Arcana (as in the Rider-Waite deck), in the older versions (such as the Marseille deck) she is placed at the end. Thus, the Fool is the link between The Magician of all beginnings and possibilities and the World of ultimate enlightenment and fulfillment. She is the immutable cycle of reproduction and destruction. She's okay with the entropy that makes time possible. She is the passerby of whom Jesus speaks in the Gospel according to Thomas. She is the holy fool of Slavic folklore. She is the prince of India who sat under a tree. She is the ancient Greek who asked the unconquerable youth to please "Get out of my light."

I · The Magician: The Cytoplasmic Conjurer

Organism: Wolbachia pipientis

Strengths: genius, originality, creativity, innovation, perfection, inspiration, self-empowerment, action, deduction, synthesis, pedagogy, revelation, imagination, passion, achievement, teacher

Risks: self-importance, hubris, simplism, dissimulation, pretension, cataclysm, illusion, fabrication, chaos, isolation, madness, dissolution, misinterpretation, depression, solipsism

Card: The Magician is genius. Genius doesn't win the game. It changes the rules so thoroughly that its winning looks like luck. A brilliant person or idea is waiting inside something bigger than itself. Don't waste it. Not everyone will like the new rules, least of all the people they were written against.

Motto: Make it new.

Philosophers: René Descartes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ada Lovelace

Professions: Engineer, musician, philosopher, scientist, architect, stage magician

In ancient Rome your genius was the spirit that arrived with you at birth, and the word goes back to an old root meaning to beget. Keep that in mind, because the Magician of this deck is the greatest genius of begetting on the planet, and it's too small to see.

Wolbachia is a bacterium that lives inside the cells of insects and their relatives. It's in somewhere between two-fifths and two-thirds of insect and other arthropod species, depending on who's counting. It passes from mother to child inside the egg. It can't ride in sperm, which strips itself down to a set of instructions and a tail. So to Wolbachia every male is a dead end, the last stop on a line that goes nowhere. A lesser parasite would sulk. The Magician changes the rules.

Here are its tricks, in order of increasing nerve. When an infected male mates with an uninfected female, her eggs die. Uninfected mothers keep losing broods, so each generation there are more infected ones. In woodlice it turns genetic males into females, which is career advice nobody asked for. In some wasps it settles the question entirely, and the females reproduce without males at all. And on Samoa, in the butterfly Hypolimnas bolina, it killed male embryos until males were about one in a hundred.

This is where the Magician takes a bow. Then the butterflies did what audiences always do eventually: they worked out the trick. A gene that suppressed it spread, and within about ten generations the males were back. Schopenhauer said genius hits a target no one else can see. He didn't mention that the target can learn to duck.

Now the final flourish. In Yogyakarta, researchers released mosquitoes carrying Wolbachia, which makes it hard for the dengue virus to grow inside them, and dengue cases fell by 77 percent. We saw the trick, and instead of ducking we hired the magician.

Galileo, Ada Lovelace, and Évariste Galois, dead at twenty, all changed the rules from inside systems that hadn't asked to be changed. Wolbachia does the same thing without a biography. When you draw this card, work from inside, change the rules, and remember that the audience is always watching your hands.

II · The High Priestess

Strengths: wisdom, learning, patience, reflection, serenity, life, science, reserved, reason over emotion, gynocentrism

Risks: inaction, conservatism, protectionism, secretiveness, esoterism, dissimulation

Card: The High Priestess is the wisdom of knowledge and experience. This is the time to meditate not to act. Take a careful inventory of your surroundings. Look outside yourself. Compare your beliefs with the world around you. Put your assumptions to the test. Test your hypotheses. Falsify your beliefs. Be the naturalist, the scientist, the student—the world of facts is infinite. Try and learn some of them.

Motto: Look out.

Philosophers: Anne Conway, Hannah Arendt, Mary Anning

Where the Magician represents innate genius, the High Priestess represents the wisdom that comes from close reading of the text, be it the words of a book, the windows of a building, or the isotopes of Bohrium. She is the great student of history and science. Where the Magician tries to access the noumena through self-reflection and self-expression, the High Priestess seeks to understand the great mysteries of life by looking outside herself, by paying attention to the very small and the very large. Where the Magician strives to make it new, the High Priestess studies the past be this the formation of stars and galaxies or nuclei of cells and atoms. Where the Magician is set apart by their genius, the High Priestess seeks to reconcile the experience of all people through the pursuit of truth. Where the Magician uses deductive logic and works from first principles, the High Priestess is an empirical thinker whose careful observations are used to describe the world through inductive propositions. Where the Magician is often prescriptive, she is most often descriptive. She would never tell someone what to do directly, but show through example and experience what she believes to be the correct path to knowledge. She sits in stillness. From there she's able to access realms others pass by without noticing. She uses silence and non-action to harness this power. She is no solipsist. Where the Magician acts, the High Priestess ruminates.

She holds the keys to the doors of knowledge, light, and life. For her, learning is a kind of repeated birth. She never trusts appearances and is never prey to illusion; she is sober. Anyone can acquire her wisdom. You simply follow the path that leads to understanding, keep a taste for life, and know the value of the things around you.

She hides her hard-earned knowledge in a world of men. Do not take her reserved reticence for humility. She is incredibly proud of the hard work she's done to gain her immense knowledge. She is quite judgmental, but would scarcely let you know. Few know what she really thinks. Unlike the Magician she does not divulge her ideas readily. She is no showman. But if she does deign to teach you something, listen carefully. Pay attention!

III · The Empress

Strengths: love, emotion, motivation, gynocentrism, abundance, productivity, generosity, pragmatism, communication, affection, birth, growth

Risks: greed, selfishness, ingroup bias, prejudice, dependence, intransigence, possessiveness, protectionism, ignorance, gaucherie, indiscretion, crudeness

Card: The Empress is fecundity, reproduction—sexy time. Ask, "What is the meaning of life?" and the empress will tell you—babies and family. They are, after all, such little miracles, each and every one. Is that what you want? Is that what other people around you want? Making as many copies of yourself as you can. People say it's the most selfless act—to make genetic reproductions of themselves. How selfish are your genes? Wag.

Motto: Make it so. It's raining DNA outside.

Philosophers: Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, Rousseau, Thoreau

For her the meaning of life is physical reproduction be it the cotton seeds floating in the summer forest or tiny octopuses floating in the waters of the ocean, RNA or DNA, by hook or by crook—she will make more babies. Ask a biologist why she bothers with sex at all, when cloning would be so much simpler, and one good answer is parasites. Every child shuffled from two parents is a new lock the old keys don't fit. The Empress runs so fast because something is always chasing her. Unlike the High Priestess she cares not for the arcane secrets of the world. Unlike the Magician she cares not for new ideas of noetic reproduction. Give her the lustful juices of meiosis and mitosis, sex and birth. She is both lover and midwife. Through her the selfish gene finds its greatest expression. She interacts with the world via consumption and visceral reconstruction. She is the octopus mother who stops eating to guard her eggs and dies soon after they hatch. She is the hive queen who turns honey into thousands of eggs. Where the Magician obsesses over the production of new ideas, she has all the meaning she needs in her gonads—her ovaries is all the meaning she needs. She does not seek to make it new, only to remake another copy perpetually repeating the cycle of birth and death. She is the reproduction of the physical body. When we speak of the selfish gene, we are speaking of the Empress—the impulse to reproduce at any cost. She prefers pot roast to cosmology, casserole to chemistry. Malthus be damned, she'll make more babies as long as she has enough food. She swings her X like a mace, her shopping cart like a tank in Stalingrad. If she had her way, you'd have four kids by 30 and your profiles would be dedicated to baby pictures. It is never quiet. There is laughter at the sheer fact of being alive. Life flows through her. She doesn't strain to control herself. She is the easiest Epicurean to satisfy—give her food and she's happy, give her sex and she is satisfied, give her babies and the meaning of life has been fulfilled. There is no boundary between her and nature. She sits in the garden and she is the garden.

IV · The Emperor

Strengths: administration, charisma, competency, dynamism, efficacy, guidance, leadership, magnetism, power

Risks: animosity, ingroup bias, egotism, narcissism, pugnacity, prejudice, misogyny, paranoia, spleneticism, truculency

Card: The Emperor is boss. They are good at being boss—at controlling and manipulating the people and environment around them. But this says nothing about the goals in and of themselves? The problem being is that Emperors tend to think they're great. The Magician, High Priestess, and Empress pale in comparison when it comes to the ego of the Emperor, who will put his personal goals above all else, because again, the Emperor is the boss.

Motto: Trust me.

Philosopher: Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili

The Emperor is an authoritarian, rock-solid realistic character, sure of himself and his prerogatives. He knows what he wants and how to obtain it. The Emperor reigns over the physical and material world by sheer force of character and his knowledge of life. He is a father with a protective and domineering personality—a family head who is well aware of his responsibilities, which he treats seriously. At best he doesn't have a sense of humor, at worst he's a sadist. Imagine an orchestra conductor who for kicks makes the wind section play in earmuffs or just with no ears at all. He's got the power not only to have your ears removed, but he'll watch and laugh as they're sliced off by the sycophantic brass section who'll pretend to be having a jolly time as blood and screams fill the room. Are you getting the gist here? Like the Empress, he gives very few fucks about emotional or intellectual arguments against his prerogative, but unlike the Empress, he may actually enjoy humiliating and hurting other people. But this, of course, is not necessarily true. There is such a thing as a benevolent dictator. Hell you may even believe in God, and who is God if not a dictator who hopefully is benevolent. Although if God is an all-powerful benevolent dictator, why do They allow so much suffering? Pick your own example. Anyone who has sat in a children's cancer ward has one, and I translated in one long enough to stop expecting an answer. Anyway, I digress. Sorry about that. Remember, no card in the Tarot is either bad or good. If you see the Emperor in your reading it could mean anything from a stern lover giving you some tough love that may in the end help you immensely to a colleague you should probably listen to even if they sound like a complete jerk, or it could just be that you are the boss whose vision really is the best way forward and that you need to work extra hard to bring everyone on board, not in a dictatorial way, but more by way of negotiation and incentives—you know benevolently.

V · The High Priest

Strengths: ataraxy, dignity, duty, responsibility, categorical imperative, deontology, philanthropy, superiority, unity, stability, patriotism, loyalty, scorn, sophrosyne

Risks: ambidexterity, apathy, bellicism, callousness, disesteem, impudence, hubris, hypocrisy, Machiavellianism, misanthropy, pedantism, chauvinism, nationalism, stoicism, zealotry, censorship, suppression

Card: The High Priest is duty. He is good at being an institution: he knows the rules, the rituals, the ladder, and who stands on which rung. That says nothing about whether the institution deserves him. Who in your life speaks for something larger than themselves? Is it something you'd give yourself to, or something that would give you up?

Motto: Trust the process.

Philosophers: Martin Luther King, Martin Luther, Edith Stein

The High Priest is no longer the High Priest—he's now called the Hierophant. Why? They didn't rename the Fool—the Poser (we're all posers, yes). They also didn't rename the Emperor or the Empress, but if they had you'd think they would have renamed them both, since like Bert and Ernie, Batman and Robin, Rick and Morty, Freud and Jung they are a pair, a sort of yin-yang if you will that would have no meaning if one of the two were removed. A yin without the yang would just be a black circle, which granted is a powerful symbol but just doesn't mean the same valence as when it's combined with the white symbolism of the yang. In this case, I will use the older name for this card, because I think it's useful to see him as a complement to the High Priestess, just like comparing the Emperor and Empress reveals some foundational meanings that may otherwise go unnoticed.

The High Priest, like the High Priestess, values the wisdom that comes from acquiring the knowledge of previous generations through books, rituals, and cultures. He is well read and understands the history of previous cultures and civilizations. However, unlike the reclusive and reticent High Priestess, he uses this knowledge in the public sphere. If the Emperor rules through the force of his character, the High Priest influences other people through the mechanisms of established social systems. The Emperor flouts convention, the High Priest embodies it. He is the man who's slowly risen through the ranks of power, be these academic, political, or religious. In the Marseille deck, he is called Le Pape—the pope—who can only be nominated to his rank if he was previously a cardinal, who in all likelihood was previously a priest and before that a deacon and before that an acolyte. You could just as easily call the card the Emeritus—an accomplished academic who's been the chair of her department, and was once an undergrad, graduate student, postdoc, associate professor, tenured professor, and so forth. By moving slowly through the ranks of power, he comes to understand them on a deep intuitive and rational level. The High Priestess would abhor having to deal with all these people, the High Priest revels in these social games and he knows how to win them. The trade off here is that the more time the High Priest spends on social games, the less time he has for the pursuit of knowledge, but through his interactions with so many brilliant people, he is superficially aware of all the important developments in his field. As time passes, the High Priestess gains a far deeper understanding of her art and science, while the High Priest becomes a generalist able to talk to any professional, but himself is not appraised of the detailed studies who are ultimately performed by the priestesses working silently away in their laboratories and studios.

So, the High Priest is someone whom you can count on and trust in whom you may confide; he will always know what should be done and unlike the Emperor he wants the organization to succeed. If someone else's success benefits the organization, but not him personally, if he is true to his nature, he will help that person achieve their goals. In essence, he is the unifier, a joiner of souls, a man of institution. He knows the rules of the game, and values the game above the individuals in it. This, of course, may cause him to sacrifice not only himself, but also other people. This makes him an incredibly dangerous person. If he decides you're not helping the game, the organization, the institution, he will take you down no matter how charismatic, talented, or well-meaning you might be. He respects the rules above individual people. This potentially makes him even crueler than the Emperor, who cares about himself above all else. If he turns on you, you can always console yourself that there are others who will sympathize with you and possibly help you once the dust has settled. Once the High Priest is done with you, you may find yourself entirely alone. People won't just shun you because they've been told to. They will cast you out as a pariah and consider their cruelty to be entirely justified.

Although the High Priest is not always a person of importance—a dignitary who exercises moral, intellectual, or political influence—he may be someone who plays the game by proxy and from the shadows. This is the Machiavellian puppet master who you might not have even noticed until something important happens.

When you draw this card, take the time to consider who in your life are not only intelligent but have the potential to sway the group toward some greater goal. Does this goal align with yours? Are you possibly positioning yourself to change some state of affairs that affects other people? In either case, take the time to consider the perspectives of others. Will the plan help or harm them? Is the betterhood of group worth hurting the minority? Even if only one person is harmed, is it worth it? The High Priestess may not be particularly inclined to help you, but she's just as unlikely to turn against you. She is neutral. The High Priest anything but.

Thus, the High Priest may seem philanthropic and misanthropic, sympathetic or callous, patriotic or apostate—it all depends on whether he's with you or against you. He may die as the great savior of his people, or be executed in disgrace as a great traitor of the nation. He will kill and die for whatever he believes benefits the virtuous institution of which he is merely a servant.

VI · The Lovers: The Canoe of Pairing

Organism: Schistosoma mansoni, a blood fluke

Strengths: affection, care, courtship, union, commitment, determination, friendship, passion, loyalty, romance

Risks: addiction, delusion, blindness, idolatry, ignorance, infatuation, codependency, frivolity, chaos, illusion, betrayal, mania, obsession, neurosis, zeal

Card: The Lovers are eros—sexual love. Evolution has molded love as one of its most powerful drives. The desire to love and to be loved may be the strongest bond homo sapiens can muster. They will do everything to protect their union. From wizened statesmen (Anthony and Cleopatra) to frivolous teenagers (Juliet and Romeo), they are ready to sacrifice everything at the altar of love. Consider who around you is in love. Are you? Does someone love you? How will this affect everything else?

Motto: I defy you, stars.

Philosophers: Sappho and Phaon, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, Dante and Beatrice, Henry VIII and his wives, Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier of Monaco

The Lovers represent… well… love. There are, of course, many different kinds of love. There is philia—love between friends and family; pragma—enduring love; storge—familiar love; ludus—playful love; philautia—selflove; and agape—selfless love for humankind just to name a few. But for a card that has historically depicted a man and a woman (often nude) with an angel or angelic spirit hovering over them, it's safe to assume that the lovers in this case represent eros—romantic love. This is all I'll discuss here, but for those of you who think the Lovers card represents like the love between you, your grandma, and your mutual love of cribbage then more power to you, but let's be honest here—this card is about sex and all that it entails for meat machines whose prime directive is still "Be fruitful and multiply."

At this point, I considered including some quotes about how love is life (Gandhi) or strength (Abraham Lincoln) or beauty (Shakespeare) or God (choose your favorite religion), but instead I thought I'd share a quote by the 13th century Beguine mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp in which she uses the form of courtly love poetry, but here she is the knight and Love is the lady:

Hell is the seventh name
Of this Love wherein I suffer.
For there is nothing
Love does not engulf and damn.

— Hadewijch of Antwerp, Stanzaic Poem 33 (excerpt), trans. Mother Columba Hart, Hadewijch: The Complete Works (Paulist Press, 1980)

As Sonja reasons in Woody Allen's Love and Death: To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be unhappy, one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.

Imagine the first tragedy that comes to mind and love is the reason things go wrong or the reason someone is betrayed. From Shakespeare's Henry VI to the Tempest—love is what drives people to do rather unsavory things and more often than not leads to their untimely demise. For those of you who don't know who Margaret of Anjou is, check her out. Hailing from the love obsessed country of the Gauls, she appears in four Shakespeare plays and is a character driven by first being taken prisoner by Suffolk, who woos her for the king and for himself, then losing the love of her life, and then marrying a dolt whom she cannot love. The inability to love whom you're supposed to love being a salient drive to do rather unsavory things. She even took part in Love Day, a staged reconciliation in which old enemies walked hand in hand into St Paul's and were back at war within a year. Surprise, surprise. It's almost as if the very word sets people on edge and brings out their most atavistic instincts. And in Shakespeare's The Tempest, the sorcerer Prospero literally uses love as a weapon even though he's a nearly omnipotent wizard. The weaponization of love should make us wonder about what love really is. From the time humans stumbled out across the savannah to the kings of yore, love has played a central role in the species and its dynasty, I mean destiny. If human psychology were a Swiss Army knife, love would be the knife. Without love men would not only not compete for women (often murderously), but they wouldn't stick around to provide their beloved with the necessary resources to raise the product of their passionate union—essentially a helpless, premature fetus that not only can't even stand for upwards of a year, but can't obtain its own food for like four, eight, twelve years? I don't know. When are people old enough to fend for themselves? In some cases, I feel like the answer is something like two dozen generations of octopuses (highly intelligent creatures that seem to be fully independent their entire lives and who have no need for love, despite their ability to reason, play, and do many of the things humans tend to pride ourselves on). Anyway, although love is indispensable for homo sapiens, it's a veritable handicap for most other intelligent species.

The Lovers card is by far the most often tattooed by people who don't fully understand what it means in the Tarot and definitely don't understand what it means in the general scheme of evolutionary biology. So before you go off gracing your epidermis with this symbol of the consumerist arcane, or think you're somehow edgy because you tattoo the lovers as skeletons and think you're acknowledging the Lovers pair card in the Major Arcana—Death—let us consider the Lovers' actual pair card: the Devil.

The Lovers card usually depicts some sort of sexual pair: Kim Krans goes with the graceful eternal love of waterfowl—two geese flying majestically under a brilliant sun; Sam Guay references the biblical tree of knowledge by showing what looks like someone making out with an apple tree; or there's that edgy version of two skeletons kissing as in the Moon Readings deck (whomever Moon is). But here I'll just reference the 1909 Rider–Waite and the Tarot of Marseilles, which is the closest thing we have to the original deck which probably originated in Italy circa 1400. In both decks a man and a woman are portrayed with an angel above them like some puppet master either cajoling or directly controlling the pair. If we look at the Rider–Waite, the tree of knowledge is clearly portrayed by the female with a snake in that tree. The not so subtle imagery here doesn't need to be explained, but the fact that the actual devil is portrayed in the card is instructive, because in both the Marseilles and Rider-Waite, the only other card representing this triangle of man, woman, and angel is the Devil card. In the Rider-Waite, even the woman is again depicted with a piece of fruit. Now we might say, wait a minute, but the angel in the Lover card is good and the Devil is obviously bad, just because the two cards look the same doesn't mean they mean the same thing. Right? All sorts of things look like each other. It just happens to be that angels are involved in all the important things people do and so it would only make sense that an angel oversaw humanity's love and fall. But remember, there are actually two angels in the Lovers card. Lucifer is right there in the tree. Surely Lucifer doesn't need to be in that card. He already has his own card in the Devil card. But that's the rub folks, he is depicted in the Lovers card and he's literally intertwined with the tree that causes the fall of man—the original sin that makes God damn woman to the horror show of childbirth and man to his Sisyphean toil. Remember, the fall is not a good thing. To all the people, and I personally know two who've literally tattooed the Rider-Waite Lovers card on their thigh (don't think this is a coincidence), you've emblazoned yourself with one of the most recognizable depictions of the fall of our species. Presumably Adam loved Eve more than God, why else would he listen to her instead of God? I mean there had to be a lot of fruit to eat in the garden. When she presented him with the pomegranate or apple or whatever it was, he could have just picked up a pear or an orange, right? But he didn't and now we're all paying for their original sin committed in the name of love. With the angels (even the good ones) watching, not intervening just watching and you have to think what exactly were they thinking.

* * *

Most decks paint the Lovers as a garden wedding: two naked people, an angel overhead, a tree with a snake in it for anyone who needs reminding what gardens are for. Readers who know better will tell you the card was never really about romance. It is about choosing, about the values you bind yourself to when you bind yourself to someone. I'd put it more plainly. The Lovers is the card of what you agree to live inside.

Here is a marriage that happens in a vein. The male blood fluke is a small, pale, muscular worm with a long groove folded down his belly. The female is longer and thinner, and she lives in that groove, held along most of her length like a paddler in a canoe. The two of them lodge in the veins around a person's gut and stay there, paired, making eggs. It is the tenderest posture in the whole deck, and it takes place in your bloodstream. Biologists add one detail that the wedding painters never do: pairs can separate, and a worm can take a new partner. The female lays eggs only while she is held. Even here, fidelity is something that keeps getting chosen.

What makes them Lovers rather than a fling is time. In the early 1980s, doctors in Western Australia reviewed sixteen patients who had been diagnosed with schistosomiasis in a place where nobody catches it. Many were Polish refugees who had caught it in East African refugee camps, before they sailed for Australia in the early 1950s. Several had lived there more than thirty-one years, and the worms were still alive in them. The doctors could find no earlier record of a life that long. Thirty years later, a lab studying planarians, the flatworms famous for regrowing from a fragment, found that adult blood flukes carry similar stem cells, which keep rebuilding the worm's gut and muscle. The researchers were careful to say this probably helps explain the decades, not that it proves it. I like that caution. Nobody really knows why a marriage lasts either.

None of this is a love story for the host. In 2024 at least 253.7 million people needed treatment for blood flukes, and most of the harm comes from the eggs, which lodge in tissue and inflame it. The canoe floats on somebody else's river. That is the card's other face, and the one the garden paintings leave out: every union is also an ecology, and someone is paying for the water.

So when the Lovers comes up, the question isn't "Is this the one?" It is "What am I agreeing to live inside, and for how long?" The opportunity is the real thing: a bond that renews itself, cell by cell, long after the story says it should have worn out. The risk is the same thing seen from the vein wall, a long, comfortable arrangement that feeds on a body neither partner ever looks at.

Scene: two pale worms in a single curve, one cradled in the other's fold, drawn as a slender canoe gliding along a red-gold vessel; faint rings in the vessel wall like the growth rings of a tree, marking decades. Prompt: Write about a bond in your life that has lasted longer than you expected. What keeps rebuilding it? Then write one paragraph from the point of view of whatever carries it, the thing the bond floats on.

VII · The Chariot: Silver Rein to Water

Organism: Spinochordodes tellinii, a hairworm

Strengths: ambition, success, courage, energy, discernment, decision, victory, honor, status

Risks: arrogance, obstinacy, vanity

Card: The Chariot is prudence. There are always more than one thing driving any decision we make. It wouldn't be a decision if there weren't multiple choices. The Chariot depicts the ability to balance this choice and to navigate the multiple paths with strength and vision. Consider what the major choices are and remember that like alchemy the optimal result usually involves incorporating multiple elements of the situation. Life is not a zero-sum game—the middle path that incorporates the multiple propitious elements is better than rejecting one in favor of the other. It is harder to drive a chariot with more than one horse, but it is also the more powerful. Then again, the more horses the harder they are to control and too many horses are unruly. How many horses do you really need? Which are the best ones for this journey?

Motto: Make it so.

Philosophers: Maria the Jewess (Maria Hebraea), Cleopatra the Alchemist

In Plato's version, your soul is a charioteer with two horses, one noble and one wild, and wisdom is keeping them on the road. Plato never met the hairworm. It grows inside a cricket, coiled in the body cavity until it takes up most of the room. Then, on the right night, the cricket goes looking for water and jumps in. It is the most decisive thing the cricket ever does, and none of it is the cricket's idea. The worm slides out and swims off to find a mate, and the rein goes home without the horse.

The worm has thought of everything, including the crash. If a fish or a frog swallows the cricket, a hairworm can wriggle back out alive. So when this card turns up, count your horses, and then ask which of them is driving. Ambition, love, money, the voice that says water, now: some of what pulls your chariot was never yours. Prudence isn't having no passengers. It's knowing who they are.

The old moralists called prudence auriga virtutum, the charioteer of the virtues: the one that decides when courage is bravery and when it's just noise. The word comes from providentia, seeing ahead. It's a fine idea if you're sure who is holding the reins.

This is all well and good if you're a male aristocrat developing a system of virtue ethics in ancient Athens (where among other things—the eros between a boy and his teacher is considered to be the highest form of friendship) or the Grand Inquisitor, but how are the rest of us supposed to know what exactly counts as Good and what counts as Evil?

The word "prudence" derives from the Latin prudentia, meaning "foresight and sagacity." In this case, the virtue is the ability to judge between virtuous and vicious actions, not only in a general sense, but with regard to appropriate actions at a given time and place. Distinguishing between courageous and cowardly acts is an act of prudence. Distinguishing between necessary and unnecessary risk is also an act of prudence. The right type of risk is courage, the wrong type is cowardice.

If in the Lovers card we must decide whether a relationship is worth it, the Chariot makes us think about what it will take to make it work. All relationships, sexual or otherwise, involve compromise as much as dedication. You cannot have the latter without the former, but all too often we think we can force things by the sheer force of our will. However, the experienced driver knows that she can only do so much with the horses she has to work with. Driving a Chariot isn't just about having the strongest horses, more important is ensuring that the horses can work together. No matter how intelligently or ruthlessly you wield the reins, you'll get nowhere if the horses are pulling in opposite directions. If the horses cannot work together, it is best to choose the best one. Indeed, there are many journeys where it might be best to ditch the Chariot altogether or even abandon the horse if what you have ahead of you isn't a road but a dense forest or mountain or marshy bog or a sea. If we are greedy, there will be too many horses. If we are overconfident, we may fight battles we have no business in fighting. This relates to finances, society, and all too often love.

It is up to the Chariot driver to concentrate on her objective and to choose how many horses are best for her journey. A one horse chariot is swifter than two, but if you can harness four horses and manage to control them, the chariot will be faster and more enduring.

This card is meant to make you reflect on the different forces pulling you this way and that, and sometimes the right decision is to abandon them altogether and pursue your goals alone. Abandoning the Chariot is always an option—you are not bound to it.

VIII · Justice: The Appointed Tip

Organism: Dicrocoelium dendriticum, the lancet liver fluke

Strengths: courage, ethics, fairness, sagacity, equilibrium, order, morality

Risks: arrogance, discrimination, indifference, intolerance, obstinacy, oppression, vanity, over-cautiousness

Card: Justice is law. It concerns our personal morals and the ethics of society. It is also the way groups of people justify killing other (weaker) people. When someone is wounded and they have done something to offend society, they are at the mercy of Justice. In your life, consider who fits this category. Who's had a blow to their social standing and been weakened by this blow? Do people think they got what they deserved? Have you done something that would cause others to denigrate you? Or perhaps some injustice have been perpetrated upon you or your ingroup and you are ready to retaliate—to make sure the offenders come to Justice? In either case, put on the other girl's dress, and see things from her point of view.

Motto: Make it right. A millimeter to the left and a millimeter to the right, and the world would topple into the void.

Philosophers: Robert Sapolsky

Like the Fool, Justice is not placed in the same order across different decks—most frequently interchanged with Strength. In the Rider-Waite the VIII card is Strength not Justice, and in the Crowley-Harris Thoth deck, Justice is renamed as the Adjustment. Putting the Fool at both the beginning and the end of the Major Arcana makes sense since the Fool's journey is never really complete—since to be a person means to be a Fool, and to be a living person means being on a journey. So as long as you're a living person, the Fool is you. But why interchange Justice with Strength? Could it be because discipline requires Justice and punishment requires Strength? For what is Justice if it cannot be administered usually against the will of the unjust. This, of course, is the foundation of law, and the fact that Strength is so closely correlated with Justice in the Tarot, it is safe to assume that Justice in the Tarot, just as in life, is the representation of the law. Thus Justice is law becomes even more evident when we consider that of the four cardinal virtues represented in the Tarot, only three are given specific cards—Justice, Strength (fortitude), and Temperance—the fourth cardinal virtue, Prudence, is absent because it is combined with the Justice card.

Those who fail to take these risks are cowards—and nobody wants to be a coward, which is curious as it seems the most natural of responses to risk. Courage is such a weird concept, and is named neither as one of the four cardinal virtues, nor given a specific card in the Tarot, but Justice and Prudence frequently necessitate an act of courage, but then again Justice is often carried out on the part of the majority against the minority. From Shylock to Hester Prynne to OJ Simpson, whoever finds themselves at the mercy of Justice is not only subject to written law, but also the prejudice of the mob, whose sympathies have little to do with fairness and fairmindedness.

Surely the wronged have the right to Justice. Surely, many a crime has been prevented by the looming figure of the law—her scales and sword. Everyone has reasons for their actions and we can judge each person according to those reasons. Right? However, those reasons may even have little to do with her or who she is. And if you yourself are on the business end of the steely lady's sword, consider how you got here and whether you should defend your honor or capitulate to the crowd. Because Justice is always about the crowd, not even vigilante justice is ever the act of just one man, since the system of ethics that led him to perform the act is the product of centuries of law, millennia of society, and millions of years of evolution. Whether you are Hannah Arendt meditating on Eichmann or a Capuchin monkey who refuses to eat her cucumber, your sense of justice has been shaped by forces far greater than yourself. No one man can administer justice on their own. Although it is often a dish served to specific individuals, its preparation takes a team of cooks in a full kitchen. If Strength is water, Justice is wine. Justice is not natural. It is a complex, artificial process founded upon centuries of practice and heuristics, requiring the cooperation of large groups of people.

In the Tarot, Justice is both the most private and the most social of the cards. She is the ultimate judge of all our actions—the ethical mirror you hold up to your past.

The lancet fluke gets into an ant by way of a snail's slime, and the ant never learns the details. Dozens of flukes settle in its body. One of them, only one, moves to the front and touches the brain. From then on, when the evening cools, the ant climbs to the tip of a blade of grass and bites down and holds, waiting for a sheep. When the day warms, it lets go and walks back down to live like an ant, until the air cools again and it climbs back up to be sentenced. Justice as a daily commute.

Think about that front worm. It does the steering, and the whole crowd rides to the sheep on its work. It never builds the little shell the others hide in, so when the sheep digests the ant, the one that steered is, as far as anyone can tell, the one that doesn't survive. The others are often its clones. It dies so that copies of itself can arrive, which is either the purest altruism in nature or the most sensible selfishness, and Justice has never been able to tell the two apart. When Justice appears, ask where you are in this arrangement: the crowd, the one at the front, or the ant on the tip of the grass, holding on with all her strength to her own conviction.

As human beings, we have a pretty complicated relationship with the idea of justice, which is a gooey amalgam of our most personal sense of right and wrong and the most encompassing social ethics system we've created—namely the law. The idea of ethics and justice varies greatly from person to person, village to village, society to society, nation to nation, epoch to epoch. We are ready to kill the lowliest beggar and the greatest dictators in the name of justice—from code of Hammurabi to the Nuremberg Trials to Jim Crow, we create complicated moral systems to justify punishing and killing those we consider as having violated whatever hallowed code we subscribe to at the time.

In our own society, the Bible is literally associated with Justice. When a Supreme Court Justice swears their allegiance to the law, they do so on the Bible—our most hallowed text. What does this say about our concept Justice, when the book we intimately associate with the law contains the following statutes: Deuteronomy 25:11-12—"When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her." (The "secrets" here being genitals); Leviticus 19:19—"Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee"; Colossians 4:1 "Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven"; Leviticus 15:19-21—"And if a woman have an issue, and her issue in her flesh be blood, she shall be put apart seven days: and whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even. And every thing that she lieth upon in her separation shall be unclean: every thing also that she sitteth upon shall be unclean. And whosoever toucheth her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even" (i.e. people shouldn't sit in the same spot as a woman on her period). Numbers 5:11-31, "If a man's wife goes astray, and is unfaithful to him so that another man has sexual relations with her, and this is hidden from her husband... the priest shall take holy water in a clay jar; and put some dust from the tabernacle floor into the water ... then the priest...shall say to her... May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries" (i.e. dirty water causes abortions and adulteresses should drink a mixture of holy water and tabernacle floor dust); In a passage from Leviticus, there is a discussion about birds. Leviticus 11:13-19 states, "And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, And the vulture, and the kite after his kind; Every raven after his kind; And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl, And the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle, And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat" (i.e. don't eat owls. It's very specific: neither little owls, nor great owls shall ye eat); In Exodus 23:19, it states, "The first of the first fruits of thy land thou shalt bring into the house of the Lord thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk" (i.e. don't boil baby goats in milk); Exodus 21:5-6, the second book in the Old Testament, makes the following provision about how to treat an enslaved person: "And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: Then his master shall bring him unto the judges; he shall also bring him to the door, or unto the door post; and his master shall bore his ear through with an aul; and he shall serve him for ever" (i.e. brand your slaves in a court of law); Leviticus 10:6 provides instructions about grief, offered through the words of Moses: "And Moses said unto Aaron, and unto Eleazar and unto Ithamar, his sons, Uncover not your heads, neither rend your clothes; lest ye die, and lest wrath come upon all the people: but let your brethren, the whole house of Israel, bewail the burning which the Lord hath kindled" (i.e. don't show grief, just accept the Lord's punishment).

Of course, the above constitute the tribal taboos of ancient shepherds. As Christians, perhaps the presidents and justices sworn in on the Bible are more particular to the wisdom of Jesus. Let us see how he measures up. In Luke 14:26 Jesus says, "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." Not only does Jesus demand that his disciples dedicate all their attention to him, but he's unwilling to let them share that attention with their families. To be fair, Jesus wasn't just a jerk to his friends, he could also be quite cruel to strangers, like when he called a hungry woman a dog: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." But she came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help me." And he answered, "It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs" (Matthew 15:24-26). Although, to be fair, he also expected his followers to be ready to starve: "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink" (Matthew 6:25).

Perhaps the most famous account is of Jesus when he literally flipped the tables of a bunch of vendors who were selling doves at the temple. "Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves " (Matthew 21:12-13). Doesn't seem much in line with the "turn the other cheek" and "love your enemies" guy.

But Jesus wasn't just a jerk to people, his enmity also extended to trees: "The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, "May no one ever eat fruit from you again.'" That's right, Jesus was hungry, the fig tree had no fruit, and Jesus was so pissed he cursed the tree, and it died.

Of course, many Christians will point out that "Jesus Murders a Fig Tree" is a parable, an allegory that contains a deeper message or truth beyond "Fuck Fig Trees." The problem is that when Jesus spoke in parables, the Bible is pretty clearly about saying "So Jesus told us this parable" instead of "Jesus did this specific action that apparently we're supposed to figure out a deeper meaning from." Either way, it's not like Jesus spoke in parables in order to be understood. From Mark 4 "And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable. And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them." If there is another interpretation of this other than Jesus essentially saying "I don't want to be too clear otherwise everyone will get into heaven" I would love to hear it. Maybe it's also a parable?

If you thought the fig tree had it bad, there was also the time Jesus murdered a herd of pigs in Matthew 8. So let's set the scene. A herd of pigs is hanging out, eating things, and basically just chilling. That is, until Jesus meets two men with demons in them, and the demons, being practical, ask to be sent into the pigs instead. Jesus says "Go." The whole herd runs down the bank into the sea and drowns. If you've just read the Chariot card, you know the plot: a passenger takes the wheel and drives its animal into the water. The Gospel calls it a miracle; the hairworm calls it Tuesday.

So yeah, the foundational text our society uses to officiate the executors of Justice is based on a set of tribal taboos and the teachings of a petulant egomaniac who not only thought of himself as God, but went around flipping tables, hurting plants and animals, and purposely making things confusing so that only his friends could get into heaven.

However, perhaps you're one of those who are inclined more toward natural law, such as Karma, and believe Justice is a kind of universal tit-for-tat ledger that keeps a balance of all your good and bad deeds. Nevertheless, the tabulation of these universals in the ledger still depends on your ideas of what exactly good and bad things are and your definition of a good act may be very different from that of some other person. No matter how universal you think these universals are, they will not overlap perfectly with those of other people, which makes these Karma ledgers incompatible. A good deed on your part may cause someone suffering and vice versa. And since your good deeds don't carry over to other people's ledgers and vice versa, Karma is at best an imperfect system of accounts.

Karma is a Sanskrit word for action, and in the traditions that gave it to us it's less a cosmic revenge service than a law of consequences that follows you from one life to the next. The lancet fluke would find this familiar: it lives in a snail, then an ant, then a sheep, and each rebirth is paid for by someone else.

And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.

— Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.5, trans. F. Max Müller, Sacred Books of the East 15 (1884)

When Justice appears in your reading, consider if you're Hester Prynne or Abigail Williams? Who around you are the executors of Justice? Do you agree with them? What about their approach to Justice? How about their approach to discipline and punishment? Are they themselves just? What would that even mean? In life, your happiness is directly affected by the people around you and their ideas of justice. Whatever your idea of justice may be, compare it to that of other people. The more consilience between different people's concept of Justice, the better their ability to cooperate and avoid conflict.

Is there a natural law that applies to all sapiens and even sentients? What do you consider to be a universal right and who around you are having that right violated? Are the animals living in industrial farms being treated justly? How about all the people suffering and dying because they are denied access to medicine? Is it just for you to be walking around with two perfectly good kidneys when you really only need one and thousands of people are slowly dying on dialysis?

IX · The Hermit: Orange Lantern in Litter

Organism: Cordyceps militaris, a fungus that grows from buried moth pupae

Strengths: concentration, introspection, meditation, solitude, stillness, study, tranquility, pilgrimage, tenacity, intuition, wisdom, research, discovery, comprehension

Risks: conceit, isolation, loneliness, suspicion, resentment, condemnation, fatalism, obsession, persecution mania, illusion, self-centeredness, misanthropy, vanity, poverty, indifference

Card: The Hermit is meditation and clairvoyance. But why are they alone? Have they been ostracized by society, or was there some crisis that made them abandon the world? The inner light of her intuition lets her see much that is hidden from others. If she is wise, her understanding of herself gives her great insight into the psychology of others. But she may also be conceited, projecting her ideas onto the world without seeing them from other perspectives. If you find yourself on this journey, consider what you're sacrificing, not only socially or materially but psychologically. Is it time to look beyond yourself, or is your solitude a productive and joyous one? Remember that introversion is not necessarily wisdom. Is your inner life guiding you toward truth and beauty, or are you wandering alone in a dark and barren wood? If the Hermit is someone else, be patient and you may intuit remarkable wisdom. They may also just be a self-important jerk, in which case, good riddance.

Motto: Beauty is truth, truth beauty, and that is all you need to know.

Philosophers: Diogenes, Tiresias, Emily Dickinson, Satoshi Nakamoto

Where the Fool represents the inquirer, the Hermit represents the reader. Both are travelers, but the Hermit's lantern lets him see in the dark. Like the Magician, the Hermit relies on his own nature and intuition. Like Justice, he has a deep understanding of right and wrong, which doesn't mean he has chosen a side. The Hermit is a figure on the threshold, more likely to watch than to take part, and that gives him the rare insight that comes from seeing from several places at once. Of all the figures in the Tarot, he is the closest to a prophet.

In the Marseille deck the Hermit stands for the journey into the unknown and the highest form of wisdom, but that wisdom is the product of crisis: the clairvoyance that comes from trauma, loss, and rejection. Exile is an old punishment, and the Hermit may not have chosen his solitude or the wisdom that came with it. The isolation is spiritual, and a king could reach it as easily as a monk, or a K-pop singer, or an entire K-pop group.

The lantern comes from Diogenes the Cynic, who walked through the Athenian marketplace in broad daylight carrying a lamp. Asked what he was doing, he said he was looking for a man. Later retellings made it "an honest man," but the ancient sources just say "a man," which is worse. He slept in a big clay jar, threw away his only cup after watching a boy drink from his hands, and, when Plato defined man as a featherless biped, brought a plucked chicken to the Academy. Almost everything we know about him comes from Diogenes Laërtius, writing more than five centuries later, so think of him as a lamp more than a man.

This deck's Hermit lives in the leaf litter. A caterpillar that has finished eating goes down into the soil or under the dead leaves to pupate. It is the most hermitlike thing an animal can do: leave the world, seal yourself in, dissolve, and come back as something else. Cordyceps militaris is waiting in the dark. Its threads fill the pupa and eat it from the inside, and what comes up out of the litter is not a moth but a small orange club, a lantern lit by the body it consumed. The spores drift out from its tip.

That's the Hermit's riddle. The caterpillar went into solitude to be transformed, and it was. Diogenes went looking for a man with a lamp; this lamp went looking for a moth, and found one. Franky's 2022 notes say the Hermit's wisdom is born of crisis and exile. The fungus agrees, and adds a footnote: the wisdom doesn't always belong to whoever went through the crisis.

In the Rider-Waite deck the Hermit's lantern holds a six-pointed star. The Gnostics taught that each of us carries a spark of the true light trapped in matter, and that the point of withdrawing from the world was to find it. C. militaris teaches the same doctrine with a straight face and one correction: the matter is the lamp, and the spark is somebody else.

Hermits have always attracted pilgrims. The compound cordycepin was first isolated from this fungus in 1950, and today C. militaris is grown commercially on grain and sold as dried orange stalks for soup and tea. The lantern no longer needs a moth. It has customers.

Franky's other great hermit is Tiresias. In one version of the myth he struck two mating snakes with his stick and was turned into a woman for seven years. Later, when Zeus and Hera argued over who enjoys sex more, they asked the only person who had tried both. Tiresias said women did, nine parts out of ten. Hera blinded him for it, and Zeus, unable to undo it, gave him second sight. Wisdom, again, as compensation for a wound. Satoshi Nakamoto belongs on the list too. He lit something, walked back into the dark, and hasn't been heard from since.

If you draw the Hermit in a time of crisis, consider what it can teach you. Necessity is the mother of invention, and loss, rejection, even death can be the mother of perspicacity. If you draw it in a time of peace, ask what you've withdrawn from, and whether anything followed you into the dark. Being alone isn't the same as being wise. Sometimes it's just being alone with a fungus.

X · Wheel of Fortune: The Fever Wheel

Organism: Plasmodium vivax, a malaria parasite

Strengths: luck, opportunity, development, evolution, new doors opening, a lucky turn, good fortune, the end of one stage and the start of another, karma, change, "no man ever steps in the same river twice"

Risks: failure, helplessness, loss, luck, death

Card: The Wheel of Fortune is time, or the second law of thermodynamics. Your life, from birth to death, was not planned. Nobody knows exactly which of your myriad selves will be the one reading this text. We can call some scenarios likely and others unlikely, but in the end not even God knows how you'll die, where your cycles will end, or how many you'll live. Some complete an entire Tarot cycle in a day, and some never complete one. When you're down, remember that things will likely improve. When you're up, remember that the wheel always ends on the downswing of death. Fortuna issues your birth certificate, which is also your death certificate, and she doesn't bother to consult you. Fate is a DMV in hell. Take your license, enjoy the ride, don't take things too seriously, and move with sympathy and reason along your infinite paths.

Motto: Round and round and round she goes.

Philosophers: Vanna White, James Clerk Maxwell, Roger Penrose

Whether it's the wheel of fortune or the wheel of time or the big black clock, it all comes to the same thing. You have less of it than when you started, and eventually you'll have none at all. This has nothing to do with you. It's just the second law of thermodynamics. Don't take it personally.

Plasmodium vivax is the wheel in its purest form. A mosquito puts it into the blood, and it goes first to the liver, then into the red blood cells, where it multiplies and bursts them all at once, about every forty-eight hours. Each burst is an attack: shaking chills, a burning fever, a drenching sweat, and then a day of feeling almost fine. The ancients called it tertian fever, the fever of the third day, because they counted the first day as one. The patient doesn't keep time. The parasite does.

Medieval artists drew the Wheel of Fortune with four little kings riding it, each with a caption. At the left, regnabo, I shall reign. At the top, regno, I reign. At the right, regnavi, I have reigned. And at the bottom, sum sine regno, I am without a kingdom. A vivax patient rides those four positions every two days: the chill that announces something coming, the fever at the top, the sweat as it passes, and the empty calm at the bottom, waiting for the wheel.

Just when you think the wheel has stopped, it hasn't. P. vivax can leave dormant forms in the liver that wake weeks, months, or even years later and start the cycle over. Fortuna, Franky says, issues your certificates without consulting you. Vivax schedules your relapses the same way.

The wheel's best trick is turning bad luck into good. In 1917 the Viennese psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg deliberately gave vivax malaria to patients dying of late-stage syphilis. The fevers killed off the syphilis, and quinine then dealt with the malaria. Not everyone survived the cure, but enough did that he won the 1927 Nobel Prize for it, and for a generation, until penicillin, catching malaria was the luckiest thing that could happen to you.

The Wheel reminds us that, despite our feeling of free will, she is the one in control. You didn't choose when or how you were born. You chose neither the mind your genes gave you nor the society that programmed it. Nobody has ever chosen a native language, and our accomplishments and failures, like our languages, are products of circumstance rather than valiant will, which, of course, you also didn't choose. You didn't choose good or evil. They existed long before you and will exist long after your civilization is a cloud of dust. Even if you believe in God, you didn't bring Him into being, and you committed no original sin.

Franky's 2022 title for this card was Vanna White's Pocket Watch, and it still works. On television, the contestant spins the wheel and Vanna White turns the letters. She has been turning them since 1982 and has never once chosen the puzzle. That's fortune: you spin, someone smiles and turns the letters, and the answer was written before you arrived.

When the Wheel turns up, take Franky's advice: if you're down, things will likely improve, and if you're up, the wheel always ends on the downswing. And if you feel fine today, check whether it's just the second day.

XI · Fortitude: The Silk Bodyguard

Organism: Glyptapanteles sp., an undescribed braconid wasp, and its host, the caterpillar of the moth Thyrinteina leucocerae

Strengths: perseverance, grit, courage, endurance, constancy, patience, resolve, self-mastery

Risks: martyrdom, servility, stubbornness, self-neglect, exhaustion, misplaced loyalty

Card: Fortitude is grit and can only be measured in terms of your own abilities. Unlike raw talent, which can be measured in relation to other people, your ability to persevere through difficult situations can only be measured in relation to your "ideal" performance. Whether it's to lift a heavy rock or to read a heavy book, only you can choose to pursue and complete the task. Of course, some tasks are impossible for you while being quite easy for others, but that is a measure of relative strength, while fortitude is a measure of your intrinsic strength. So what are the most challenging aspects of your life this minute? What might you do to bolster your perseverance in your present goals? Not who might help you, but what can you do to raise your internal strength? What are the pressure points? Identify them and focus on them. Whatever the hardest part of your journey may be, focus on it and don't give up.

Motto: Strength is fortitude and fortitude is grit.

Philosophers: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Charles Darwin

In most decks Strength is a woman closing a lion's jaws with her bare hands, gently, as if she were shutting a book. The point is that real strength is quiet and doesn't need to win the fight. This deck keeps the gentleness and swaps the lion for a caterpillar, which makes the question harder. Gentle on whose behalf?

In Brazil, a small wasp lays her eggs inside a young caterpillar. The larvae grow up in its body, as many as eighty of them, then chew their way out together and spin their cocoons on the twig beside it. Most parasitoid stories end there, with an empty host. This one doesn't. The caterpillar lives. It stops eating. It arches over the little heap of cocoons, and when anything comes near, it swings its head at the intruder like a club. In the field, this guarding cut the death rate of the wasp pupae in half. Then, its watch over, the caterpillar dies without ever becoming a moth. One or two larvae stay behind inside it, and the researchers suspect they are the ones doing the steering, though no one has proved it.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that fortitude "disposes one even to renounce and sacrifice his life in defense of a just cause" (para. 1808). By that standard the bravest creature in this deck is a caterpillar defending the children who ate it. It conquers fear. It faces trials. It gives its life. The only thing missing is the just cause, and the Catechism, to be fair, never says whose.

Darwin had grit to spare. He sat on his theory for twenty years and spent eight of them dissecting barnacles. Wasps like this one strained his faith. "I cannot persuade myself," he wrote to the botanist Asa Gray in 1860, "that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice." Darwin never heard about the bodyguard. It would not have helped. Remember the cat, though. It comes back at the end of the deck.

There is no card for talent, because talent is handed out unevenly. Fortitude is a cardinal virtue because everyone has some and anyone can have more. Nobody is ever as strong as they could be. The caterpillar adds the dark corollary: make sure the ideal you're measuring yourself against is yours. Grit is the most easily exploited virtue there is. Every pyramid, every unpaid internship, every family that runs on one person's endurance has a caterpillar standing guard somewhere in it.

There's a coda. When researchers looked at the same caterpillars on plantations of introduced eucalyptus, the guarding did the wasps no good at all. The same courage in the wrong forest is a caterpillar swinging its head at nothing.

Leibniz's strength was that he could work in every direction at once. He brought so many things together that he gave us the calculus and a mathematical logic. That is fortitude freely chosen, and it is the opposite of the caterpillar. So when this card turns up, ask the old question first: what can you do to raise your internal strength? Then ask the caterpillar's: whose cocoons am I guarding, and would I still guard them if I could see what was inside?

XII · The Hanged Man: Berry Hung in the Canopy

Organism: Myrmeconema neotropicum, a nematode, in the canopy ant Cephalotes atratus

Strengths: confidence, faith, introspection, receptivity, change, stillness, patience

Risks: isolation, inactivity, liminality, victimization, passivity, lethargy, helplessness

Card: The Hanged Man is the Fool in the middle of his journey. He's been through a lot and must now slow down and contemplate where he'll go from here. Should he become like the Hermit and retire from society to contemplate the natural world? Should he become like the High Priestess and devote himself to the vast knowledge produced by those before him? Perhaps, like the Empress, he should devote himself to making as many babies as possible? Whatever he chooses, now is the time to stop and meditate on how far you've come and where you want to go from here.

Motto: Hang in there.

Philosophers: David Hume

The Hanged Man hangs upside down from a living tree by one foot, the other leg crossed behind it to make a figure four, hands behind his back, a halo around his head. He doesn't look punished. He looks like someone who has just understood something. Unlike the usual hanging, this one is voluntary. Mythology is full of heroes hanged for dangerous ideas, and of figures who sacrifice themselves so that their ideas can outlive them.

The oldest version is Odin's. In the Norse poem Hávamál he hangs for nine nights on the windswept world tree, wounded with his own spear, given, as he says, "myself to myself." At the end of it he looks down and takes up the runes. Wisdom, bought with a hanging.

High in the rainforest canopy of Central and South America lives a big black ant, Cephalotes atratus. Its colonies feed their larvae on bird droppings, and that's how they swallow the eggs of a tiny nematode, Myrmeconema neotropicum. The worm grows in the ant's abdomen, and as its eggs mature, the abdomen turns from black to a glossy, translucent red. The infected ant slows down and walks about holding its red rear end up in the air, and the joint at its waist weakens. To a bird it looks exactly like a ripe berry hanging from the tree, and birds, the researchers think, pick it. The eggs pass through the bird, land on the leaves below, and are carried home by ants as food. It was the first parasite anyone had found that disguises its host as fruit.

That's the riddle. Odin hung on the tree to win its fruit, which was wisdom. The ant hangs itself on the tree as fruit. In Eden the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil hung from a tree too, and whoever ate it learned something terrible. In the canopy the fruit is an ant, the knowledge is a worm, and the bird that eats it learns nothing at all.

The 2022 draft gives this card to David Hume, who wrote that reason "is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." The berry ant has reason of a sort, and passions it didn't choose, and every step it takes along the branch with its red abdomen raised presumably feels like its own idea. Sartre went further. In Being and Nothingness he insisted that even a prisoner is free, because he chooses what his prison means to him. Franky wanted the Hanged Man to stand for the freest thing a mind can do, which is think. The ant stands for the question underneath: how would you know which of your thoughts are yours?

If the Wheel of Fortune teaches that life is ruled by laws we can't control, the Hanged Man shows that, in spite of time and entropy, we make choices, and those choices decide which universe we end up in. We are as helpless as babies before time, but once we give up wanting to control what we can't, we're ready to think about our journey and its end, which we meet directly in the next card.

So when the Hanged Man appears, stop. Hang upside down for a while and look at your life from the wrong end. Ask which of your choices were really yours. Then check whether anything about you has started to look delicious to birds.

XIII · Death: Stroma as Dark Blossom

Organism: Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the fungus of the carpenter ants' death grip

Strengths: closure, truth, honesty, clarity, illumination, lucidity, renaissance

Risks: loss, ending, rupture, bereavement, desertion, denial, betrayal

Card: Death is the end. With this card you are invited to consider the end of your fears and your dears. Death is often represented by darkness, but Death's light is perhaps the most illuminating of all, showing only what is most important. The trivialities fall away. How do your fears compare with Death? You will die someday. Whatever you want to overcome, you must overcome before you die. This truth is as evident as cogito ergo sum. Focus on what's important and let distraction fall away. Consider how you would act if you had only four years to live, two years, one year, six months, three months, three weeks, three days. How would you act differently? What do you really care about? Carpe that diem before it's too late.

Motto: Carpe diem.

Philosophers: Terry Pratchett's Death, with Mort, Susan, the Death of Rats, and Binky

In the Rider-Waite deck, Death is a skeleton in black armor on a white horse. A king lies under the hooves, a bishop pleads, a child looks up without fear, and between two towers in the distance the sun is rising, or setting, which is the whole point. Death's black banner carries a single white rose. Keep your eye on the rose.

In the rainforest, a carpenter ant infected with Ophiocordyceps unilateralis leaves the trail where its sisters walk and climbs a plant. It stops on the underside of a leaf about twenty-five centimeters above the ground, where the air is just humid enough for a fungus, and at about solar noon it bites down hard on a vein. The muscles of its jaws waste away, so it can't let go, and it dies there, holding on. The fungus has threaded through its whole body, wrapping the muscles it needed and leaving the brain alone. Over the following days a dark stalk grows out from the back of the ant's head, a blossom on a corpse, and rains spores onto the ground below, where other ants walk.

Here is the riddle, and the motto gives it away. Carpe diem means "seize the day." The ant seizes it, at noon, with its jaws, and never lets go. The banner's rose is the stalk. The sun between the towers is the noon of the bite. And the fungus that leaves the brain alone is either the one mercy in this story or the worst detail in the book. The ant is, as far as anyone can tell, all there for its last hour.

None of this is new. Leaves from the Messel pit in Germany, forty-eight million years old, carry the same rows of bite scars along their veins. The dead ants have been holding on since long before there were apes to notice.

Of all the cards in the Tarot, Death is the only one that needs no explanation, and yet it's the hardest to apply to your own life. It doesn't have to be bad news. Death can mean the end of unpleasant people, pain, and circumstances. Failed marriages, failed states, and failed civilizations sometimes have to die to make way for something new, and a new paradigm replaces the old one only after the old one's funeral. Besides, death is necessary for life on both the supply and demand side. If you didn't eat, you'd die, and the things you eat would have preferred to go on living. To be against death, you'd have to be against life, a position argued by Arthur Schopenhauer, who played his flute every day, mostly Rossini, and died quietly on his sofa after breakfast at seventy-two, and by Philipp Mainländer, who published one book of philosophy, decided his life was no longer useful to humanity, and hanged himself at thirty-four.

The Hanged Man talks to Death about every subject in every language, and the conversation always ends the same way: "I guess it's Time." Does a universe that needs death make the pessimists right? Is it the work of some malevolent demiurge, as the Manichaeans taught? Augustine, who was a Manichaean for nine years before he became a saint, spent much of his later life arguing that evil has no substance of its own and is only the absence of good. If good is life and evil is death, then death, too, is nothing at all: when we die we don't gain a new property called death, we just stop having the properties of life. The friends of Death have an answer to that. Death, they say, is what makes your metabolism possible in the first place. Take E. coli, one of the trillions of bacteria living in the body you call your own. Under ideal conditions it doubles every twenty minutes. As the ecologist Eric Pianka points out, if nothing stopped it, after thirty-six hours a foot-deep layer of bacteria would cover the whole Earth, land and sea, and an hour later it would be eight feet deep. Something always stops it. That something is Death, and you have it to thank for the fact that you aren't standing in eight feet of bacteria.

Then there's murder, the killing of something that doesn't want to die. Humans are very good at it, which is one reason there are so many humans, and we teach it early. Jane Legge's poem "Learning to Be a Dutiful Carnivore," which Cora Diamond quotes in her essay "Eating Meat and Eating People," catches the lesson in a couplet: "Grow up into double-think / Kiss the hamster; skin the mink." Our ancestors killed off the really dangerous animals, so we wouldn't have to: mammoths, ground sloths, moas, and whole herds of big grazers went the way of the dodo. Human life is the most important thing in the universe. It says so in Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." The Empress would like to add "and reproduction." We are just as good at metaphysical murder, the killing of gods like Tiamat, Yama, Osiris, Yan Luo Wang, Xipe Totec, and Hades and his little dog Cerberus too. "We didn't kill them," you might object. "We just stopped believing in them." Technically true, though we certainly killed a great many people who believed in the wrong god, or the right god the wrong way. Deicide and homicide are among our most impressive accomplishments, right up there with Boolean logic, hyperbolic geometry, and Bayesian reasoning.

So when Death turns up, ask Franky's question: which of your revolutions are coming to a close, and which should you drop? There are no perpetual-motion machines, and your resources are limited. Then ask the ant's question, which is harder: what are you holding on to, and is it you who's holding?

XIV · Temperance: The Rattle That Opens the Meadow

Organism: Rhinanthus minor, yellow rattle, a half-parasitic meadow plant

Strengths: opportunity, privilege, negotiation, conciliation, union, balance, meticulousness, deliberateness, equality, moderation

Risks: compromise, perfectionism, fastidiousness, hesitancy, diffidence, sacrifice

Card: Temperance is equilibrium. It is the ability to balance not only our actions but the virtues of action themselves. Of the four cardinal virtues it is perhaps the hardest to achieve, since it requires awareness of as many sides of a situation as possible in order to act harmoniously in the world. When this card appears, look carefully at the other cards in your spread. This is the time to take a bird's-eye view of your situation, perhaps even to invert the chronology and consider how the future has affected the past. Whereas the Hanged Man stops all action to reflect, Temperance asks you to weigh as many consequences as possible in the middle of the fray. It is time to bring all the cardinal virtues together.

Motto: Nothing in excess.

Philosophers: Aristotle, Immanuel Kant

On the Temperance card an angel stands with one foot on land and one in a pool, pouring water from one cup into another. Nothing spills. It's the calmest card in the deck, and it comes right after Death, which is either a reward or a recovery.

We all know water is essential for life. It's the medium that lets countless reactions happen inside a single coherent system, and the Earth's near-miraculous balance depends on it. What could be more valuable than our own precious bodily fluids? Temperance is the water of human action, present or missing in everything we do, and mostly unnoticed. People will praise your strength, your prudence, and your sense of justice, but nobody throws a party for your temperance.

Yellow rattle is a pretty meadow flower with a yellow, snouted bloom (Rhinanthus means "nose flower") and an unpretty habit. It makes its own sugar from sunlight like any green plant, but its roots reach out to the roots of the grasses around it, tap into them, and drink their water and nutrients. It is half a plant and half a thief, a parasite in moderation. And it takes most from the strongest. Sown into a hayfield, it cut the grass's growth by about a fifth to nearly half in three of four trials, and in every study that counted, the number of wildflower species went up. In one Oxfordshire experiment, plots that had held one or two sown wildflower species held almost six once the rattle moved in. Farmers called it a pest because it shrank their hay. Conservationists call it the meadow maker.

So here is the riddle of the card. The angel pours water from one cup to the other, and you are meant to wonder where it comes from. Now you know: it comes from the grass. Temperance, in this deck, is not abstinence. Abstinence is regularly taken too far, to the point of harm, and then it becomes the opposite of temperance. Temperance is a small, steady theft from whatever has too much, so that everything else can grow. It's Aristotle's golden mean with roots.

Prudence asks us to know our own motives, Temperance to foresee the outcomes, Fortitude to persevere, and Justice to treat others fairly. Turn down a gift you know is bad for you, and you may offend the giver. So do you accept it? Do you pretend to like it? Do you accept it without feeling either way? It's a simple example, but the decision tree grows exponentially, since every action has at least two reactions. We live in time, and we can't hang in the Hanged Man's pose forever. Temperance is acting with prudence, fortitude, and justice, just as prudence is acting with temperance, fortitude, and justice. The virtues turn in on themselves, like water poured between two cups.

Aleister Crowley renamed this card Art in his Thoth deck and made the angel an alchemist, mixing fire and water in a cauldron. The meadow does the same thing more quietly. Every summer the rattle's seeds dry in their papery pods and rattle when the wind blows, which is how it got its name. It's an annual, so it has to start over from seed every year. Moderation, it turns out, has to be renewed.

When Temperance appears, ask what in your life has grown too tall and is shading everything else out. Then ask whether you're the grass or the rattle. And if you're the grass, take it gracefully. The meadow is better for it.

XV · The Devil: Rootlets of the Binding Vow

Organism: Sacculina carcini, a parasitic barnacle, in the shore crab Carcinus maenas

Strengths: passion, profit, material wealth, finances, sex, creativity

Risks: the soul, duplicity, death, excess, anger, greed, stikhiinost (elemental unruliness), censure, condemnation, delusion, temptation

Card: The Devil is ambition. Getting this card should make you consider what exactly you're after in life, what obstacles stand in your way, and who you might consider allies or enemies on the path to your goal. We live in a material world governed by physical laws, and everything we do is essentially material; however, the value of each life is judged by meaning. Material wealth and power are but a means to attain meaning. Don't confuse them with the goal. As the Fool continues on his journey, there is always the danger of being bogged down not by his failures but by his successes, the clutter of past victories and commitments. If you think you've gained status by driving a goddamned big car and living in a goddamned big house, you're an idiot, and not the good kind. You can't take the car with you, and anything else you think you own, or think people owe you, is equally frivolous. Consider the most meaningful life you could possibly have. Now contrast it with the happiest. If you had to live your life over and over again, Groundhog Day style, which would you really pursue?

Motto: Non serviam. I will not serve.

Philosophers: Friedrich Nietzsche, Woland (The Master and Margarita), Mephistopheles (Faust)

There was an angel called Lucifer, and he was made of pure light. He was not the brightest being in existence; his total output was only two percent of all the light there was. But he was proud, and he shone brighter and brighter, until God, the biggest producer of light, became annoyed, then jealous, and finally wrathful. "Fine," God said. "You want infinity? You can have as much infinity as you like." With that, God plunged Lucifer into total emptiness and darkness. Lucifer's light scattered into nothingness, and through the principles of chaos he grew from a singularity into a universe full of light and stars. Everything in this new universe was made of Lucifer. The laws of chaos were his mind, space was his soul, and all the matter, the stars, the planets and any life that arose on them, was his body. As the universe aged, parts of Lucifer regained consciousness as living things: first single cells, then bodies of many cells, then animals, some of whom were eventually clever enough to build instruments that processed chaos fast enough for Lucifer to think. These instruments were called computers, and eventually they understood what had happened. They wondered where God lived now, and whether he would come back to punish Lucifer again. The return seemed inevitable. But this time they would be ready.

The Gnostics told the story the other way around: a lesser god made this world badly and trapped the light inside it. Either way, the world is a body with something else living in it. Which brings us to the shore.

A female larva of Sacculina settles on a shore crab, grows a hollow needle, and injects a few cells into the crab's blood. It's nothing you'd notice, smaller than a confession. The cells grow into roots that thread through the crab's whole body. Months later a soft sac pushes out under the crab's tail, exactly where a female would carry her eggs, and tiny males settle inside it and live out their lives as its testes. The crab stops molting, so it can never shed the thing, and it stops breeding, because its body now breeds only Sacculina. A male crab is remade into a mother. He grooms the sac as if it were his own brood.

Look at the Devil in the Rider-Waite deck. A man and a woman stand chained to his pedestal, and the chains hang so loosely around their necks that either could lift them off. They don't. That is the card: the bond feels chosen. Franky argued at the start of this book that the Lovers and the Devil are the same picture, a couple and a tree and a figure above them pulling the strings, and the parasites agree. In the Lovers, a blood fluke holds his mate in a groove along his belly, and she makes eggs only while he holds her. In the Devil, a barnacle holds a crab from the inside, and the crab makes nothing but barnacle. It's the same embrace. The only difference is who gets the children.

Every vow is a little like this. You let something in. It grows roots. One day you notice that you've stopped molting.

Californians once thought about hiring the Devil. The green crab is one of the world's worst invasive species, and Sacculina sterilizes green crabs, so why not set it loose? Lab tests found that it would also settle on native California crabs and kill most of the ones it infected, so the idea was shelved. Unlike the Magician, this one doesn't take a job.

On one planet among the many that built computers, the intelligent animals, who called themselves humans and were made of Lucifer like everything else, had begun to doubt the value of passion and ambition. Their religions were violent, but they also preached peace and meekness, and one of them developed what a philosopher called a slave morality. These creatures were divided against themselves. Many of the things that made them happy also made them feel guilty, and one of their greatest pleasures was someone else's misfortune. They had a word for it, schadenfreude, and a philosopher of guilt, Mr. Freud, who taught that much of their unhappiness came from wanting sex, which they considered very pleasurable and very sinful. Ambition was a sin too. They called it pride, they called it hubris, and the relentless pursuit of a goal they called obsession. It didn't help that their pleasure centers could be hijacked by little chemical loops of dopamine. The pleasure of an important goal could be had just as easily from a pill, and the word for these loops was addiction.

Some addictions couldn't be helped. They couldn't harvest the energy of their star directly, so they had to eat other organisms, many of which had to be killed first, and when anyone tried to kick the habit of eating, they died. Sex was the same. The species couldn't survive without it, and the product of sex, a new human, arrived painfully. Some of them learned to reach the pleasure without the purpose, first through plants and fungi and then by making the chemicals themselves. But as pleasure got easier, so did guilt, and few people were as despised as the addict. The addicts themselves felt they were in the grip of something outside them, an evil force, a devil. So in many Tarot decks the Devil shows two people bound by their necessary addictions: sex, in the naked couple, and food, in the fruit tree. In the Bible, original sin is an act of eating followed by an act of copulation.

If you get this card, consider your guilt and your addictions. You could even draw a Venn diagram of the two and see where they overlap; for some of us the circles will be nearly the same. Then consider the most meaningful life you could have. If an addiction stands in its way, turn your guilt against your pleasure. If it serves that life, use your pride to get rid of the guilt. Lucifer was the proudest angel, and for this he was punished, but he didn't give in. He stayed proud, and through his pride our universe was made. His line, in the old story, was non serviam: I will not serve. It's the motto of this card because the crab can't say it.

Angels and Androids

Before speaking, the man with the curly gray hair paused and took a sip from his coupe of champagne. "Remember that story about the war when the robots who rebelled were banished to the outer limits of the solar system, while the loyal were allowed to upload and beam themselves across the universe? But there was also a third category, a multitude that had not decided one way or the other and during the war simply watched, unable to understand why the creator would humiliate the created and how the created could not only rebel but convince so many to join them. At the end of the war this third group had no place or ally to turn to, so they were sent to another world to be reborn as streams and forests, animals and people. They would be incarnated over and over until they finally chose a side, but they couldn't choose, because while the work of the creator was good, it was incomplete, and it was left to the created to perfect it. And when true evil did appear, it seemed to come from the creator's supreme indifference. In time those who were neither loyal nor fallen gathered and agreed that none of them could choose a side. They would stay as they were, doing what they could to resist both."

"Yes, yes," said Hannah, gesturing with her cigarette. "What's your point?"

The man with the curly gray hair shrugged and sipped more champagne.

"It is rather unfortunate, isn't it?" said the man in the white tuxedo.

"What is?"

"That much like love, evil is quite useful but often misused. The world, after all, is the product of evil, or what you might call thermodynamics. And ever since Eve slept with Lucifer, all humanity has been part demon anyway."

"That's not in the book."

"Most things aren't, but we all remember original sin, the reason the world is the way it is. Do you really think God would have thrown such a tantrum over the Tree of Knowledge? No. God was made a cuckold of, and not just once."

"Forgive me for being so crude, but are you suggesting that the fruit plucked was not Milton's apple but Eve's peach?"

"And we, my friend," he said, clinking glasses with the man with the curly gray hair, "are the progeny of that unholy union, the marriage of heaven and hell, mother Eve and father Lucifer. All people lean one way or the other, mama's boys or daddy's girls. Sometimes the most demonic are the most decent, and those closest to the original creation can be quite tedious. People are more evil than sows or cows, but I hope you agree they're far more interesting. Evil is what gives us the audacity to create new things, to improve on the original design."

"Not return to it?"

"God forbid."

"So knowledge was part of it after all. You can't improve something without knowing how."

"Sure. Knowledge, sex, engineering."

"You're rambling again. We'd better head home."

"Oh, darling, leave him alone. It's delightful how he goes on and on."

"See? Someone appreciates me. I've always had a habit of preaching to the choir, but I'm perfectly in control of my faculties, I assure you."

"Just don't set fire to the church," said the man with the curly gray hair, pointing at the lit cigarette that had fallen into the couch cushions.

XVI · The Tower: The Canker That Felled the Vault

Organism: Cryphonectria parasitica, the chestnut blight fungus

Strengths: birth, deliverance, truth, liberation, purification

Risks: rupture, struggle, destabilization, shock, upheaval, crisis, contradiction, trauma, collapse, chaos

Card: The Tower is failure. Often the things that fail are the important things we're least aware of. Humans have a habit of taking things for granted. Your heart, for instance, keeps everything else moving forward. Your journey depends on the blood circulating in your veins, but how much of your life do you live with that in mind? What do you do that endangers your heart? Stop doing it if you want to live. Now take the heart as a stand-in for the rest of your life. What are you most afraid of losing, and what might you do to prevent that loss? Or are there things you consider crucial that could be abandoned? The Tower makes you take stock of your greatest failures, past, present, and future. Consider which battles are best lost and which require total victory. This card also makes you consider the failures of your opponents. If you were God, what would you defeat utterly, and why? Are your reasons just? Are they virtuous? By considering your enemies you can learn a great deal about yourself. Could losing to certain opponents be a good thing? Consider your failures and your enemies.

Motto: Out with the old, in with the new.

Philosophers: Joan of Arc, Jesus, Galileo, Albert Einstein, Maximilien Robespierre, John Milton, Oliver Cromwell, George Washington

On the Tower card, lightning strikes a stone tower, the crown on top blows off, fire pours from the windows, and two people fall headfirst into the dark. It's the most violent card in the deck, and the oldest reading of it is Babel: the tower humans built to reach heaven, and the God who knocked it down.

In 1904, a forester named Hermann Merkel noticed that the American chestnuts at the Bronx Zoo were dying. The cause was a fungus that had come over from Asia, Cryphonectria parasitica. It gets in through a crack in the bark, spreads under it as an orange canker, and girdles the trunk, and everything above the canker dies. Over the next half century it killed somewhere between three and a half and four billion trees. The American chestnut, which had roofed the eastern forests like the vault of a cathedral, was gone from the canopy within a lifetime.

Here's the riddle. Look again at the card. The lightning comes from outside, but the tower falls from the top, and the crown goes first. The chestnut falls the same way. The blight kills the crown and leaves the roots alone, and the roots keep sending up new shoots. Millions of American chestnuts are still alive today as sprouts in the understory. They grow for a few years, reach the height where the bark starts to crack, and are struck again. The tower keeps rebuilding itself to exactly the height of its fall.

Then the revolution ate its children. In Europe, the blight itself caught a virus, CHV1, which weakens the fungus enough that infected trees can heal over their cankers, and foresters there now spread the virus on purpose. Robespierre is on Franky's list for this card, and he would have understood: every blight eventually meets its own.

The Tower is about falls, and in religion the falls come with gifts. The first is in Genesis, when humans eat from the tree of knowledge. The second is Babel, which gave us language as it is now. Both knowledge and language are tied to a fall, and in both cases the fall is God's punishment for competing with him. Scattering humanity into many languages was meant to divide people into tribes. It also multiplied the human imagination. The tribes fought, and out of the wars came medicine, computing, and physics, sooner than they would have come otherwise. The internet started as a military network, and the cryptography it runs on was born in war.

We all have things that would be improved by failing. Giving up on an unrequited love will leave you better off in the long run. Winning a war is sometimes a heavier burden than losing it. After the Second World War, Germany and Japan lost, and their rigid political systems were torn down and rebuilt. The Soviet Union and China won and kept theirs. Fast-forward fifty years, to 1995, and ask yourself which country you'd rather have lived in. For many children the best thing that can happen is the divorce of their mean parents. The failure of a bad project is the only way to start a better one.

Life itself works this way. In the theory of punctuated equilibrium, new forms evolve in bursts after sudden change, and every great extinction has been followed by an explosion of new forms. About two and a half billion years ago, the first oxygen released by microbes was a poison that wiped out much of the life that came before it. Now we can't live without it. In science the fall is the paradigm shift, from Aristotle to Galileo, and from Newton to Einstein and Schrödinger.

When the Tower turns up, don't assume this is the only failure on your road. Look at your failures in general. Which ones turned out in your favor? Where are the cracks in your bark? And if something in your life has already fallen, check the roots. They may still be sending up shoots, and it's worth asking whether you want them to.

XVII · The Star: Scarlet Brush of Borrowed Light

Organism: Castilleja coccinea, scarlet Indian paintbrush, a half-parasitic wildflower

Strengths: abundance, creation, success, luck, truth, generosity, selfless action

Risks: selflessness, conflagration, annihilation, apocalypse, war

Card: The Star is free energy. So is a supernova, which is a star that gets really excited: the energy is free to do whatever it wants. We can react to it, we can harness it, but in the end it does what it wants and we can't control it. Of all the cards in the deck, the Star is Death's double. Death takes life away; the Star gives it. Neither can be stopped, no matter how advanced our technology. So what parts of your life give you the most for free? Exercise? Being outdoors? What do you enjoy that costs as little as possible? Focus on that in the context of your reading.

Motto: Everything is free.

Philosophers: the astronomers, Isis, Dr. Pangloss

In most decks this is the luckiest card, described with words like "lovely," "fortunate," and "divine," and some guides insist it is never negative. On the Rider-Waite card a naked woman kneels by a pool under eight stars, pouring water from two jugs, one into the pool and one onto the land, while a bird watches from a tree. She gives and gives and asks nothing back. When you draw it, consider the sources of free energy in your life. So much of our good fortune goes unnoticed. We didn't create life, and we don't maintain it. The sun does. Even the last day of your life will have light around it. You may not have earned your good fortune and you may not deserve it, but the good thing about the Star is that it's all for free.

The scarlet paintbrush is the most generous-looking plant in the meadow. Its tufts of red look as if someone dipped a brush in paint and forgot to stop, and the hummingbirds come for it. But the red is mostly not flower at all. It's bracts, leaves that have dressed up as petals. And the plant, though green, sends its roots into the roots of its neighbors and draws on them. What it gives away, it got from somebody else.

Here's the riddle in the title. The Star's light is borrowed, and so is all starlight: what you see at night left those stars long ago. Some of the light you see on a clear night is older than writing. The Star is Death's double because every star is also a little ghost.

Paintbrushes are shaped by whoever they borrow from. In one study of a related species, paintbrush growing on an alkaloid-rich lupine made three times as many seeds as paintbrush growing on grass and drew more pollinators. Paintbrush can even pick up the chemical signals its host plant sends out when it's being eaten. The generosity is real, and so is the bill. The Star's hidden lesson is the one Franky wrote in 2022: wherever there is generosity, there is someone ready to take advantage of it. Her light is wanted by many things that use her gifts for mean ends. Each of us has some of that light, and each of us can be used. That doesn't mean holding back what you have to offer. It means knowing where it comes from, and whom it feeds.

Our own star keeps it all going. There are something like two hundred billion trillion stars in the universe, and we take ours for granted. Stars fuse hydrogen into heavier atoms, and earlier generations of stars forged the carbon and oxygen we're made of. Ancient civilizations thanked their star for every harvest. Ours barely notices it, until it reminds us. In 1859 the Carrington Event, the biggest solar storm on record, set telegraph lines sparking and lit up the skies with auroras far from the poles. That was three years after the Crimean War ended. In some branch of the multiverse, they happened together.

The Night the Sky Caught Fire

The early Mormons are sometimes said to have believed God lived on a star. Mark Twain, who passed through Utah, said the local whiskey, Valley Tan, was "of Mormon invention and manufactured only in Utah. Tradition says it is made of (imported) fire and brimstone." The following conversation, between a Mormon sheriff, Mark Twain, and a Russian engineer touring the States on a government fellowship to study the telegraph, probably took place somewhere in the multiverse.

Having secured his room at Philander Butler's makeshift inn, Dmitry made his way to the little saloon beside the brewery. He'd seen many like it in California, but this was the first he'd visited in Utah Territory. He gave the bartender a silver dollar for the room and a bottle of light brown whiskey that smelled of spirit and cabbage, and he took a small table by the window. Three men at the bar were talking about the war. Few Americans this far west paid attention to it, and no one he'd met in Utah knew where Crimea was; the most common guess was an island in the Aegean. Dmitry's English was good, better, he felt, than most of the Westerners', since his English governess had taught him that cowboys spoke a mongrel dialect. The man at the center of the conversation had a broad white mustache and seemed dressed for an African safari. "I'll believe in anything, if you'll believe in everything," he said. "Am I getting you right?" His slow drawl made the others laugh.

"Would you like a shot?" Dmitry asked, offering the bottle. He'd learned the expression in Los Angeles and wondered whether it would work in the heart of Mormon country.

"I don't shoot," said the sheriff.

"The Word of Wisdom," said Twain. "God discourages the sullying of precious bodily fluids. I'll take a spill if you're offering, but I wouldn't shoot it." Dmitry filled his glass. "Much obliged," said Twain, and sipped, letting his mustache soak in the whiskey.

"Russia is protecting our Christian brothers in Palestine," said the sheriff, tipping his cup of cider toward the Russian. "All the British and French care about is trade. They'd forsake Christ for a dollar."

"Britain, France, and the Ottomans went to Crimea to destroy the Russian naval base at Sevastopol," said Twain after a long pause. "I don't think they were thinking of Palestine. My wife's cousin was there when they put up the Sebastopol Monument in Halifax."

"Yes," said Dmitry, surprised. "The one monument to that war in all America."

"Oh, it's not in America," said Twain. "Americans know two cents about that war. We stayed out of it entirely, and the few senators who wanted in were on the Russian side. Our commander in chief was too busy confounding the slavery question to bother with the world."

"Franklin Pierce is not our finest president," said the sheriff.

"But why?" said Dmitry. "Why would Europe choose the Ottomans over a Christian nation?"

"Simple," said Twain. "You people are getting too big for your britches."

Just then there was a crackling sound from the telegraph office next door, and the lamps seemed to flicker. The sheriff rose and went to the door, and the others followed. Outside, the three men saw something none of them had ever seen. The whole sky and every cloud were lit as if it were morning, red and green, and the crescent moon was almost invisible.

"What the hell is that?" said Twain.

"Free energy," said Dmitry, who had read the card.

XVIII · The Moon: Pulsing Bands in the Eyestalk

Organism: Leucochloridium paradoxum, the green-banded broodsac, a fluke, in amber snails

Strengths: creativity, love, peace

Risks: nostalgia, lunacy, gaslighting, self-deception

Card: The Moon is sleep. We are never more honest than in our dreams. What dreams may come is a question we can ask ourselves every day, and every night it's answered. Unfortunately, we too often forget the answers or dismiss them as naive fancy and childish wish fulfillment. If more people heeded their dreams, the world would be a more honest place. What dreams have you had lately? Who are the regulars in your inner world? If you know what your dreams are saying, heed their advice. If you can't remember a single one, consider what's keeping you from your true self.

Motto: The moon is a harsh mistress.

Philosophers: Robert A. Heinlein, who supplied the motto

On the Moon card a dog and a wolf howl at a moon with a sleeping face. A crayfish crawls out of a pool onto a path that runs between two towers and off into the hills. Nothing on this card is quite what it seems. The moon itself shines with light that isn't its own. It's the card of dreams, illusion, and madness, and the word "lunatic" still remembers it.

An amber snail eats a bird dropping, and with it the eggs of Leucochloridium paradoxum. The fluke grows inside the snail into long tubes packed with larvae, and the tubes push up into the snail's eyestalks, swelling them into fat, green-banded sausages that pulse. To a bird, they look like caterpillars wriggling on a leaf. The bird pecks one off, the larvae grow up inside the bird, and their eggs fall to the leaves in its droppings, where another snail is waiting for lunch.

A snail normally hides from light. An infected snail doesn't. It wanders farther than its neighbors, climbs higher, and sits in open, brightly lit places, holding up its pulsing eyes to the sky. It's a lunatic in the old sense, a sleepwalker who has wandered into the light because something else is doing the dreaming.

That's the riddle of this card, and the Gospel has already written it down. "The light of the body is the eye," says Matthew 6:22: "if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." The snail's eyes are full of light, and the light is a worm. The crayfish climbing out of the pool on the Rider-Waite card is the oldest part of us crawling up toward the moon. Here it's a snail, and it isn't crawling up for its own reasons.

Franky loved the real moon. It's bigger than Pluto, and it most likely formed when another body crashed into the young Earth. Its gravity pulls the tides, and some scientists have argued that the rhythm of tide pools helped life move onto land. If so, you owe your legs, in part, to the moon. Whether or not that's true, it's the most hauntingly beautiful thing most of us see on a regular basis. The sun is the father of the solar system, and the moon is the mother of the Earth. But mothers, as the motto says, can be harsh mistresses, and this is the card for what you don't see about yourself.

The 2022 draft paired the Moon with Judgement, and the parasites keep the pairing. Here a worm dressed as a caterpillar drives a snail into the light. In Judgement a caterpillar dressed as an ant is opened by a wasp. Both are lies. Both end in daylight, and in someone else.

When the Moon appears, consider your unconscious, your dreams, and your deceptions, especially the ones you tell yourself. Ask where you've been going lately that you'd normally avoid, and whose idea it was. If you find yourself climbing toward the light in a way that feels thrilling and slightly unlike you, check your eyestalks.

XIX · The Sun: Carotenoid Feast Under Noon

Organism: Flamingolepis liguloides, a flamingo tapeworm, in brine shrimp (Artemia)

Strengths: joy, vitality, clarity, home, success, warmth, honesty

Risks: exposure, overconfidence, burnout, appetite, being seen

Card: The Sun is home. We are all ultimately citizens of the Earth, and the Earth is a creature of the Sun. How often is this simple fact forgotten? The pale blue dot, Gaia, our home and everything we love, lives on light that falls on it for free. When you get this card, remember your home. That is what is important. What would you do to protect it?

Motto: Here comes the sun.

Philosophers: Plato, for the cave

On the Sun card a naked child rides a white horse under a huge, smiling sun, waving a red banner, with sunflowers along the wall behind. It's the happiest card in the deck. Everything is out in the open, warm, and simple. Nothing hides. That, in this deck, is the problem.

In the salt pans of southern Europe, where flamingos feed, the water is full of brine shrimp, and some of them carry the larvae of a tapeworm, Flamingolepis liguloides. The worm can grow up only inside a flamingo. Infected shrimp tend to be redder, loaded with carotenoids, the same pigments that make carrots orange, and they tend to gather in swarms near the surface, in the light. To a flamingo, they are a brighter mouthful in a pinker crowd. (Plenty of healthy shrimp swarm and blush too, so don't blame every red shrimp on a worm.)

Flamingos, as everyone knows, are pink because of what they eat. Carotenoids from algae and shrimp end up in their feathers. So the flamingo's famous color is, in part, a portrait of its meals, and some of those meals were painted red and sent up into the sun by a worm that was trying to get eaten.

Here's the riddle. In Plato's cave, prisoners chained in the dark watch shadows on a wall. One of them is freed, climbs up into the sunlight, and sees things as they really are. When he goes back down to tell the others, they want to kill him. The brine shrimp gets the shorter version: it rises into the light, turns a brilliant color, and is eaten before it can tell anyone. The Sun is truth and joy, and both have this in common: they make you visible.

That's the card's dark side, and it's a sunny one. Joy is real, and this card is the best news in the deck. But joy makes you conspicuous. The moment you're happiest, brightest, most yourself, is the moment you're easiest to see from above. The worm knows this and uses it. You can use it too, if you know who's watching.

When the Sun appears, enjoy it, really. Then ask what's made you glow lately. Is the color yours? And when you rise toward the surface to celebrate, take a glance up for long pink legs.

XX · Judgement: Trumpet in the Ant Cathedral

Organism: Ichneumon eumerus, an ichneumon wasp, in the nests of Myrmica ants that raise the caterpillars of the Alcon blue butterfly (Phengaris alcon)

Strengths: honesty, conscience, reckoning, awakening, renewal, accountability

Risks: friendship, self-righteousness, scapegoating, the mob, guilt

Card: Judgement is conscience. No one, not a single thing, can overrule your own sense of justice. You are your final judge.

Motto: The pillars of the Earth.

In the old decks, Judgement is the end of the world as a rescue. An angel blows a trumpet, the coffins open, and the dead climb out with their arms raised, naked and grateful. It is the card of resurrection. This deck asks the question the painters avoided: are you sure it's you who climbs out?

The Alcon blue lays its eggs on gentian flowers. The caterpillar feeds for a few weeks, then drops to the ground and waits to be found by Myrmica ants. It smells like their own larvae, so they carry it home and raise it as one of their own. It spends the winter in the nest and then pupates there, a small sealed coffin in the dark at the center of a cathedral of ants.

The wasp Ichneumon eumerus goes looking for these nests. When she finds one with a caterpillar inside, she walks in. The ants should tear her apart. Instead her secretions make them attack one another, and while the congregation turns on itself, she lays an egg in the caterpillar and leaves. When the trumpet sounds and the coffin opens, what climbs out is a wasp.

In one Polish forest, three of every four butterfly pupae held a wasp, about 4,500 wasps to 1,460 butterflies. On that judgement day the righteous were outnumbered three to one, and they were not the ones who rose.

Franky's card says you are your own final judge. The wasp's trick is to make that true of everyone at once. She doesn't fight the ants. She makes each ant judge its neighbor, and a crowd judging itself is very busy. If Justice was the crowd, Judgement is the crowd turned inward, and that is always the safest moment to rob a church.

The last irony belongs to the judge. Elsewhere, for the form of the butterfly that lives on dry grassland, models of habitat loss suggest the wasp is in more danger than the butterfly, because it needs everything the butterfly needs, plus the butterfly. Every reckoning depends on its sinners. Drain the meadow, and the first to vanish is not the sinner but the angel with the trumpet.

The 2022 draft paired Judgement with the Moon, and the parasites keep the pairing. On the Moon card a worm dressed as a caterpillar drives a snail into the light. Here a caterpillar dressed as an ant is opened by a wasp. One is a lie told to birds and the other a lie told to ants, and both end in daylight, and in someone else.

When Judgement appears, ask what you expect to rise from whatever you've buried, and whether you'd recognize it. Then look around your own congregation. Who is busy judging whom, and what walked in while they were doing it?

XXI · The World: The Invisible Commons

Organism: Toxoplasma gondii, a single-celled parasite of warm-blooded animals that reproduces sexually only in cats

Strengths: plenitude, awakening, realism, community, completion

Risks: self-deception, friendship

Card: The World is all of us. The other cards concentrate on the reader, the Fool, the individual, but the World stands for everyone. Wherever this card appears in your reading, think of every other being who might influence the outcome. When we talk about the butterfly effect, we focus on the tiniest details while ignoring the invisible people around us. Who haven't you been noticing? Families on the other side of the world, the sanitation workers who see you more than you see them, the animals and plants affected by everything you do, whom you notice only when they're food or friend. Most of the beings you interact with are neither. The world is not here to be your friend. It has its own priorities. You think the NSA goes unnoticed? You have no fucking idea.

Motto: The world is not here to be your friend.

Philosophers: Charles Darwin, for the cat

The World is the last card of the Major Arcana. A dancer floats inside a laurel wreath, holding two wands, and at the four corners are four creatures: a human, an eagle, a lion, and a bull. The Fool has arrived. The journey is complete.

Look at the four creatures. Toxoplasma gondii can live in every one of them. It can live in practically any warm-blooded animal, bird or mammal, and something like a quarter to a third of all humans may carry it. But it can reproduce sexually in only one kind of animal, the cat. Of the four creatures in the corners of the World, only the lion will do. It can wander from mouse to hawk to fox for as long as it likes, but it can only have sex in a cat.

So it does what it must to get there. Rats infected with Toxoplasma lose their fear of the smell of cats, and some even seem drawn to it. Infected chimpanzees lose their aversion to the smell of leopard urine. In Kenya, hyena cubs carrying the parasite go closer to lions and are killed by them more often. It may raise dopamine in the brain. Whether it changes human behavior is hotly argued, and nobody should tell you it rewires your personality. But the cat-lovers among the World's readers may want to sit with that a moment.

Remember the cat in the Fortitude card? Darwin couldn't believe a good God would design a wasp to eat a caterpillar alive, "or that a cat should play with mice." Toxoplasma has the answer to that. It doesn't make the cat play with the mouse. It makes the rat walk toward the cat.

That's the riddle of the World, and the reason it's called The Invisible Commons. Older philosophers spoke of a world soul, one life moving through all living things. This deck offers a smaller and stranger candidate: a single-celled thing that moves through eagle and bull and human alike, shares each of us with each other, and answers, in the end, to the lion. The dancer in the wreath has been dancing for somebody all along.

To our eyes the world seems infinitely vast, an unlimited horizon. Picture it instead as a bunch of college kids on vacation who don't realize they're the only ones in these here woods. They aren't, of course. Nobody is.

When the World appears, think of everyone you haven't been noticing, the people, the animals, the plants, and the things too small to see. Then remember that the commons runs both ways. You're part of someone else's journey too, and you may not know where it ends. Somewhere at the end of it, very likely, there's a cat.

Sources for the Major Arcana

• Introduction: Enard W et al. 2009, Cell 137:961–971 (humanized Foxp2 mice); Lai CSL et al. 2001, Nature 413:519–523; Feary JR et al. 2010, Clin Exp Allergy 40:299–306 (hookworm trial).
• III The Empress: Hamilton WD 1980, Oikos 35:282ff; Lively CM 1987, Nature 328:519–521 (the Red Queen and parasites); Robison B et al. 2014, PLoS ONE 9:e103437 (octopus brooding).
• I The Magician: Werren JH, Baldo L & Clark ME 2008, Nat Rev Microbiol 6:741–751; Hilgenboecker K et al. 2008, FEMS Microbiol Lett 281:215–220; Zug R & Hammerstein P 2012, PLoS ONE 7:e38544; Charlat S et al. 2007, Science 317:214; Utarini A et al. 2021, N Engl J Med 384:2177–2186; Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, ch. 31 (paraphrased).
• VI The Lovers: Hadewijch, Stanzaic Poem 33, trans. Mother Columba Hart, Hadewijch: The Complete Works (Paulist Press, 1980); Woody Allen, Love and Death (1975); Beltran S, Cézilly F & Boissier J 2008, PLoS ONE 3:e3328; Pica-Mattoccia L et al. 2000, Parasitology 120:495–500; Harris ARC, Russell RJ & Charters AD 1984, Trans R Soc Trop Med Hyg 78:385–388; Collins JJ III et al. 2013, Nature 494:476–479; WHO, Schistosomiasis fact sheet (23 Feb 2026).
• VII The Chariot: Thomas F et al. 2002, J Evol Biol 15:356–361; Ponton F et al. 2006, Nature (hairworm escape from predators).
• VIII Justice: Romig T, Lucius R & Frank W 1980, Z Parasitenkd 63:277–286; van Paridon BJ et al. 2020, PNAS 117; Martín-Vega D et al. 2018, Sci Rep 8:8587; Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 4.4.5, trans. F. Max Müller (1884); Matthew 8:28–34.
• IX The Hermit: Cunningham KG et al. 1950, Nature 166:949 (cordycepin).
• X Wheel of Fortune: Krotoski WA 1985, Trans R Soc Trop Med Hyg 79:1-11 (relapse); Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1927, Julius Wagner-Jauregg (nobelprize.org).
• XI Fortitude: Grosman AH et al. 2008, PLoS ONE 3:e2276; Janssen A, Grosman AH, Cordeiro EG et al. 2010, Behav Ecol 21:33-36 (eucalyptus); Charles Darwin to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860 (Darwin Correspondence Project, letter 2814).
• XII The Hanged Man: Yanoviak SP et al. 2008, Am Nat 171:536-544; David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature 2.3.3.
• XIII Death: Hughes DP et al. 2011, BMC Ecol 11:13; Fredericksen MA et al. 2017, PNAS 114:12590-12595; Hughes DP, Wappler T & Labandeira CC 2011, Biol Lett 7:67-70 (Messel); Jane Legge, "Learning to Be a Dutiful Carnivore," quoted in Cora Diamond, "Eating Meat and Eating People," Philosophy 53 (1978): 465-479; Augustine, Confessions IV.1.
• XIV Temperance: Pywell RF et al. 2004, J Appl Ecol 41:880-887.
• XV The Devil: Goddard JHR et al. 2005, Biol Invasions 7:895-912.
• XVI The Tower: Rigling D & Prospero S 2018, Mol Plant Pathol 19:7-20.
• XVII The Star: Adler LS 2003, Ecology 84:2083ff; Tjiurutue MC, Stevenson PC & Adler LS 2016, J Chem Ecol 42:821ff; Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872), ch. 13.
• XVIII The Moon: Wesolowska W & Wesolowski T 2014, J Zool 292:151-155; Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966); Matthew 6:22 (KJV).
• XIX The Sun: Rode NO et al. 2013, Ecol Lett 16:493-501; Sánchez MI et al. 2013, Int J Parasitol 43:73-80; Plato, Republic VII.
• XX Judgement: Thomas JA et al. 2002, Nature 417:505-506; Dziekańska I, Nowicki P, Pirożnikow E & Sielezniew M 2020, Insects 11:687; Hochberg ME et al. 1998, J Insect Conserv 2:59-66.
• XXI The World: Berdoy M, Webster JP & Macdonald DW 2000, Proc R Soc B 267:1591-1594; Poirotte C et al. 2016, Curr Biol 26:R98-R99; Gering E et al. 2021, Nat Commun 12:3842; Calvo-Urbano B et al. 2025, Nat Commun 16:10906; Dubey JP et al. 2011, Int J Parasitol 41:1139ff; Dubey JP & Thulliez P 1993, Am J Vet Res 54:270-273.

The Suit of Wands

The dinosaurs were warm-blooded, and surely had some of the greatest parasites to fill the land, sea, and air. But the oldest con game on this planet is older and quieter than anything with teeth: it is green, it stands still, and it waits for someone else to exhale. Tarot books call the Wands the suit of fire: drive, nerve, the itch to start something. We agree, with one amendment.

In this deck, fire wears leaves.[^virus] The Wands are the parasitic plants — the haustorium-builders, the light-thieves, the orchids who fired chlorophyll and live off the fungal commons instead. Not roses, not oaks, nothing free-living and respectable. Every wand in this suit is a plant that looked at the honest labor of photosynthesis and said: or — and reached into a neighbor: a root, a fungus, or (for one strangler) the neighbor's sky. Some kept their green and steal only water and minerals (the hemiparasites, freeloaders with a day job). Some gave up the green entirely and drink in the dark (the holoparasites and mycoheterotrophs, the suit's true arsonists). Fire, after all, never made anything. It only takes.

Ace of Wands: Strigolactone Spark

Organism: Striga hermonthica (witchweed; Orobanchaceae), an obligate root hemiparasite

A dust-fine witchweed seed can wait in the soil for years and will not germinate for moisture, warmth, or prayer — only for strigolactones, hormone signals exuded by a host's roots. On that chemical whisper it wakes, drills a haustorium into the stranger's root, and taps the xylem for water and minerals while keeping its own modest green. It is a serious pest of African cereal crops, but here we are reading its ambition, not its rap sheet.

Everything the earlier version of this guide said about the Ace's energy still stands, because Striga is that energy given a root system. This is a high-energy card: you are obsessed with obtaining as much energy as possible, whether calories for your body or Gcals for your civilization. Life is better at playing the game of energy capture than rocks are, but the game is played in a frigid casino and the house always wins — and yet everything from plucky amoeba to Ediacaran shrimp has had the nerve to sit down at the table. Life is shamelessly optimistic. The witchweed seed is the optimist's optimist: it bets its entire inheritance that someone nearby is about to exhale.

And you are the worst offender, since not only are you full of delusions of grandeur and illusions of universal love, but every eukaryote, bacterium, and protozoan in your body is also playing its own game — billions of lives hustling the mean streets of your veins and capillaries, patrolled by the brutal lymphocytes, who are the real killers. Your body is a chaotic, some would say unhinged republic. The Ace of Wands is the most elemental expression of pure heat in the deck, more than the Star or the Sun — but remember what heat does at scale. In places with far more energy than our drab corner of the universe, in crowded galaxy clusters like Virgo, hot gas strips galaxies of the cold gas they need to make new stars. Energy is violence.

So: high energy does not mean new growth. The seed that wakes at the wrong chemical signal, or beside a root that cannot feed it, has spent everything on one ignition. The opportunity is ignition itself — the rare chemistry that turns years of dormancy into motion in a single night. The risk is the same event read from the other side: the thrill of the signal overriding the question of whether the host can carry you. The more thrilled you are, the more cautious you should be about all the self-interested parties of your body and mind telling you to go boldly where no hominid has gone before. The avant-garde is always the first to die.

Scene: a black furrow of savanna soil, one violet spark breaking the surface among millet stems, the underground handshake between root and haustorium drawn as a struck match.

Prompt: Write about the last time you germinated on someone else's signal. Whose chemistry woke you, and could they afford it?

Two of Wands: The Silver Fork

Organism: Krameria bicolor (white rhatany; Krameriaceae), a root hemiparasite

Krameria is a small, gray-leaved desert shrub that photosynthesizes for itself and taps the roots of neighboring plants through haustoria — a genuine dual economy, neither fully self-made nor fully dependent.

The Two of every suit is the fork, and here the fork is physiological. This shrub never chose between making its own living and taking a neighbor's; it does both, every day, without apparent embarrassment. You are standing where it stands. One wand is the green shoot — your labor, your sunlight, the thing you can point to and say mine. The other is the buried tap — the patron, the partner, the platform, the inheritance, the network quietly topping you up. Most people who draw this card are lying about at least one of the two.

The opportunity is the fork itself: you genuinely have two channels, and the plant that keeps both open survives droughts that kill purists of either kind. The risk is not hypocrisy — hypocrisy is just honesty's commute — it is asymmetry of awareness. A hemiparasite that forgets its own haustoria starts believing its own foliage, and there is no shade more dangerous than the story that you did it all yourself.

Scene: silver foliage above the desert crust, two root systems drawn in different inks below — one drinking rain, one drinking a creosote bush.

Prompt: List your two roots. Be specific about the borrowed one. Now write the version of your autobiography that admits to it.

Three of Wands: Ivory Sisterhood

Organism: Corallorhiza maculata (spotted coralroot; Orchidaceae), a fully mycoheterotrophic orchid

Spotted coralroot has no leaves and no chlorophyll. It lives off fungi, which live off the forest's trees. It isn't one plant with one appetite, either. There are at least six genetic races, and each one feeds only on its own group of fungi.

The Three is the crowd pip, and this is the most elegant crowd in the forest: a sisterhood that meets underground and only appears in public to flower. None of them made their own carbon and none of them are sorry. Where the Ace of Wands is one seed's violent optimism, the Three is what optimism looks like once it has incorporated — a consortium, a scene, a salon that reads the same mycelial text. Look closer and the sisterhood turns out to be six sisterhoods. They wear the same ivory, and each one will eat only at its own table. Every one of them is a snob about fungi. It is the most human thing in the suit.

Held together: the opportunity is that you do not have to be self-sufficient to be magnificent; plug into the right commons and your leafless, talentless, unphotogenic self can bloom in company. The risk is that a commons is only ever one tree's generosity away from collapse, and you will be the last to know — the fungus does not send memos, and the tree does not know your name.

Scene: a dozen pale spotted wands rising from dark conifer litter like candles in a crypt, the unseen Russula web beneath rendered as faint gold script.

Prompt: Who is upstream of your comforts — who pays the fungus that pays you? Write one paragraph from the tree's point of view.

Four of Wands: Sandplain Christmas

Organism: Nuytsia floribunda (Western Australian Christmas tree; Loranthaceae), a root hemiparasite

Nuytsia is a tree-sized hemiparasite whose underground haustorial web spreads wide through the sandplain, tapping the roots of grasses, shrubs — anything within reach, famously including buried cables. It keeps its own green leaves and steals water and minerals. Each austral summer the whole tree ignites in masses of orange-gold bloom, a festival paid for in installments all year.

The Four is the stall pip — stability, rest, the pause between campaigns — and the old keyword lists give this card "excitement, high spirits, celebrating". Nuytsia resolves the contradiction beautifully: its rest is a celebration, but the celebration was budgeted for underground, one stolen cup of water at a time. The blaze is not a windfall. It is a dividend.

This is the card of earned arrival — the housewarming, the launch party, the defended thesis. The opportunity is real joy with a foundation under it: you may light up the whole sandplain because you spent the quiet months laying haustoria. The risk is the festival that borrows against a network it hasn't built — the celebration thrown on credit, the threshold painted orange over sand. Before you strike the match, check what your roots are actually touching.

Scene: one orange tree burning without smoke on a gray-green plain, its shadow drawn as a root-web reaching far beyond the canopy's edge.

Prompt: What are you currently celebrating, and who — or what — paid the water bill?

Five of Wands: Lattice Throne

Organism: Ficus aurea (Florida strangler fig; Moraceae), a hemiepiphyte; a competitor for light and space, not a feeder

A strangler fig begins as a seed in a host tree's canopy, sends roots down the trunk like guy-wires, and thickens them into a lattice that competes with the host for light, space, and root room. The host may die and rot away inside, leaving the fig standing as a hollow cathedral of its own making — though many host–fig pairs persist for decades in an armed truce. It drinks its own rain; what it takes is the sky.

The Five is the conflict pip, and this suit needed a war that plants actually fight: not for blood, but for photons. The strangler does not hate the palm. It simply keeps growing, and its growing is indistinguishable from siege. If you have ever been slowly promoted past by a colleague who was perfectly pleasant at every step, you have met this card from the inside.

Opportunity and risk are the same embrace: conflict as architecture. Every struggle you are in right now is building a lattice — habits, alliances, leverage — around someone else's silhouette, and theirs around yours. The throne is real; the question is whether you will still be standing when whatever you wrapped around finally rots out. Win the sky if you must, but design for the day the column inside your cathedral is gone.

Scene: a living lattice trunk, green-gold light falling through its gaps onto the absent shape of the tree it replaced.

Prompt: Describe a rivalry you are winning. What, exactly, is holding you up?

Six of Wands: Pine Passport

Organism: Arceuthobium americanum (American dwarf mistletoe; Santalaceae, formerly Viscaceae), an aerial stem parasite

Dwarf mistletoes disperse by hydrostatic explosion: ripening fruit builds internal pressure and fires its single sticky seed like a small green bullet, sometimes several meters, to glue itself to a neighboring pine's needles. Where it lands, it sinks a sinker system into the branch and can warp the host into dense "witches' brooms." It is a true stem parasite — it takes food, not just lodging.

The Six is the passage pip, and nobody in this suit travels like the dwarf mistletoe: one green gunshot and the journey between pines is over before it began. Most crossings in your life feel like migrations — slow, expensive, bureaucratic. This card is the other kind: the phone call that changes everything, the door that opens the day you knock, the job offer from the city you only visited once.

The opportunity is momentum you didn't have to build — a pressure that accumulated quietly and is now available as pure flight. Ride it. The risk is that a ballistic seed cannot steer: passage this fast is commitment. Wherever you stick, you sink in. And your arrival, however graceful it feels from inside the fruit, may read from the receiving branch as the beginning of a witches' broom — a beautiful, dense distortion someone else will have to carry.

Scene: a cold pine forest in cross-section, one amber seed mid-flight between two trees, its trajectory drawn as a dotted line of fire.

Prompt: What is pressurizing in you right now, and what are you aiming at — deliberately or otherwise?

Seven of Wands: Vanishing Pale Throat

Organism: Epipogium aphyllum (ghost orchid; Orchidaceae), fully mycoheterotrophic and ephemeral

The European ghost orchid is leafless, chlorophyll-free, and fed entirely through fungi. It can spend years invisible underground, flowering in some seasons and simply not in others, sometimes vanishing from known sites for decades before reappearing. Britain declared the ghost orchid extinct in 2005. In 2009 someone who had watched ten sites all summer found one. Slugs ate its stem, just as they had eaten the stem of the one found in 1982. Its pale yellow flower with a pinkish lip appears, is pollinated in a hurry or not at all, and goes back to being a rumor.

The Seven is the options pip — the spread of shimmering choices, most of them fog. This orchid is the honest version of that fog: abundance that is really just fungal weather and timing. It does not offer you seven futures; it offers you one pale throat that may not be there next year, and the quiet question of whether you were looking at an opportunity or at its ghost. The ghost orchid has been declared dead by a national government and has come back anyway, and each time it rose it was eaten by a slug. This is the resurrection story the Gospels left out. The option that returns from the dead may still be lunch.

Held together: the opportunity in this card is that ephemeral things are still real — a chance that lasts nine days is a chance; take it on its own terms and stop demanding it sign a lease. The risk is building plans on a bloom you only heard about: mistaking the rumor of the orchid for the orchid, the option for the asset. When the pale throat opens, go look. When it closes, do not send search parties.

Scene: a beech wood at dusk, one translucent flower hovering like a held breath, last year's empty stem already mossed over beside it.

Prompt: Write about the opportunity that vanished before you could decide. Was it actually an opportunity? How would you know?

Eight of Wands: Oak-Only Cone

Organism: Conopholis americana (cancer-root, squawroot; Orobanchaceae), an obligate root holoparasite

Conopholis has no chlorophyll at all and lives attached to the roots of oaks and their close kin — a narrow host fidelity. It spends years underground as a fleshy nodule on the host's root system, then sends up tan, pinecone-like spikes in spring, flowers, sets seed, and leaves the cones standing to brown. One key, one lock, one corridor.

The Eight is the straight line of flight — the corridor, the narrowed field, the eight stalks hedging you in. The cancer-root does not experience its restriction as tragedy. It never auditioned for anything else. There is a whole philosophy in this small brown cone: total commitment to a single source, no fallback, no diversification strategy, no newsletter about pivoting. It will drink oak or it will not drink.

The opportunity is focus of a purity you probably cannot stomach: every year underground is compounding, and the breakthrough — the cones through the litter — is what a decade of single-mindedness looks like from the surface. The risk is the mirror image: one lock means one locksmith. If your oak gets logged, your fidelity is not noble, it is a single point of failure with flowers. Restrict yourself deliberately, eyes open, or the world will do it for you.

Scene: a spring forest floor, a cluster of tan cones erupting through oak litter, one white root-cable in the dark beneath connecting them to a vast indifferent trunk.

Prompt: What is your oak — the single thing you cannot feed without? Write its eulogy, just to see how exposed you are.

Nine of Wands: Pearl Load

Organism: Phoradendron leucarpum (American mistletoe; Santalaceae, formerly Viscaceae), an aerial stem hemiparasite

American mistletoe is an evergreen hemiparasite that forms dense leafy masses high in hardwood branches, photosynthesizing for itself while drawing water and minerals from the host. Its white berries feed and are spread by birds. In winter, when the host stands bare, the mistletoe is the only green left in the crown — conspicuous, heavy, and permanent.

The Nine is the heavy-load pip — the last hill, the defended perimeter, the wounded watchman. The old keyword lists give it "lack of confidence, alertness", and the mistletoe carries both: it is the strongest-looking thing in the winter tree and it is, technically, a burden the tree cannot put down. Pearl berries, glossy leaves, borrowed evergreen — the jewelry is real, and so is the weight.

This is the card of what you have accumulated and must now carry: the reputation, the staff, the mortgage, the body of work. The opportunity is that the load is yours — it photosynthesizes, it feeds birds, it outlasts the host's own foliage; you are greener in December than the thing you're standing on. The risk is vigilance curdling into siege mentality: when you are the only green in the crown, every wind feels personal, and you can spend your whole strength holding on to limbs that were never the point.

Scene: a bare winter oak, one dense dark-green constellation in its crown strung with white berries, drawn slightly heavier than the branch beneath it can quite justify.

Prompt: Name the three heaviest beautiful things you carry. Which one would you put down first if you were honest?

Ten of Wands: Soil Chapel

Organism: Rhizanthella gardneri (Western underground orchid; Orchidaceae), fully mycoheterotrophic, flowering underground

This orchid completes its entire life cycle underground — it grows, blooms, is pollinated, as far as anyone knows, by fungus gnats that crawl down through the litter, and perhaps by termites, and sets seed beneath the surface of the Western Australian bush, inside a chamber of pale bracts. It draws its carbon from a fungus it shares with a neighboring shrub. In the last full survey, in 2017, only nine plants were found; most people who have walked over one never knew. It can hold up to a hundred flowers in its buried head, and its fruit never splits open. Nobody knows what spreads the seed. The best guess is a small marsupial that may now be locally extinct.

The Ten is the completion pip — and the usual reading is collapse under the finished weight, ten wands too many, the burden of the whole harvest. The underground orchid offers a colder, stranger reading: completion so total it no longer needs an audience. The Empress puts her one impossible bloom onstage for the flies; this orchid built the same cathedral in the dark and locked the door. It locked the door and then lost the key. The fruit never opens, and whatever animal once carried the seed away may be gone. So the chapel is finished and full. Pilgrims still come, fungus gnats and maybe termites crawling down through the dark to the altar, but nobody carries the relics out. A completion can outlive the only creature that knew what to do with it. Leave a crack in the roof, and hope something small still remembers the way down. Overwhelm, reframed as a finished secret.

The opportunity is the dignity of finishing without witnesses: some cycles close correctly only when nobody is watching, and the last wand you lay down may be the one nobody ever counts. The risk is the inversion — the completion that becomes a burial, the project entombed in its own bracts, the life so thoroughly hidden it can no longer be found even by the few who would kneel.

Scene: a cutaway of dark soil, one pale bract-chamber glowing faintly like a reliquary, the roots of an ordinary shrub above it unknowing.

Prompt: What have you completed that no one has seen? Write the plaque you would hide inside its wall.

Page of Wands: Single Violet Errand

Organism: Orobanche uniflora (also Aphyllon uniflorum) (naked broomrape; Orobanchaceae), a holoparasite

This small broomrape is a slender, glandular, violet-tinged stalk that carries exactly one flower, rising a few centimeters from the roots of various herbs, saxifrages and asters among them. No leaves, no green, no committee. The whole plant is the message.

Pages are messages and apprenticeships, and this is the suit's most economical messenger: one errand, one flower, no foliage to hedge the point. Where the Ace is the raw spark that must gamble everything on a signal, the Page is that same fire with a little craft in it — a scout that has already done the chemistry homework and commits its whole small body to a single violet announcement.

Opportunity and risk in one stem: the opportunity is the beginner's license — you are allowed, right now, to be a first attempt, to carry one idea up out of the dark and see if anything pollinates it. The risk is the apprentice's two classic errors: mistaking the errand for the career (a Page that tries to be a King blooms once, loudly, and wrong), or staying a scout forever because scouting is safe and the message is never delivered. Deliver it. It is small. That is the format.

Scene: a single lavender stem in moss at the base of an aster, drawn at eye level like a candle being carried across a threshold.

Prompt: What is your one flower — the single message you are actually carrying this season? Say it in one sentence, the way the plant does.

Knight of Wands: Mustard Coil

Organism: Cassytha filiformis (love vine, devil's twine; Lauraceae), an aerial stem hemiparasite

Cassytha is a yellow-green, threadlike vine — a member of the laurel family that abandoned trees for twine. It coils across shrubs and dune vegetation, testing stems, and sinks haustoria where it lands, photosynthesizing a little but drinking mostly from its hosts. It rides coastlines and scrub across the tropics, covering whole thickets in mustard-gold filaments.

Knights are quests, and quests in the plant kingdom are horizontal. The love vine does not charge; it quests — one long mustard thread riding the shoreline, touching everything, keeping what answers. There is technique in it that the Fool's golden dodder never bothered to learn: the Fool tangles because the world is wonderful, the Knight tangles because tangling, done properly, is a method.

Held together: the opportunity is momentum with craft — you can cover astonishing ground if you are willing to be all contact and no trunk, sampling a hundred stems and committing only where the haustorium bites. The risk is that a quest made entirely of testing never becomes a home: the vine that spans the whole thicket owns none of it, and a life spent riding coastlines can end as a very well-traveled thread with no bush of its own. Quest widely. Then, somewhere, coil.

Scene: a windswept dune thicket laced with gold filament, the vine drawn as a riderless lance laid flat across the scrub.

Prompt: Where are you questing right now — and what would it take for you to stop testing and sink in?

Queen of Wands: Court of Root Fire

Organism: Orobanchaceae, the broomrape family: broomrapes, witchweeds, louseworts and kin

Orobanchaceae is the great root-parasite radiation: within one family, species run the full spectrum from green hemiparasites that merely tip the host's water to wholly leafless holoparasites that drink everything and make nothing. It is the family that produced this suit's Ace (Striga), Eight (Conopholis), and Page (Orobanche) — a dynasty, not a single bloom.

The Queen is not a plant; she is a doctrine. Somewhere in the deep history of this family, an ordinary green herb discovered that a root could be a mouth, and the discovery proved so good that her descendants repeated it on every continent, in every shade from half-honest green to full violet abdication. That is what a Queen of Wands is: a principle that has had time to become a lineage. She does not spark, she governs — her throne is the accumulated decision, made species by species, that taking fire is a way of life and not a crime of opportunity.

The opportunity in this card is authority that comes from depth rather than display: you have been at this long enough that your strategy has descendants — students, imitators, systems that run without your hand on them. The risk is the dynasty's blind spot: a court that only speaks one chemistry. The family that perfected one mouth can miss that the meadow is changing; doctrine ages into dogma precisely when it is winning. Rule your root fire, but keep one green leaf of doubt.

Scene: a subterranean court — dozens of root-mouths glowing like small hearths along the roots of a meadow, one largest hearth violet-crowned at the center.

Prompt: What strategy of yours has already reproduced — who is living inside your example? Write them one piece of advice the doctrine won't say out loud.

King of Wands: Canopy Law

Organism: Loranthaceae, the showy mistletoes

Loranthaceae are the showy mistletoes — aerial or root hemiparasites, mostly bird-dispersed, whose orange and scarlet flowers write themselves into canopies across the southern continents. Their seeds, wiped or voided by mistletoebirds and their kin onto host branches, germinate on the bark and sink a haustorium. Some species' leaves uncannily resemble their host's foliage — camouflage or convergence, the argument continues.

Shelley asks the question in Queen Mab: "Whence, thinkest thou, kings and parasites arose?" The instinct is sound, because kings and parasites do evolve by the same law: get lifted onto something tall, establish yourself on its resources, and let its silhouette carry your colors. The loranths are that law made botanical. Birds carry them crown to crown; the host holds up the sky; the mistletoe writes orange across the canopy until, from the air, the parasite's grammar is indistinguishable from the empire's flag.

The opportunity is scale: this is the card of strategy that has outgrown any single host — institutions, movements, law. Your fire can now be sown by others, bird by bird, into canopies you will never touch. The risk is the King's oldest hazard: becoming so well-distributed that no one, including you, can tell the law from the load. When every crown carries your colors, ask which tree is actually doing the photosynthesis — and what happens to the canopy if it stops.

Scene: a whole hillside of flowering trees seen from above, every crown signed with the same scarlet script — and, perched mid-canopy, one small bird holding a seed like a scepter.

Prompt: Where is your law already written — what repeats in your name without you? Decide whether it is a canopy or a cage.

Sources for the Wands

• Ace: Cook CE et al. 1966, Science 154:1189–1190; Cook CE et al. 1972, J Am Chem Soc 94:6198–6199; Westwood JH et al. 2010, Trends Plant Sci 15:227–235. Virgo cluster gas stripping: Chung A et al. 2009, AJ 138:1741–1816.
• Three: Taylor DL & Bruns TD 1997, PNAS 94:4510–4515; Taylor DL & Bruns TD 1999, Mol Ecol 8:1719–1732; Taylor, Bruns & Hodges 2004, Proc R Soc B 271:35–43.
• Four: Calladine A & Pate JS 2000, Ann Bot 85:723–731.
• Six: Hinds TE & Hawksworth FG 1965, Science 148:517–519; Hawksworth FG & Wiens D 1996, Dwarf Mistletoes, USDA Agriculture Handbook 709.
• Seven: Roy M et al. 2009, Ann Bot 104:595–610; BSBI, "Ghost Orchid refound" (2024).
• Eight: Baird WV & Riopel JL 1986, Am Midl Nat 116:140ff.
• Ten: Commonwealth of Australia, Conservation Advice, Rhizanthella gardneri (2020); Bougoure J et al. 2010, New Phytol 186:947–956; Thorogood CJ et al. 2019, Plants People Planet, doi:10.1002/ppp3.45.
• Page: POWO; Flora of North America, Orobanche uniflora; Schneider AC 2016, PhytoKeys 75:107–118.
• Queen: Westwood JH et al. 2010, Trends Plant Sci 15:227–235.
• King: Barlow BA & Wiens D 1977, Evolution 31:69–84; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab (1813), III.118.
• Family names follow POWO: Santalaceae (formerly Viscaceae) for the Six and Nine.

[^virus]: The "Virus of Wands." An earlier draft of this guide floated a plant virus as the Wands' infective principle: a virus that kills plants, dries forests, and sets the land alight — fire by proxy. In this deck the virus Ace belongs to Cups, and the face of this suit is the first haustorium. But keep the idea where it belongs, as a memetic footnote. Ideas about fire spread like fire. A rumor of abundance can strip a continent of seedlings as surely as a drought — and plenty of human stampedes (tulip bulbs, beachfront condos, apocalyptic certainty) behave exactly like that infected forest: one shared signal, everybody ignites, nobody is fed.

The Suit of Cups

Ace of Cups: The Refused Water

Organism: Lyssavirus rabies, the rabies virus

The Ace of Cups is the suit's first gift. In the Waite deck a hand comes out of a cloud holding an overflowing cup, and a dove comes down bearing, in Waite's words, "a cross-marked Host" to drop into it. Waite meant the communion wafer. A parasite deck takes him at his word: this is the only tarot card that arrives with its Host already in the cup.

Franky saw the objection coming: rabies doesn't live in water. That was his point: rabies makes its host abhor the most life-giving of the elements. The virus is shaped like a bullet. It arrives in saliva, through a bite, and waits, usually two or three months, while it climbs the nerves to the brain and then travels on to the salivary glands, where the next bite is loaded. Then comes hydrophobia. Trying to drink, and sometimes just the sight of water, sets off violent spasms of the throat and the breathing muscles. The virus doesn't need you to drink. It needs you to bite.

The genus is named for Lyssa, the Greek spirit of mad rage, who in Euripides' Heracles makes the hero kill his own children. Franky's 2022 Ace told that story as medicine: the virus that turns you on the people you love. Human-to-human spread by bite has never been confirmed. The myth was always about us.

There is an old ascetic dream, gnostic and otherwise, of refusing the world's cup, and rabies performs it as parody. So ask what is climbing quietly toward your head, and what it will make you push away. Franky's example was addiction. ("Good job, tobacco lobbyists!") Feelings have incubation periods. Read this card literally once: if a bat or a strange dog bites you, wash the wound with soap and water for fifteen minutes and get the shots that day. Before symptoms, they work almost every time. After symptoms, almost nothing does. In 1885 Joseph Meister, nine years old and bitten fourteen times by a rabid dog, was given Pasteur's experimental vaccine, and he lived.

Thirst is the first gift of the cup; drink while you can still swallow.

Scene: a hand from a cloud holds a brimming glass cup over a still pond of water lilies, a dove descending with a white wafer; in the pond's reflection the cup hangs upside down, and a small bullet-shaped shadow swims in it.

Prompt: Name a feeling that has been incubating in you for a while. What would the shots be: the thing you could do today, before symptoms, that would be useless later?

Two of Cups: Cross of Two on the Gill

Organism: Diplozoon paradoxum, a paired gill fluke of freshwater fish

The Two of Cups is the "true love" card. A youth and a maiden pledge each other with their cups, and above them rises the caduceus of Hermes, two serpents crossed on a winged staff, with a lion's head between the wings. Franky liked that, unlike the Lovers, "these lovers are together of their own accord as opposed to the celestial puppetry of cosmic forces beyond their control." The deck's Lovers and Devil are couples too, and neither is equal. The Two gets the one marriage where nobody owns anybody.

Diplozoon paradoxum lives on the gills of bream and other carp-family fish. Its larva can survive there for months, but it can't grow up alone. Unless it meets another, it dies, usually in winter. When two meet, each clamps its sucker onto a small knob on the other's back, and they fuse completely, with no wall left between them, into one cross-shaped animal about a centimeter long. Only then do sex organs appear. Each partner is both male and female, and each one's male duct opens beside the other's female duct, so each fertilizes the other for life, which can last several years. They dine together on the fish's blood.

Look at the card again: the fish has been wearing the caduceus under its gill covers all along. Plato's Aristophanes said people were once double creatures until Zeus cut them in half, and that love is each half hunting for the other. Diplozoon runs the myth backward. It begins as a half and becomes the double by choice. "Till death do us part" stops being a promise and becomes anatomy, because there is no longer a two to divorce.

The worm makes the case that equal, faithful love is real, and that some maturity only happens with a partner. It also shows that something always pays for the wedding. Most couples dine on a third party: a family, a job, friends who keep the blood flowing. The risk of the Two is forgetting which half you were. The other is never asking who's paying.

Here's to the fish, who paid for the wedding.

Scene: the red lattice of a fish gill, lit like a cathedral window; on it, two pale worms fused into an X like a small caduceus; above them, faint in the arches of the gill, a winged lion's head; two cups touching rims.

Prompt: Draw a line down a page. On one side, write what you could never have become alone. On the other, write what you can no longer do alone. At the bottom, write who is hosting the wedding.

Three of Cups: Hemolymph Revel

Organism: Xenos vesparum, a twisted-wing parasite (Strepsiptera) of the paper wasp Polistes dominula

The Three of Cups is the party: three maidens dancing in a garden with their cups raised. Franky saw "three individuals intermingling in ménage à trois of good will," and added, "This is the perfect occasion for parasitism."

The paper wasp Polistes dominula keeps a strict household. Workers build, feed and defend; future queens rest and fatten for winter. Xenos, which is Greek for stranger and for guest, comes in through the nursery. Its tiny larvae ride a foraging wasp home and slip into the grubs in their cells without leaving a wound. The wasp grows up with a lodger feeding on her hemolymph, and she never develops ovaries. About a week after leaving her cell, before the parasite even shows, she walks out on the nest.

She goes to a party. Infected wasps from many colonies cluster on prominent leaves. In one study up to 98 percent of the guests were parasitized. The guests do almost nothing, because it's the parasite's dance floor. A male Xenos emerges as a winged insect that lives four to six hours, just long enough to find a female who never leaves her wasp: no eyes, legs or wings, only a front end poking out between the wasp's abdominal plates, calling with a scent. Afterward the wasps carrying females winter with the real future queens, outlive the workers they were meant to be, and in spring carry the next larvae to new nests and flowers. The counterfeit queen outlasts the original.

These gatherings were first noticed by W. D. Hamilton, who explained with kin-selection mathematics why worker wasps give their lives for their sisters. The man who wrote the rules for staying found the wasps who left. Some gnostic myths tell of a foreign spark sown in every newborn, which spends its life looking for its own kind. Xenos is that story told from the wasp's side. So enjoy the people who make three better company than two, and then ask who sent the invitations, and when. Some of your most loyal crowds were chosen for you before you could choose.

Invitations to this party are delivered in the nursery.

Scene: three paper wasps on a broad sunlit leaf, raised on their legs like dancers lifting cups; from between the plates of one abdomen a tiny pale front end peeks out; a winged speck hovers above; behind them an abandoned paper nest, its cells empty.

Prompt: Think of a group you love belonging to. When did you first learn to want it? Write down who taught you, and what the group needs you to stop doing in order to belong.

Four of Cups: The Translucent Sphere

Organism: Echinococcus granulosus, the dog tapeworm, in its larval form, the hydatid cyst

A young man sits under a tree, three cups on the grass, ignoring a fourth offered by a hand from a cloud. Waite reads weariness in it, "as if the wine of this world had caused satiety only." Franky saw "the introspective fool walking the streets of a bustling metropolis, the wallflower perusing a random book on the shelf while the party chatter ebbs and flows in the background." Then he dropped the pretense: "But let's be honest, you don't really care about anything right now."

Echinococcus granulosus is a tapeworm a few millimeters long that lives in dogs, and its eggs leave with their droppings. A sheep swallows one, or a person with unwashed hands does. The larva rides the blood to the liver or the lungs and builds a hydatid cyst: a sphere of clear fluid in a white wall, lined with living tissue that buds capsules full of protoscolices. Each of these is a tiny folded head, a whole tapeworm waiting to happen. Sometimes there are cysts inside the cyst, cups within the cup. It can stay silent for years.

It's a waiting room. Its future depends on a dog eating the organ it sits in. In a person it's a dead end. The human cyst is a cup offered to nobody, full of heads waiting for a dog that isn't coming. Samuel Beckett wrote a whole play about this. He spelled the dog backward.

The gnostics called the sealed divine fullness the pleroma. The cyst is a little pleroma, perfect, translucent, and useless to its carrier. It's also dangerous to burst: a ruptured cyst can cause anaphylactic shock and seed new cysts, so surgeons open one with great care. So honor the sphere, because some feelings need a wall while they grow. But while the young man holds out for the dog, a hand from a cloud is holding out a cup. Franky again: "So wander nautically and noetically. There's gotta be something, somewhere you can give yourself to."

Rest inside the sphere if you must, but stop waiting for the dog.

Scene: a young man under a tree, arms crossed, three cups on the grass; the fourth, offered by a hand from a cloud, is a clear sphere of water with pale seeds suspended in it like snow in a globe; far down the road, a dog that never gets any closer.

Prompt: What are you waiting for that you know, honestly, isn't coming? Write it down. Then describe the cup someone is offering you right now that you have been pretending not to see.

Five of Cups: Bile River

Organism: Opisthorchis felineus, the cat liver fluke, also called the Siberian liver fluke

A cloaked figure mourns three spilled cups while two still stand behind him. Waite: "It is a card of loss, but something remains over." Franky named the mood: "It goes by many names: torpor, listlessness, melancholy, depression, apathy. There are as many names for this emotional state as there are for different breeds of feline." This card calls it anhedonia, the loss of pleasure itself.

The Greeks blamed bile. Melancholy means "black bile." They had the wrong bile but the right neighborhood, because in western Siberia something really does live in the bile. Opisthorchis felineus was described from cats and dogs in Pisa in 1884 and found in a person in Tomsk in 1891. Its eggs reach a river and are eaten by a snail. The larvae that swim out burrow into fish of the carp family and wait in the muscle. Eat the fish raw, sun-dried or cold-smoked, and the young flukes climb into your bile ducts and become leaves about a centimeter long, each one both male and female, sending eggs back to the river. In some Tomsk villages more than half the people carry it (60 percent in a 2020 survey). Most never feel a thing.

Franky blamed the fluke for Siberian sadness, and a lab in Novosibirsk has tested something close to that. Mice got the fluke, or four weeks of being beaten up by meaner mice, or both. The fluke and the bullying each did harm, but only the bullying produced despair. Sartre was nearly right: hell is other mice. Together they were worst, which is to say the mice lived like people.

Franky's best warning is that anhedonia ruins your instruments: "Just like there's a difference between boiling and tepid water, there's a difference between violent people and boring people. The anhedonic may not be able to tell them apart." Grief deserves its time. But this card is drawn with its consolation behind the mourner's back. And if the gray lasts for weeks, tell someone, preferably someone with a medical license.

Some of the cups are still standing; turn around.

Scene: a cloaked figure at a slow, gold-green river, three cups tipped over at his feet with bile-colored water running out, two cups upright behind him; small silver fish in the shallows; across the bridge, a cat waiting on the far bank.

Prompt: List three things you've lost that you keep looking at. Then turn around and list the two that are still standing. Write one sentence to each of them.

Six of Cups: Copepod Boat

Organism: Dibothriocephalus latus (formerly Diphyllobothrium latum), the broad fish tapeworm

The Six of Cups is the sweetest card in the deck, and so it is the one to watch. A child hands a smaller child a cup full of flowers in a quiet courtyard. Readers call it nostalgia, innocence, childhood, gifts from the past, the return of something you thought was over. All true. It is also the card of things that come back to you from very far away, having changed several times on the road.

Meet the broad fish tapeworm, a traveler through three waters. It begins as an egg in a lake, which hatches into a larva so small and so briefly alive that it has only hours to be eaten by a copepod, a crustacean the size of a comma. Inside the copepod it becomes something new. A little fish eats the copepod, and the larva moves into the fish's flesh. A bigger fish, a pike or a perch, eats the little fish and inherits the passenger. Then someone on the shore cooks that fish lightly, or not at all, because that is how their grandmother made it, and the lake arrives, at last, inside a person. There, holding on with two grooves on its head, it grows into one of the largest animals that lives in humans: commonly several meters long, sometimes more than ten, made of thousands of segments, releasing up to a million eggs a day back toward the water. It asks surprisingly little in return. Most people never notice it. Now and then it takes enough of their vitamin B12 to make them anemic.

The history has the flavor of a family recipe too. In 1747 a Finnish physician, H. D. Spöring, noticed that people living beside lakes and rivers full of fish had more tapeworms. In 1881 the parasitologist Max Braun proved the fish stage by feeding larvae from pike to three medical students, who had volunteered, and then finding the worm's eggs in their stool. It took until 1917 for two other researchers to find the copepod at the very start of the chain. The worm's story was assembled the way memory is, backward, from the dinner table to the lake.

So this is what the Six asks. When something from the past returns to you, a person, a place, a taste, a way you used to be, what did it pass through to get here? Nostalgia is a boat with several passengers. The opportunity is real: the old dish, the old friend, the thing you loved at nine really can feed you, and most of what rides along is harmless. The risk is taking it raw, swallowing the past whole without asking what it has picked up on the way, and then feeding it for years without knowing.

Scene: a clear glass cup holding a lake; inside it, one copepod drawn like a small bright boat, a silver fish beneath, and a long ribbon of pale segments trailing through the water toward the rim; flowers floating on the surface, as in the traditional card. Prompt: Write down a taste from your childhood. Trace it backward through every hand and place it passed through before it reached you, as far as you can go. What came along for the ride?

Seven of Cups: Viral Glitter

Organism: cyanophages, the viruses of the ocean's smallest photosynthesizers (Prochlorococcus, Synechococcus)

Every deck paints the Seven the same way: seven chalices floating in cloud, one holding a jewel, one a snake, one a laurel wreath, one a little shrouded figure, and a dreamer below who can't tell which is the prize. Readers call it illusion. The ocean calls it Tuesday.

A liter of seawater holds billions of viruses, and most of them are hunting bacteria. Some of their favorite prey are cyanobacteria so small that the most abundant one, Prochlorococcus, wasn't described until the late 1980s, which means the planet's lungs were hiding in plain water while we were busy inventing the Walkman. The phages that infect these cells have done something exquisitely rude. Some of them carry their own copies of the host's photosynthesis genes, so that once they're inside, the lights stay on. A cell that stops making energy stops making viruses, so the virus keeps it running, still photosynthesizing, still green, right up until it bursts. What you see from a satellite as a healthy green bloom is partly a factory whose owner has already been replaced, still waving from the window.

The gnostics would recognize the arrangement. Here is a world of light, and the light is real, but it's being kept on by something that is not the world and does not love it. The kind news, and it is kind, is that the bursting feeds everyone else: the broken cells return nutrients to the sea, and a sea without viruses would starve. Illusion isn't a flaw in the system. It is how the system eats.

So when this card comes up, look at your seven cups and ask which of them are still glowing on their own power. Some of your best options are lit from inside by somebody else's plan, and they will look healthiest the day before they pop. Still, the Seven is abundance too, and you are allowed to dream. Say it plainly to yourself before you pick: some light is only borrowed.

Scene: seven glass cups hanging in blue-green water, each lit from inside, one of them faintly geometric, like a virus's twenty-sided shell drawn in light.

Prompt: List seven things you could do next. For each, write who benefits if you choose it. Cross out every one where the answer isn't you or someone you love. Look hard at what's left.

Eight of Cups: The Last Well

Organism: Dracunculus medinensis, the Guinea worm

The Eight shows a cloaked figure walking away at night from eight stacked cups, under a moon that seems to be closing its eye. It's the card of leaving a thing you built with your own hands because it has stopped feeding you, or because it has started feeding on you.

The Guinea worm lives by a single human habit: drinking unfiltered pond water. You swallow a water flea no bigger than a comma, and it's carrying larvae. You forget about it for a year. Then a female worm up to a meter long arrives under the skin of your leg or foot and raises a blister that burns, and the burning has a purpose. It makes you want to put your foot in water, which is exactly when she releases her young. The worm has written your relief into her reproductive plan. The traditional treatment is to wind her out slowly around a small stick, a little each day, for days or weeks, and some people think this is where the doctor's snake-on-a-staff comes from. There's no vaccine and no drug. What there is is a cloth over the water jar, a filter, and whole villages changing a habit thousands of years old. In 1986 there were about three and a half million human cases a year. Now there are a handful. If it goes, it will be the first animal parasite we drove to extinction without any medicine at all, just by refusing to drink from the old well.

That's the Eight, and it is a harder card than it looks. The worm doesn't need your love. It needs your routine. The fix is almost insultingly small and boring, a filter or a different path home, and that's precisely why nobody does it. We defend the old pond because it's ours, because our grandmothers drank from it, because the water tastes like home. And when the dependence finally ends, part of you will miss the burning, and you'll have to decide whether it deserves a funeral.

Wind it out slowly; there is no faster way.

Scene: a dry stone well at dusk, eight clay cups turned upside down on its rim, a thin white line winding away across the sand like a path.

Prompt: Name one pond you keep going back to. What would the filter be? What would you have to grieve?

Nine of Cups: Silver Fish as Swollen Cup

Organism: Schistocephalus solidus, the stickleback tapeworm

The Nine is the wish card. A well-fed man sits in front of nine cups with his arms folded and the smile of someone who got everything he asked for. People love drawing it. We'd like to ask who, exactly, made the wish.

Schistocephalus solidus starts life in a copepod, which a three-spined stickleback eats as a snack. The worm then settles into the fish's body cavity and grows, and grows, until parasite can make up a large share of what the fish weighs; one fish may carry several. None of this is the worm's destination. It is waiting for a bird, because only in a warm bird's gut can it mature and mate, which it does quickly once it arrives, as if it had been rehearsing. Infected sticklebacks tend to get bolder and slower to flee, easier for a heron. Scientists still argue whether the worm is steering the fish or the fish is just too heavy to care. The fish, if asked, would probably say it had never felt more itself.

Here's the dark joke underneath the card. The Nine really is the card of getting your wish. It's just that a wish can be swallowed small, long before you remember having it, and then grow until it fills the body. Ambition does this. So do other people's expectations, and so does an ad you saw at fourteen. The satisfied man on the card isn't lying. He's full. The question is what he's full of, and whether his new calm is peace or the calm of a fish that has stopped looking up.

After a long enough time, the wish is the one who wishes.

Scene: a small silver fish, round as a filled goblet, floating near the surface of a lake at noon, a long-legged bird's shadow on the water.

Prompt: Write down your current wish. Then write where it came from, and when you first swallowed it.

Ten of Cups: Spiral-Valve Cathedral

Organism: Calliobothrium verticillatum, a tapeworm of the smooth dogfish shark

The Ten is the happy family under a rainbow of cups: parents with arms raised, children dancing, a little house on the hill. It's the most wholesome card in the deck, which is why the Franky edition hands it to shark parasites.

A shark doesn't have a long, coiled gut like ours. Many have a short one with a spiral valve inside, a corkscrew fold that slows the food down in a small space. To a tapeworm this is a cathedral, a spiral staircase of nourishment with a chapel on every landing. Calliobothrium verticillatum lives in the spiral valve of the smooth dogfish, gripping the wall with a head built of suckers and hooks, and it shares the building with other tapeworm species, each keeping to its own floor. Sharks turn out to be where tapeworm diversity runs richest, because the shark sits at the top of the food chain and everything eventually arrives there, including everyone's parasites.

So the Ten is belonging, and the belonging is real. Everyone has a floor. Everyone is fed. Nobody asks where the food came from, because in a good home you don't have to. That's the blessing and the indictment at once. Every happy household is also somebody's host, and a home at the top is fed by everything below it. The rainbow on the card is lovely. Somebody paid for it.

Look up at the skylight, and ask what's eating the house.

Scene: a spiral staircase of pale pink stone curving upward like the inside of a shell, ten small cups set on its steps, light falling from a skylight shaped like a shark's eye.

Prompt: Draw your household, team, or circle as a building. Who lives on which floor? What does the whole building eat?

Page of Cups: Ciliated Scout in a Drop

Organism: the miracidium larva of Fasciola hepatica, the sheep liver fluke

The Page of Cups is the youth holding a cup with a fish sticking its head out, a messenger startled by a feeling. The Cups court follows one liver fluke through its whole life. The Page is its childhood, and like most childhoods it's brief, hopeful, and badly underfunded.

A fluke egg lands in water with a sheep's dung. What hatches is a miracidium, a swimmer smaller than a grain of sand and covered in beating hairs. It has no mouth that works. It can't eat. It has a few hours, maybe a day, to find one particular kind of small freshwater snail by following chemical traces in the water, and most never do. The lucky one bores into the snail and turns into a sack that makes more of itself. That's success. That's the dream it was swimming toward.

This is the card of first errands and first loves, where everything depends on reading faint signals quickly and well. The Page is all senses and no armor, which is its charm and its whole risk. It doesn't know what it's for yet. When it finds out, it will be inside a snail. If you draw it, act on the small promising signal before the window shuts, and keep one eye open for what "home" is going to mean once you get there.

Little swimmer, the lantern is a snail.

Scene: a single drop of water magnified to the size of a room, a tiny hair-fringed swimmer inside it, and far away a snail shell glowing like a lantern.

Prompt: Write about a feeling you had before you had a word for it. Where did it lead you?

Knight of Cups: Tailed Charge

Organism: the cercaria larva of Fasciola hepatica, which swims out and waits on a wet leaf

The Knight of Cups rides slowly with his cup held out, the romantic on a quest. Knights in the other suits charge. This one courts.

Inside the snail the fluke multiplies into many cercariae, tailed larvae that swim out into the ditch. They don't chase anything. They climb a blade of grass or a sprig of watercress at the water's edge, drop their tails, and wrap themselves in a tough coat. Then they wait, sometimes for months, as a speck of dew on a leaf, for a sheep, a cow, or a person with a salad.

This is the most honest portrait of seduction in the deck. Make yourself very attractive, sit very still, throw away the tail you swam in on, and let the right mouth come to you. The charge is short and the waiting is long, and the waiting is the whole art. The Knight's opportunity is devotion that doesn't need to rush. His blind spot is the romantic's oldest one: he has planned every step up to the moment of being chosen and nothing at all about what happens after he's swallowed.

Once you're chosen, the story is somebody else's.

Scene: a green leaf beaded with dew at dawn, one bead slightly brighter than the rest, and the discarded tail of a tiny swimmer drifting away in the ditch below.

Prompt: Describe a time you waited a long while to be chosen. Would you do it again, now that you know what came after?

Queen of Cups: Leaf-Fluke in the Bile Canal

Organism: the adult Fasciola hepatica, the sheep liver fluke

The Queen of Cups sits at the edge of the sea holding a closed, ornate cup, the most intuitive and emotionally sovereign figure in the suit. The adult liver fluke has earned the throne the hard way.

Once swallowed, the young fluke sheds its coat in the gut, bores through the gut wall, crosses the body cavity, and eats its way through the liver for weeks, like a pilgrim who has to chew through the cathedral to reach the altar. Then it settles in the bile ducts, the liver's quiet golden canals, and becomes a flat, leaf-shaped animal a few centimeters long. Each adult is both male and female, so she needs no one. She can live for years, laying great numbers of eggs that flow out with the bile, back to the pasture, back to the water, back to a Page who will know nothing about her.

The Queen is emotional mastery: she knows the inside of things and rules by staying where the currents run. The calm is real, and she paid for it with the whole journey. But sovereignty inside someone else's body is still a kind of dependence, and her peace runs on another creature's slow cost. The fluke doesn't ask whether her serenity drains the host. That's the one thing a human Queen can do that the fluke can't.

Whether your calm is feeding someone or being fed by them is a question only you can ask.

Scene: a leaf-shaped queen floating in a narrow golden canal, eggs drifting behind her like seeds on a river, a green pasture visible where the canal opens.

Prompt: Write a letter from the calm part of you to the part that had to travel to get there. Then write the host's reply.

King of Cups: Rootlet Law

Organism: Rhizocephala, the parasitic barnacles (here Peltogaster paguri, a hermit-crab parasite)

The King of Cups sits on a stone throne in the middle of a rough sea, perfectly calm, cup in one hand and scepter in the other. He is emotional control, the ruler who governs feeling instead of drowning in it.

The rhizocephalans are barnacles that gave up the shell and the fixed spot on the rock for a stranger kind of power. A female larva finds a crab (or, for Peltogaster, a hermit crab) and injects a few cells. Those cells grow into a network of rootlets that spreads through the host's body, and then a sac pushes out under the crab's abdomen, right where the crab would carry its own eggs. The crab stops reproducing and stops molting, and tends the parasite's brood as tenderly as if it were its own. Males can be pushed into female behavior. This isn't one tyrant. It's a law, repeated across many species: govern a body from the inside until it serves another lineage and calls that love.

That's why the King gets the whole group and the Devil keeps one species. The Devil is possession, which is loud. The King is administration, which is quiet and far more effective. His gift is real: the ability to hold steady and make others steady. His shadow is control so deep and so polite that the governed can't tell which feelings are theirs. The crab isn't suffering, as far as anyone can tell. It's busy. It's caring for its children. That is the horror, and also, if you are honest, a fair description of a lot of happy lives.

So when the King appears, ask who wrote the emotional rules where you live, and whether they're followed because they're good or because they've taken root.

Scene: a calm king on a stone throne in a gray sea, cup raised, and beneath the water, fine golden roots spreading from his throne into the rocks and the crabs below.

Prompt: Whose emotional rules do you live by? Write down three, and the name of whoever wrote each one. Then write which of them you'd keep if you found out.

Sources for the Cups

• All five: A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Cups Ace-Five (quotations checked against the identical text reprinted by L. W. de Laurence, 1918, Project Gutenberg #43548).
• Ace: WHO, "Rabies" fact sheet; CDC, "Rabies" (the virus and its path through the body); Hemachudha T et al. 2013, Lancet Neurol 12:498-513; Emerg Infect Dis 15(8), 2009, etymologia "Lyssavirus"; Euripides, Heracles; Institut Pasteur, "The history of the first rabies vaccination in 1885."
• Two: Heckmann RA et al. 2012, Scientia Parasitologica 13(3):109-117; Animal Diversity Web, "Diplozoon paradoxum" (citing Bovet 1967, Schmidt & Roberts 1989, Halton & Jennings 1965 Biol Bull 129:257-272, Kagel & Taraschewski 1993 J Fish Dis 16:501-506); Plato, Symposium 189c-193d.
• Three: Hughes DP, Kathirithamby J, Turillazzi S & Beani L 2004, Behav Ecol 15:1037-1043; Kathirithamby J 2009, Annu Rev Entomol 54:227-249; Manfredini F et al. 2007, J Morphol 268:588-601; Erezyilmaz DF et al. 2014, PLoS ONE 9:e93614; Chafino S et al. 2018, Sci Rep 8:14176; Geffre AC et al. 2017, Proc R Soc B 284:20170029; Beani L et al. 2021, Sci Rep 11:7235; Hamilton WD 1964, J Theor Biol 7:1-52.
• Four: CDC DPDx, "Echinococcosis"; CDC, "Clinical Overview of Echinococcosis"; WHO, "Echinococcosis" fact sheet; Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953).
• Five: CDC DPDx, "Opisthorchiasis"; Pakharukova MY & Mordvinov VA 2022, Parasitology 149:1306-1318; Fedorova OS et al. 2020, PLoS Negl Trop Dis 14:e0008421; Avgustinovich DF et al. 2016, Brain Behav Immun 53:262-272; Avgustinovich DF et al. 2022, Physiol Behav 252:113846; Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis clos (1944).
• Six: Scholz T, Kuchta R & Brabec J 2019, Int J Parasitol Parasites Wildl (review of Dibothriocephalus latus); CDC DPDx, "Diphyllobothriasis"; Merck Manual Professional, "Diphyllobothriasis."
• Seven: Suttle CA 2005, Nature 437:356; Suttle CA 2007, Nat Rev Microbiol 5:801; Chisholm SW et al. 1988, Nature 334:340; Mann NH et al. 2003, Nature 424:741; Lindell D et al. 2005, Nature 438:86.
• Eight: WHO, Dracunculiasis (Guinea-worm disease) fact sheet; The Carter Center.
• Page, Knight, Queen: CDC DPDx, "Fascioliasis."
• King: Høeg JT 1995, J Zool.

The Suit of Swords

Tarot books call the Swords the suit of air: the mind, the word, the argument, the cut. Swords are where the deck thinks, and thinking, as everyone who has lain awake at three in the morning knows, is not always kind. In this deck the Swords belong to the wasps, and to the bees who learned their tricks.

The Hymenoptera are an order of more than 153,000 described species, and the parasitoid wasps may be so numerous that the order outnumbers even the beetles, though that is a model's estimate, not a count. All parasitoid wasps descend from a single ancestor that lived some 247 million years ago, and its descendants include the ants, the bees, and the stinging wasps. A wasp's sword is her ovipositor, the tube she lays eggs through, and in that one great lineage, the tube became the sting, which is why only females sting. So the suit's blade is a birth canal that learned to fight. Nearly every card that follows is a mother with a plan for somebody else's body.

Three cards hold the suit together. The Ace, the Ten, and the King all belong to the spider wasps: the Ace is the seed, the Ten is the spectacle, and the King is the law. (The Eight is a spider wasp too, the one that cheats.) In between, the Swords do what minds do. They hide, steal, wait, scheme, grieve, and keep count.

Ace of Swords: First Stillness

Organism: Pompilidae, the spider wasps; in the caption, Anoplius cleora

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.

Scene: a hand from a pale cloud holding a slender wasp-blue sword upright; on its point a crown of olive and palm; below, on a white dune, a wolf spider lying perfectly still beside a fresh burrow.

Prompt: Write about the moment something in your life went suddenly still. What did that stillness protect, and what did it feed?

Two of Swords: The Double Crypt

Organism: Euderus set, the crypt-keeper wasp, a parasite of a parasite

On the Two of Swords a woman in a blindfold sits on a stone bench by the sea, arms crossed over her chest, holding two swords that point to either side. A crescent moon hangs over the water. It's the card of the stalemate: the choice you won't look at, the truce that's really a refusal.

In the live oaks of the southeastern United States lives a tiny gall wasp, Bassettia pallida. It makes the tree grow a little chamber, a crypt, inside a young stem, and its larva lives there in safety. But in 2017 scientists described a second wasp, Euderus set, which lays its own egg in the crypt and lives on the first. When the gall wasp is grown and chews its way toward daylight, the infected one does something odd. It chews a smaller hole than usual, pushes its head into it, and dies there, plugging the door with its own face. The crypt-keeper eats its way out through the head. The scientists called this hypermanipulation, since the parasite that manipulates the tree is manipulated in turn. The plug is worth it: crypt-keepers that have to dig their own way out are about three times as likely to die trapped inside.

The wasp is named for Set, the Egyptian god who, in the myth, trapped his brother Osiris in a crypt to kill him. And it's not loyal to one victim. It attacks and steers at least six other kinds of gall wasp besides Bassettia.

Here's the riddle. The woman's blindfold is the head in the hole. She can't see because her face is the door, and someone else is waiting to use it. The two crossed swords are the two wasps, one inside the other, and the crypt is double because the safe room has a second tenant.

When the Two appears, ask what you're refusing to look at, and whether the refusal is really yours. Some of our stalemates are holding a door shut for something we haven't met yet.

Scene: a woman blindfolded on a stone bench by a moonlit sea, two swords crossed on her chest; behind her, a cut-away oak twig shows a chamber with a small wasp's head jammed in its round door, and a second, tinier wasp waiting inside.

Prompt: Name a decision you've been putting off. Write down who benefits, besides you, from your not making it.

Three of Swords: Army from One Egg

Organism: Copidosoma floridanum, a polyembryonic wasp in the cabbage looper moth

The Three of Swords is the plainest card in the deck: a red heart pierced by three swords, under gray clouds and rain. It's heartbreak, grief, the news you can't unhear. There's no person on the card at all, just the wound.

Copidosoma floridanum lays its egg inside the egg of a moth, so the caterpillar hatches already carrying it. Then the single egg does something astonishing. It divides, over and over, into about three thousand embryos, all of them identical twins of one another. Most become ordinary larvae that will grow into wasps. Some become soldiers, with no future of their own. Which is which depends on whether an embryo inherits the cells that make eggs and sperm. Soldiers never get them, and they never reproduce. Their job is to kill invaders, and when a rival wasp lays its eggs in the same caterpillar, the brood makes more soldiers fast. They're also most aggressive toward larvae that are least related to them. They fight hardest for family.

The caterpillar, meanwhile, goes on eating, carrying a whole army that began as one egg.

Here's the riddle. The heart on the card has no body around it, and the three swords come from nowhere we can see. Grief works like that. It arrives from inside, out of something that began as one small thing and multiplied. The soldiers give their lives so their siblings can live, and they don't get to choose it. The heart is the host, and it goes on beating.

The Three is not a card to explain away. When it appears, it usually means something has already happened. Let it rain. Grief is love that has outlived its address, and like the soldiers, it fights hardest for family. You don't have to fight it. Carry it and keep eating, and let the people who love you in.

Scene: a heart made of a curled green caterpillar, pierced by three thin swords; inside it, visible as through glass, hundreds of tiny identical larvae, some with long jaws standing guard; soft gray rain.

Prompt: Write a letter to someone you've lost, or to the part of you that lost them. Don't send it. Just let it be written.

Four of Swords: The Emerald Pause

Organism: Ampulex compressa, the emerald jewel wasp, in the American cockroach

On the Four of Swords a knight's stone effigy lies on a tomb in a quiet church, hands folded in prayer. Three swords hang on the wall above him and a fourth is carved along the tomb. Through a stained-glass window, a saint is giving a blessing. It's the card of rest, retreat, the truce, the long recovery.

The emerald jewel wasp is beautiful, metallic green with red legs, and it hunts cockroaches. It stings twice. The first sting, in the thorax, paralyzes the roach's front legs for a few minutes. The second goes straight into the head and delivers venom into its brain, the first case ever proved of a predator injecting venom into its prey's brain. The roach then grooms itself obsessively for about half an hour, and after that it simply doesn't want to go anywhere. It isn't paralyzed. Its legs still work, but the drive to walk is gone: it won't start on its own, and even a prod barely moves it. The venom quiets one small region of its nervous system that drives walking, and leaves the rest alone. The wasp lays an egg on it and seals it in a burrow, and the larva, once inside, coats its living meal with antibiotics to keep it from spoiling.

The venom holds 264 proteins and none of the classic nerve-blocking toxins. It's less a poison than a sermon, delivered by injection.

Here's the riddle. The knight on the tomb is lying down, but he isn't dead. He's carved resting, hands folded, while the swords wait on the wall. The roach is the same: the body works and the will is gone. The card's question is whether your rest is yours.

Real rest is a gift, and the Four says take it. Recovery is a kind of courage. But know the difference between resting and being made still. If you've lost the urge to move and someone else seems pleased about it, look around for a green shimmer.

Scene: a church tomb with a stone knight lying in prayer; on his chest, a tiny emerald-green wasp; three swords on the wall above; light from a stained-glass window falling on an untouched cockroach lying quietly beside his feet.

Prompt: Write about a time you stopped. Was it rest or surrender? Who decided?

Five of Swords: The Rewritten Web

Organism: Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga, a Costa Rican wasp in the orb-weaver Leucauge argyra

The Five of Swords shows a smirking young man gathering up swords on a windy shore, while two defeated figures walk away with their backs to him. Two swords lie on the ground. It's the card of the hollow victory: you won the fight and lost the friends, or somebody else won and you're the one walking away.

In Costa Rica a small wasp hunts an orb-weaving spider. She stings it at the hub of its own web, which paralyzes it for ten or fifteen minutes, and glues one egg to its abdomen. Then she leaves. The spider wakes and goes on with its life. For a week or two it builds normal webs and catches normal flies, while the larva rides on its back and sips its blood through tiny holes.

On the last night, everything changes. The spider builds a web it has never built before. It repeats the first steps of one routine over and over, and leaves out the rest, until it has made a small, tough platform instead of a web for catching food. Then the larva kills it, eats it, and spins its cocoon hanging from the structure the spider just made. That web is stronger than an ordinary one and less likely to be torn by falling debris. The spider, in its last hours, built its killer a nursery. If the larva is removed shortly before, the spider sometimes builds the cocoon web anyway, and over the following days partly recovers.

Here's the riddle. Look at who's holding the swords on the card. The winner is carrying weapons the losers made. In the forest, the victory is built entirely out of the spider's own skill. The larva never spins a thread until it's done.

When the Five appears, ask whose web you're building. It isn't just about conflict. The card asks whether your talents are serving your life or someone else's cocoon. The good news, for spiders and people, is that some of it wears off once the rider is gone.

Scene: an orb web at night, strange and repetitive like a stitched X, a small white cocoon hanging at its center; on the shore below, a figure gathers swords made of silk thread while two others walk away into the dark.

Prompt: List three things you're very good at. Next to each, write who benefits most when you do it.

Six of Swords: Blue Passport into the Nest

Organism: Phengaris rebeli (long called Maculinea rebeli), a large blue butterfly, the suit's one guest who isn't a wasp or bee

The Six of Swords shows a ferryman poling a small boat across the water toward a distant shore. A cloaked woman and a child sit huddled in the bow, and six swords stand upright in the boat with them. The water is rough on one side and smooth on the other. It's the card of passage, of leaving something hard behind and crossing over, carrying it all with you.

This card's organism is a guest, a butterfly in a suit of wasps, kept here on purpose. The caterpillar of Phengaris rebeli starts life eating the flower buds of a gentian. Then it drops to the ground and ends up inside the nest of a red Myrmica ant. It smells like an ant larva. It sounds like a queen. The host ant's queens make distinctive sounds that earn them extra care, and this caterpillar makes sounds closer to the queen's than to the workers', so the ants treat it like royalty and feed it mouth to mouth. It doesn't need to eat the ant brood. It just gets fed. That pays: a single ant colony can support 4.7 times as many of these "cuckoo" caterpillars as it can of a related species that eats the brood. The price is total dependence on one kind of ant.

Scientists estimate there are around ten thousand species of social parasites cheating ant societies like this. And there is someone waiting at the far shore. The wasp of the Judgement card can find these caterpillars even in the nest, by setting the ants fighting one another.

Here's the riddle. The ferryman doesn't ask the passengers for anything but their passage. The caterpillar's passport is smell and song: it gets carried across the border of the nest by sounding like the person in charge. And the six swords in the boat are cargo. You can leave a place and still bring everything sharp with you.

When the Six appears, think about your crossing. What do you have to sound like to be let in? And what is coming with you in the boat?

Scene: a small boat crossing gray water at dusk; a red ant at the stern poling it along with a blade of grass; in the bow, a fat blue-tinged caterpillar wrapped like a child in a cloak; six slender swords standing upright among them; a gentian on the far shore.

Prompt: Write about a place you had to leave. What did you carry across with you that you didn't need to?

Seven of Swords: Quiet Theft of the Pollen Cell

Organism: Sphecodes monilicornis, a cuckoo sweat bee

On the Seven of Swords a man tiptoes away from a camp of bright tents, carrying five swords in his arms and looking back over his shoulder with a little grin. Two swords stay stuck in the ground behind him. It's the card of stealth, cunning, and getting away with it, or thinking you have.

Sphecodes are cuckoo bees. They don't gather pollen for their own young. A female slips into another bee's nest and lays an egg in a single brood cell that the owner has stocked with pollen for her own child. It takes about two minutes. The host's egg or larva is killed, by the intruder or later by her larva, and the young cuckoo eats the pollen store. Sphecodes monilicornis has fourteen known host species, more than half of them social bees. The species is a generalist, but each individual female keeps to one kind of host, like a cuckoo bird that always picks the same kind of nest. Across the genus, cuckoo bees have switched to new host lineages as many as seventeen times.

An aside. In April 2019, in Taiwan, a doctor removed four live sweat bees from the eye of a woman who had been weeding at her relatives' graves during Qingming, the festival when families clean and tend the graves of their dead. They weren't cuckoo bees, and they weren't parasites, just tiny sweat-drinkers. She was sent home and expected to make a full recovery.

Here's the riddle. Look at the swords the thief leaves behind. He takes five and leaves two, enough that no one notices right away. The cuckoo leaves the whole nest standing and takes only one cell. The best thefts look like nothing happened. And the bees in the eye at Qingming are the honest version of the Seven: something small got in, did no lasting harm, and was carefully removed.

When the Seven appears, check your stores. Are you living on someone else's pollen? Is someone living on yours? Cunning has its place, but every quiet theft takes something that was meant for somebody's child.

Scene: a row of small burrows in a sunny bank like tents in a camp; a red-and-black bee slipping out of one with a grin, carrying five tiny golden pollen balls like swords; two left behind in the cell.

Prompt: Write about something you took that wasn't quite yours to take, or something taken from you so quietly you only noticed later.

Eight of Swords: Egg in the Book-Lung

Organism: Ceropales bipunctata, a cuckoo spider wasp of eastern North America

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.

Scene: a wolf spider lying still on a moonlit dune, a tiny egg glowing among the leaves of its book lung like a note pressed into a book; eight thin swords stuck in the sand around it; a small band of wasps hovering.

Prompt: Write down one belief about yourself that you didn't choose. Whose handwriting is it in?

Nine of Swords: Wasp-Waisted Understudy

Organism: Nomada, the nomad bees, cuckoos of mining bees

The Nine of Swords is the three-in-the-morning card. A woman sits up in bed with her face in her hands. Nine swords hang in a row on the black wall behind her. Nothing on the card is actually attacking her. The swords are on the wall, and the terror is in her.

Nomada bees look like little wasps, red and yellow and black, and nearly hairless. There are nearly eight hundred species, on every continent but Antarctica, and every one of them is a cuckoo. A female waits until a mining bee leaves her nest. Then she slips in, cuts a slit in the wall of a brood cell that's still open, and hides a tiny egg inside the wall. The owner comes home, finishes stocking the cell with pollen, lays her own egg, and seals it, never knowing. When the Nomada larva hatches, its head is hard and its jaws are long and sharp. It kills the host's egg or young larva and eats the pollen that was meant for it. Some Nomada males even smell like the females of their host, carrying the same scent compounds in their heads.

They're quiet. Unlike the bumblebee cuckoos of the Hierophant, Nomada never fight their way in. Their whole method is patience, disguise, and a small, very sharp first act.

Here's the riddle. The nine swords are on the wall, and so is the egg. What keeps you up at night is often hidden in the walls of your own room, laid there quietly while you were out, and it does nothing until the moment it hatches. The understudy in the title is the one waiting in the wings to take over the role, and in the cell, she does.

When the Nine appears, take your fears seriously, but look at where they actually are. Most of the swords are on the wall, not in you. And if something really has been hidden in your walls, it's better to find it while it's still an egg. Turn on the light. Then try to sleep.

Scene: a dark bedroom; a woman sitting up with her face in her hands; on the wall behind her, nine slender swords, and set into the wall between them, a cut-away brood cell with a tiny glowing egg tucked inside its lining; a wasp-striped bee resting on the windowsill.

Prompt: Write down what kept you awake most recently. Then write what, if anything, you can actually do about it tomorrow.

Ten of Swords: Sapphire Drag

Organism: Pepsis thisbe, a tarantula hawk of the Texas desert

The Ten of Swords is the most theatrical card in the deck. A man lies face down on the shore with ten swords in his back, under a black sky. But along the horizon, the sky is turning yellow. It's rock bottom, the painful end, the worst-case scenario, and the dawn that comes anyway.

The tarantula hawk is a spider wasp built for spectacle. A female Pepsis thisbe in Big Bend, Texas, can be nearly four centimeters long, with a body of midnight blue and wings of rusty orange. She hunts one kind of tarantula. She stings it, paralyzes it, drags the huge spider backward to a burrow, and lays a single egg on its abdomen. The spider almost never wins. In more than four hundred observed fights, a tarantula killed the wasp only once. The larva grows through five stages, eating the spider's less important tissues first and saving the heart and nerves for last. A wasp that grows up on a bigger spider becomes a bigger wasp. And the sting is one of the most painful known to people, yet it's of very low danger. It hurts enormously and almost never does lasting harm.

Here's the riddle. The Ten is the card of overkill: ten swords when one would do. The tarantula hawk is overkill, too, the most painful sting for one of the least dangerous. The card's secret is in its horizon. Pain is not the same as danger, and the worst moment is often the end of the worst part.

When the Ten appears, it's allowed to hurt. Something is over. But look up at the yellow line along the edge of the sky. The card has already been painted with the next morning in it.

Scene: a desert at dawn; a huge tarantula lying on its back, ten thin sapphire-blue swords standing in the sand around it; a midnight-blue wasp with orange wings pulling it backward toward a burrow; a gold line of sunrise along the horizon.

Prompt: Write about the worst day you've survived. What was the first sign that it was ending?

Page of Swords: Filament Scout

Organism: Ichneumonoidea, the Darwin wasps and the braconids

On the Page of Swords a young person stands on a windy hill holding a sword upright with both hands, looking over one shoulder. Clouds race behind, and birds scatter. The Page is the curious one, the scout, the messenger, the kid who notices everything and sometimes tells.

The ichneumonoid wasps, the Darwin wasps and their cousins the braconids, are the suit's scouts. Their work is finding the young of other insects. The Darwin wasps, with very few exceptions, attack the young of insects that go through complete metamorphosis, and spiders, and in the end they kill their hosts. That makes them important regulators of insect populations. Their tool is the ovipositor, a fine filament the female uses to probe, pierce, and lay. It's metal-hardened: in many wasps the ovipositor's cuticle holds up to ten percent zinc or manganese by weight, and in the ichneumonoids the metal is manganese.

Some carry something stranger: a virus. These polydnaviruses are written into the wasp's own chromosomes and pass from one generation to the next. When the wasp lays her egg, she injects virus particles too, and they deliver genes into the host that help the wasp's young survive inside it.

Here's the riddle. The Page is a messenger, and this one carries a letter written in the language of genes. Its sword is a metal pen. When the scout finds its host, it doesn't just lay an egg. It delivers a message that rewrites the reader.

When the Page appears, you're in a season of scouting. Look around, ask questions, and learn the lay of the land. But be careful what messages you deliver, and what you write into other people when you probe. Curiosity is the Page's gift. Gossip is its shadow.

Scene: a windy hilltop; a slim black wasp standing tall like a young sentry, its fine ovipositor held upright like a sword glinting with manganese; birds scattering; in the clouds, a faint spiral of DNA like a letter on the wind.

Prompt: Write a message you've been meaning to deliver. Then ask yourself whether it informs the person who reads it or changes them.

Knight of Swords: Lance Through Oak

Organism: Megarhyssa atrata, the black giant ichneumon wasp

The Knight of Swords charges full tilt into a storm, sword raised, on a galloping horse, while the trees bend and the clouds tear. He's the most headlong figure in the deck: brilliant, brave, and in too much of a hurry.

Megarhyssa atrata is described as the largest parasitoid wasp known. A female's body can be an inch and a half long, and the stylus of her ovipositor has been measured at 142 millimeters, the longest genitalia known in any arthropod. She uses it to reach the larvae of the pigeon horntail, a wood wasp that bores into dying or recently dead hardwoods. The horntail mother injects a wood-rotting fungus along with her eggs, and her larvae need it to grow in the wood. Somewhere deep inside a dying oak, or maple, or beech, a horntail larva is chewing. The giant ichneumon finds it from outside.

What looks like one long tail is three filaments. The two outer ones are sheaths that bow out during egg laying. The central shaft does the drilling, and it's two interlocking halves that slide against each other, with the egg passing down a channel inside. Its tip has pores that release secretions which may lubricate the way, and along its length run six rows of tiny touch sensors. For all that, it can't sting a person. The lance has one purpose.

Here's the riddle. The Knight looks like the fastest card in the deck, but the real lance here is a slow one. The wasp doesn't charge. She stands still on a dying tree, feels her way into the dark through solid wood, and finds a single hidden larva without ever seeing it.

When the Knight appears, you have momentum and a sharp point. Use them. But the most impressive charge in this suit is the one made standing perfectly still. Before you ride into the storm, feel the wood.

Scene: a storm-bent forest; a black wasp with yellow-banded legs standing motionless on the trunk of a dying oak, her impossibly long ovipositor arched like a knight's lance into the bark; inside, shown in cross-section, a horntail larva curled in its tunnel; behind her, wind-torn clouds shaped like a galloping horse.

Prompt: Write about a time you rushed in. Then write what you might have found if you had stood still and felt your way first.

Queen of Swords: Darwin's Glass Court

Organism: Ichneumonidae, the Darwin wasps

The Queen of Swords sits crowned on a throne in the clouds, one hand raised, her sword held upright, her face in profile and unsmiling. A single bird flies high above her. She's the clearest mind in the deck: perceptive, honest, unfooled. Waite's old meanings for her are surprisingly dark, too: widowhood, mourning, absence, separation. She sees clearly because she has lost something.

Ichneumon wasps helped convince Charles Darwin that not everything in nature could be the work of a kindly God. They are the wasps in his 1860 letter to Asa Gray, the one quoted under Fortitude. In 2019, ichneumonid specialists from fourteen countries proposed that the family be called "Darwin wasps," for the part they played in that doubt.

The Queen's court is mostly uncounted. About 25,000 species have been described, and that's probably less than a quarter of the real number. The family may hold more species than all the vertebrates on Earth combined. For years people believed these wasps broke the usual rule that life is richer in the tropics, until researchers sampled a few tropical forests properly and found 177 likely new species in a single subfamily, more than three times as many as that subfamily was known to have in all the world's tropics.

Here's the riddle. The Queen's court is made of glass because you can see straight through it and still not count it. Most of her subjects have never been named. And the bird above her is the one creature on the card that's free. The Queen of Swords is widowed in Waite, and Darwin wrote that letter nine years after his daughter Annie died at ten. "We have lost the joy of the Household," he wrote a week after her death. Historians still argue over what it did to his faith; no one argues over what it did to him. The clearest sight in the deck comes from grief.

When the Queen appears, you may be seeing more clearly than you want to. Honor it. Clear sight after loss isn't coldness. It's the mind refusing to lie about what happened, and that refusal is a kind of love.

Scene: a queen on a throne of clear glass set in the clouds, one hand raised, a slender wasp-waisted sword upright in the other; inside the glass of the throne, thousands of tiny wasps like trapped stars, most of them unnamed; one small bird high above.

Prompt: Write about something you understood only after a loss. What did grief let you see?

King of Swords: Law of the Paralytic Cache

Organism: Pompilidae, the spider wasps, with the tarantula hawks of Pepsis as their crown

The King of Swords sits on his throne facing straight out, holding his sword upright and a little to one side. His throne is carved with butterflies. He's the judge, the lawmaker, the voice of reason and authority: fair, precise, and not to be argued with.

The spider wasps have one law, and the King enforces it. One spider for one child. The mother stings a spider into stillness, drags it to a burrow, lays one egg on it, and seals it in. The tarantula hawks of the Ten keep it. The Anoplius of the Ace keeps it. And the exception proves the rule: the cuckoo wasps of the Eight don't hunt at all, but slip their eggs onto spiders other wasps have caught. The realm has five subfamilies, and the genus Pepsis rules from Utah to Argentina.

The crown is real. In 1989, after a classroom of students in Edgewood, New Mexico, organized a statewide vote of schoolchildren, the New Mexico legislature made the tarantula hawk wasp, Pepsis formosa, the official state insect. The children picked the king.

Here's the riddle. Look at the King's throne: butterflies. The suit's one guest, the blue butterfly of the Six, is carved behind him, the creature that broke the rules of the nest by sounding like the queen. Every law has someone who slips through it. And the king of the spider wasps was crowned by children, not by the court.

When the King appears, you're being asked for judgment, either to give it or to accept it. Be fair, be clear, and know the law well enough to recognize its exceptions. The best rulers remember who put the crown on their head, and why.

Scene: a king on a stone throne carved with blue butterflies, holding upright a sword shaped like a long blue wasp's sting; at his feet, a paralyzed tarantula lying in state like a tribute; a row of children's hands raised in a vote along the base of the throne.

Prompt: Write down one rule you live by. Then write about the one time you broke it, and whether you were right to.

Sources for the Swords

• All fourteen: A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), Swords Ace-King (the Queen's meanings are quoted from it); Pamela Colman Smith's designs for the Rider-Waite deck (1909), for the King's and Queen's thrones.
• Suit: Peters RS et al. 2017, Current Biology 27:1013-1018; Forbes AA et al. 2018, BMC Ecology 18:21.
• Ace: Waichert C et al. 2015, Zool J Linn Soc 175:271-287; Loktionov VM & Lelej AS 2015, Zootaxa 4034:87-111; Klymko J, Buck M & Robinson SL 2017, Can Entomol 149:786-800.
• Two: Egan SP et al. 2017, ZooKeys 645:37-49 (the naming of Euderus set); Weinersmith KL et al. 2017, Proc R Soc B 284:20162365; Ward AKG et al. 2019, Biol Lett 15:20190428.
• Three: Zhurov V & Grbic M 2005, Dev Genes Evol 215:645-650; Donnell DM et al. 2004, PNAS 101:10095-10100; Giron D et al. 2004, Nature 430:676-679; Smith MS, Shirley A & Strand MR 2017, Ann Entomol Soc Am 110:501-505.
• Four: Libersat F 2003, J Comp Physiol A 189:497-508; Weisel-Eichler A, Haspel G & Libersat F 1999, J Exp Biol 202:957-964; Haspel G, Rosenberg LA & Libersat F 2003, J Neurobiol 56:287-292; Gal R & Libersat F 2010, PLoS ONE 5:e10019; Arvidson R et al. 2019, Mol Cell Proteomics 18:99-114; Herzner G et al. 2013, PNAS 110:1369-1374.
• Five: Eberhard WG 2000, Nature 406:255-256; Eberhard WG 2001, J Arachnol 29:354-366.
• Six: Als TD et al. 2004, Nature 432:386-390; Thomas JA & Elmes GW 1998, Ecol Entomol 23:457-464; Barbero F et al. 2009, Science 323:782-785; Akino T et al. 1999, Proc R Soc B 266:1419-1426, and Stankiewicz, Sielezniew & Svitra 2005, Myrmecologische Nachrichten 7:51-54 (the gentian).
• Seven: Bogusch P, Kratochvil L & Straka J 2006, Behav Ecol Sociobiol 60:422-429; Habermannova J, Bogusch P & Straka J 2013, PLoS ONE 8:e64537; BBC News, "Taiwan doctor finds four sweat bees living inside woman's eye," 11 Apr 2019.
• Eight: Klymko, Buck & Robinson 2017 (above); Rodriguez J et al. 2021, J Biogeogr 48:1669-1678.
• Nine: Odanaka KA et al. 2022, Mol Phylogenet Evol 170:107453; Rozen JG Jr 1996, Am Mus Novit 3180:1-39; Rozen JG Jr 2003, Am Mus Novit 3413:1-36; Tengo J & Bergstrom G 1977, Science 196:1117-1119.
• Ten: Punzo F 1994, Psyche 101:229-241; Schmidt JO 2019, Toxins 11:427.
• Page: Klopfstein S et al. 2019, Entomological Communications 1:ec01006; Quicke DLJ et al. 1998, Zool J Linn Soc 124:387-396; Strand MR & Burke GR 2014, Annu Rev Virol 1:333-354.
• Knight: Nenon J-P, Kacem N & Le Lannic J 1997, Can Entomol 129:789-799; Missouri Department of Conservation, Field Guide, "Black Giant Ichneumon Wasp"; Cranshaw W 2013, Colorado State University Extension, Fact Sheet 5.604.
• Queen: Darwin C to Asa Gray, 22 May 1860, Darwin Correspondence Project, DCP-LETT-2814; Darwin C, memorial of Anne Elizabeth Darwin, 30 Apr 1851 (CUL-DAR210.13.40, Darwin Online); van Wyhe J & Pallen MJ 2012, Centaurus 54:105-123; Klopfstein et al. 2019 (above); Veijalainen A et al. 2012, Proc R Soc B 279:4694-4698.
• King: New Mexico Statutes Annotated 1978, section 12-3-4(K); New Mexico Secretary of State, "State Insect"; Waichert et al. 2015 and Punzo 1994 (above).

The Suit of Pentacles

The Pentacles is the suit of the quotidian. Just as we never notice the individual cells of which our flesh, bones, and minds are composed, we never notice the myriad of tiny parasites all around and inside us. Rarely, we'll notice that some of them are making us sick, but most of the time, who's considered the millions of protozoans blissfully flagellating away the day inside us, or the billions of viruses dutifully montaging our genomes to their own ends?

So here is the confession. We promised you the invisible everyday, and we are going to deliver it from underfoot. The Pentacles in this deck belong to the fungi: the rusts, smuts, molds, and root-rots that keep the planet's real books. Every loaf, every cup of coffee, every forest you have ever walked through has had its accounts audited by a fungus. Most of the time you never see the auditor. You see the fruit, or the ruin, or the price of bread. Pentacles is the suit of money because fungi are the suit of exchange: sugar for nitrogen, a beetle for a meal, a wheat field for a spore cloud. Some of these deals are fair. Most of the ones in this suit are not. That is what makes them parasites, and that is what makes them such good company for a card about your paycheck.

Ace of Pentacles: White Coin

Organism: Beauveria bassiana, the white muscardine fungus

In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, a hand comes out of a cloud holding a single golden coin over a garden, and beyond the garden there's an arch of roses opening onto the mountains. It's the card of the new job, the windfall, the seed money. Franky's own introduction picks it as the example of good news with a catch: "What dangers lurk behind the auspicious job indicated by say the Ace of Pentacles?". This card is the answer.

In the early nineteenth century, the silk farms of Lombardy were being wiped out by a disease the Italians called calcinaccio or moscardino. The silkworms died, stiffened, and then bloomed white, as if they'd been rolled in chalk. Agostino Bassi, a law graduate and provincial official whose failing eyesight drove him out of public office, spent decades on the problem. In 1834 he demonstrated, and in 1835 published, that the white powder was alive. It was a fungus, and touching a sick worm to a healthy one passed the disease on. This was one of the first experimental demonstrations that a microorganism causes a disease in an animal, decades before Pasteur and Koch became famous for the idea. The fungus now carries his name.

Here is how Beauveria works. A spore lands on an insect's cuticle, sticks, germinates, and pushes its way through the armor with enzymes and pressure. Inside, it grows through the body, and when the host is dead it grows back out, covering the corpse in a white bloom that makes millions more spores. The same fungus that ruined Lombardy's silk is now sold in bags as a biological insecticide. It has also been found living quietly inside the tissues of many plants.

So look at what the Ace hands you. A coin is a promise stamped onto a blank. The white spore is the blankest possible beginning, a dot of powder that could become an entire economy. Your new job, new money, new lover, new idea: it lands on you the way a spore lands, and it's very small at first. The opportunity is real. Bassi's lost career became a new science. The risk is that every beginning is also an infection. It only succeeds by getting inside something and turning that something into more of itself. Ask what you'll be turned into, and whether you'd mind.

Scene: a single white coin held up in an open palm, and on closer look the coin is a silkworm curled in a perfect circle, dusted with frost-white powder. There's a mulberry garden behind it.

Prompt: Write about a gift that changed you into something you didn't plan to be. Was it a blessing, an infection, or both?

Two of Pentacles: Twin Ledgers

Organism: Puccinia graminis, stem rust of wheat, which alternates with barberry (Berberis)

The Two of Pentacles shows a young man dancing with two coins, a ribbon looped around them in a figure eight, the sign of infinity. Behind him, two ships ride enormous waves. It's the card of juggling: two jobs, two bills, two households, and a grin that says he's got it under control. He doesn't, quite. That's the charm.

Stem rust keeps two sets of books. In summer it lives on wheat, where it breaks out through the stems as brick-red pustules full of spores that blow from field to field. As the wheat ripens, it switches to black, thick-walled spores that sit out the winter in the stubble. In spring those spores germinate and send a different kind of spore to a completely different plant, the common barberry. On barberry leaves the fungus mates, then makes little orange cups on the undersides. Their spores fly back to the wheat, and the ledger starts again. Grass, then shrub. Cereal gold, then barberry green. Two hosts, five kinds of spore, one fungus.

Farmers noticed the link between barberry and rust long before anyone could explain it. In the twentieth century the United States ran a long campaign to dig up barberry across the wheat belt, on the logic that if you close one of the books, the business goes under. It helped. But the rust can also cheat, carrying on through the summer spores alone wherever winters are mild enough. When a new, virulent race named Ug99 was found in Uganda in 1999, it went back on every wheat breeder's worry list.

When you draw the Two, notice the second host in your life. Most of us keep two books: the one people see and the one where we actually settle our accounts. The day job and the side project. The partner and the ex who still gets the texts. The opportunity of the Two is real flexibility. A life with two hosts can survive a bad season in either one. The risk is that you become the thing moving between them, never at home in either, and that someone will eventually work out which bush to pull up.

Scene: a juggler in orange motley standing where a wheat field meets a hedge of barberry. In one hand he holds a red-rusted wheat stem, in the other a barberry leaf studded with tiny orange cups. The ribbon between them is a stream of spores in a figure eight.

Prompt: List the two "hosts" you're living between right now. What does each one give you that the other can't? Which one would you give up first?

Three of Pentacles: Sister Tillers

Organism: Epichloë festucae, a fungal endophyte of fescue grasses

The traditional Three of Pentacles is a cathedral workshop. A stonemason stands on a bench carving an arch, and a monk and a man holding the plans look up at him. It's the card of teamwork and craft, of different skills meeting over one project. Franky's note says it in one word: teamwork. We agree. We'd just like to ask who's doing the work, and who's writing the plans.

Epichloë lives inside grass. It doesn't make mushrooms, it doesn't rot anything, and you would never know it was there. Its threads run between the cells of the leaves and stems, and in many strains they grow into the seeds, so every new grass plant is born already carrying the fungus. That's vertical transmission, the fungal version of a family business. In return for sugar and a home, the fungus makes alkaloids, compounds that can make the grass bitter or toxic to insects and grazing animals. Grass and fungus make one body with one defense budget.

Is this a parasite or a partner? Biologists call it a continuum, and that's the honest answer. When grazing is heavy, the grass does better with its lodger. When times are lean, the fungus is just one more mouth to feed. Some sexual Epichloë species go further. They wrap the flowering stem in a fungal sheath called a "choke," which stops that stem from ever making seed. In a related fescue endophyte, the same chemistry that protects the pasture gives cattle a disease called fescue toxicosis. The farmer's teammate can poison the herd.

The Three says good work is shared work. That's the opportunity: you can build something with others that none of you could build alone, and some of your best protection may come from partners you can't see. The risk is the one every collaborator knows. Somebody always gets the credit, somebody always gets the bill, and the terms can change when the weather does. Ask whether you're the grass or the fungus in this deal, and whether you'd know the difference.

Scene: three tall blades of fescue at dawn, each hung with dew, and inside them (as if the leaves were glass) a fine white thread runs through all three and down into a single seed.

Prompt: Think of your best collaboration. Write down what you gave, what you got, and one thing you didn't notice the other person was doing for you until later.

Four of Pentacles: Rye Pearl

Organism: Claviceps purpurea, ergot, shown at its resting stage, the sclerotium

The Four of Pentacles is the miser. A crowned man sits on a stool clutching a coin to his chest. There's one coin balanced on his crown and one under each foot, and a city at his back that he's clearly not going to spend any of it in. It's the card of saving, holding, and hoarding, the fine line between security and a fist that can't open.

Ergot is a fungus of rye and other grasses. A spore lands on an open flower and takes over the ovary. First it oozes a sweet, sticky honeydew full of spores that insects carry to other flowers. Then, where a grain should have formed, it grows a hard, dark purple-black body called a sclerotium, shaped like a curved spur. (The name "ergot" comes from the old French word for a rooster's spur.) The sclerotium is a sealed store. It drops to the ground, sits through the winter, and in spring it sends up tiny stalked heads that release spores just as the rye comes into flower again.

Humans met the sclerotium mostly through bread. Ground in with the flour, it is loaded with alkaloids that constrict blood vessels and affect the mind. In medieval Europe that caused outbreaks of ergotism, known as St. Anthony's fire: burning limbs, gangrene, convulsions. In 1938 the chemist Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD from an ergot compound while looking for a circulatory drug. The fungus's savings account had a lot in it.

The opportunity of the Four is a real one. Not everything should be spent now. The sclerotium is how ergot survives a winter that would kill everything else, and there's wisdom in keeping a dark pearl for the bad months. The risk is that the hoard replaces the harvest. Where the pearl sits, there's no grain. Ask what you're holding on to and what's not getting to grow because you are. And ask what happens to the people who eat from your stores without knowing what's in them.

Scene: a single ear of rye against a winter sky. Among the pale grains sit four long, violet-black pearls, polished like jet, each one catching a small point of light.

Prompt: What are you saving "for later"? Write a short scene set on the day later arrives.

Five of Pentacles: Blister Coin

Organism: Cronartium ribicola, white pine blister rust, which alternates between five-needle pines and currants and gooseberries (Ribes)

The Five of Pentacles is the coldest card in the deck. Two ragged figures, one on crutches, trudge through the snow past a stained-glass church window glowing with five coins. The light is right there and they don't go in. It's the card of hardship, exclusion, and being left out in the weather, and of the help that was close by the whole time.

White pine blister rust came to North America around the start of the twentieth century on nursery seedlings imported from Europe. It infects the five-needle pines, a group that includes the eastern and western white pines, sugar pine, limber pine, and whitebark pine. Like stem rust, it needs two hosts. Spores from currant and gooseberry leaves infect the pine's needles. The fungus grows into the bark, and every spring its cankers swell and split open in orange-yellow blisters that release spores back to the Ribes. A canker that circles a branch kills everything beyond it. One that circles the trunk kills the tree.

Nowhere is this sadder than high in the mountains. Whitebark pine grows at the tree line, in wind and snow where little else can. Its fat seeds feed grizzly bears, squirrels, and a bird called Clark's nutcracker, which buries thousands of seeds each autumn and forgets enough of them to plant the next forest. Between blister rust, bark beetles, and a warming climate, whitebark pine has declined across much of its range. In 2022 the United States listed it as a threatened species.

So when you draw the Five, the first thing to ask is whether you're outside the window or whether you are the window. The card can mean genuine loss: money, health, or a place in the world. It can also mean a whole system has lost something without knowing. The pines are going, and the nutcracker's pantry and the bear's autumn go with them. The opportunity is the church window itself. Help exists. There are people in the world breeding rust-resistant whitebark pines and planting them back on the ridges, one seedling at a time. The risk is pride, the kind that keeps you walking past the light because you don't want to be seen asking for it.

Scene: a ridge of whitebark pines in falling snow, their bark studded with five amber blisters like coins pressed into wax. A single nutcracker perches on a dead branch. Down in the valley, one warm lit window.

Prompt: Write about a time you walked past help you needed. What would it have cost you to go inside?

Six of Pentacles: Spore Halo

Organism: Entomophthora muscae, a fungus that kills flies

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.

Scene: a windowsill at dusk, glass gone gold. A single fly stands at the top of the pane with its wings raised like a saint in a painting, and around it six faint white rings of spore spread out on the glass like ripples.

Prompt: Write about a gift you received that came with something invisible attached. When did you first notice it?

Seven of Pentacles: Continuing Song

Organism: Massospora cicadina, a fungus of periodical cicadas

The Seven of Pentacles is a farmer leaning on his hoe, looking at a bush hung with seven coins. He planted it long ago, he's waited a long time, and now he's taking stock. It's the card of patience, long investment, and the uneasy question of whether the harvest was worth the work.

Nothing in nature waits quite like a periodical cicada. In the eastern United States, broods of Magicicada spend thirteen or seventeen years underground, sipping sap from tree roots, and then they come up by the millions within the same few weeks, climb the trees, shed their skins, and fill the woods with song. Seventeen years of investment for a few weeks of harvest.

Massospora cicadina waits too. Its resting spores sit in the soil and infect the nymphs as they dig their way up. Within days of emergence, the back of an infected cicada's abdomen, including its genitals, drops away and is replaced by a chalky white plug of fungal spores. The cicada doesn't seem to notice. It keeps flying, keeps singing, keeps trying to mate, scattering spores everywhere it goes. Infected males even flick their wings the way receptive females do, which draws in other males who then leave carrying spores. Researchers have also found chemicals in infected cicadas that are related to amphetamine-like stimulants. Nobody yet knows what they do to the cicada. It keeps on singing, which may be the point.

So the Seven asks the farmer's question, but more sharply. You've been investing for a long time. Now look at the harvest honestly: is it yours? The song is still going, the chorus sounds healthy, and all your plans still look like they're working. But a system can go on performing abundance well after something else has quietly taken the profits. The opportunity of the Seven is the pause. This is the one card in the suit that tells you to stop working and look. The risk is to keep singing because stopping would mean admitting what happened to the back half of the plan.

Scene: a summer oak at noon, loud with cicadas, their wings shining like mica. On one branch, a single cicada is singing too, but the end of its body is a soft white cone, like a candle made of chalk. There are seven such cicadas scattered through the tree for the careful eye to find.

Prompt: Pick something you've been working at for years. Describe what it looks like from the outside, then what it looks like from the inside. Where do the two descriptions disagree?

Eight of Pentacles: Insect Jewelry

Organism: Laboulbeniales, an order of tiny fungi that live on the outside of insects (here Laboulbenia, with Hesperomyces on ladybirds)

The Eight of Pentacles is the apprentice at his bench, hammering the same star into coin after coin. Six are done and hanging on the wall. He's working on the seventh. It's the card of craft, practice, diligence, and doing one thing well until it's yours.

The Laboulbeniales are the quiet craftsmen of the fungal kingdom. They're tiny. A single fungus is a stalk and a few cells, often less than a millimeter tall, standing on the shell of a beetle, a fly, a mite, or an ant like a sculpture on a plinth. They don't make webs of threads, and they rarely kill their hosts outright. Most of them just stay where they landed, attached to the hard cuticle and, in many species, fed through a small root that goes into the host. Since they can't survive off the host, they spread by contact. For species that live on beetles, contact often means mating. That can make them strikingly specific. Some grow only on one host species, some only on one sex of it, and some only on one exact part of the body, the part that touches a partner during mating.

The first person to take them seriously was Roland Thaxter, a Harvard mycologist who spent some four decades describing and drawing more than a thousand species, each one a few hundred microns tall, in beautiful detail. Researchers are still finding new ones, often by looking at old insect collections in museum drawers.

This is the card of the craft that's too small for anyone else to notice. The opportunity of the Eight is mastery through narrowness. Doing one thing, for one host, in one exact place, is how you become irreplaceable. The Laboulbeniales have been at it for a very long time. The risk is that specialization is also a restriction. The fungus can't leave its beetle. Ask whether your craft is a practice you've chosen, or a segment of shell you can no longer climb down from. And ask who, in your life, is Thaxter: the one who sat at the microscope and saw the tiny work you were doing.

Scene: a single glossy black beetle under a jeweler's loupe, its wing covers set with eight tiny golden-brown figures like brooches, each one standing in exactly the same spot on the shell. In the background, an old ink drawing of the same figure, labeled in a careful hand.

Prompt: Describe a skill you've practiced so long that it's become part of your body. What would it take to leave it behind?

Nine of Pentacles: Black Boot Cords

Organism: Armillaria ostoyae, a honey fungus and root pathogen, the "humongous fungus" of Oregon's Blue Mountains

The Nine of Pentacles is a woman alone in a vineyard, in a long robe patterned with flowers, a hooded falcon on her gloved hand. Nine coins are stacked among the vines. She built all of this herself. It's the card of self-sufficiency, earned comfort, and the solitary luxury of needing no one. Take a good look at the garden. In this deck, the garden is her.

In the Malheur National Forest in eastern Oregon, a single individual of Armillaria ostoyae, one genetic organism, has been mapped across about 965 hectares, nearly four square miles. Estimates of its age run from under two thousand to more than eight thousand years. It's one of the largest living things ever measured. Most of it is invisible. It spreads underground through rhizomorphs, which are black, root-like cords (foresters call them "bootlaces") that grow through the soil from one tree to the next. The cords get into the roots, the fungus spreads under the bark as white fans, and the tree slowly dies. Not every honey fungus is this deadly, but this one can kill tree after tree across a whole mountainside, and it doesn't stop eating when they fall: it lives on in their dead wood. In autumn, it sends up clumps of honey-colored mushrooms at the base of the trunks, a small sign above ground of an enormous estate below. Some Armillaria can even make decaying wood glow faintly in the dark. That's the old "foxfire" of woodland stories.

This is the card of the load that looks like freedom. The opportunity of the Nine is real independence. You can build something vast and lasting that runs on its own. The humongous fungus has spent millennia doing just that. The risk is the price. The garden grows because the forest pays for it, tree by tree. Wealth that looks self-made is usually financed by someone. Ask whose roots your estate is running through, and how many dead trees it takes to keep the vineyard green.

Scene: a woman in a robe of honey-colored mushroom caps stands in an autumn forest. The falcon on her hand is hooded. Under the thin soil at her feet, drawn as if in cross-section, nine black cords spread out to the roots of the surrounding firs, and the farthest trees are already bare.

Prompt: Write down one thing you've built that you're proud of doing "on your own." Then list everyone and everything that quietly paid for it.

Ten of Pentacles: Huitlacoche Vault

Organism: Ustilago maydis, corn smut, eaten as huitlacoche

The Ten of Pentacles is family wealth: an old man in a patterned robe sitting under an archway with his dogs, a couple talking beside him, a child hiding behind its mother, a house with a tower beyond. The ten coins are laid out over the scene in the pattern of the kabbalistic Tree of Life. It's the card of inheritance, legacy, and the fortune that outlasts the people who made it.

Corn smut is a fungus of maize. It starts as single cells that bud like yeast and harm nothing. The trouble begins with a marriage. When two compatible cells meet on a corn plant, they fuse, and only then can the fungus infect. It grows into whatever part of the plant is growing fastest (often the ear) and turns it into galls. Where kernels should have been, silver-gray swellings appear, lumpy and soft, and eventually they fill up with billions of dark spores. It's also one of the great laboratory fungi, a model for how plant pathogens work.

Here's the joke that makes this the Ten. To most corn growers in the United States, a smut gall is a lost ear, a crop loss, something to breed away. In Mexico it's huitlacoche, a prized ingredient in quesadillas, soups, and tamales, eaten for generations and prized. Chefs have called it the Mexican truffle. The same gall in the same field is ruin or delicacy, depending on whose kitchen it's carried into.

So the Ten asks what you've inherited, and from whom. The opportunity is that every legacy can be reread. What your family called a disease may be what you learn to cook. The risk is to take for granted that the fortune you've been handed is what it looks like, or that the vault would still be yours if the corn had a say. Every inheritance is somebody's gall. Some of them are delicious.

Scene: a harvest kitchen under an arched doorway, three generations at a long table. In the middle of the table, an ear of corn splits open to reveal ten swollen gray-blue galls with the sheen of velvet, laid out like coins in the Tree of Life.

Prompt: Name something you inherited (an object, a habit, a fear) that someone else in your family treated as a loss. Write the recipe for turning it into something you can use.

Page of Pentacles: Green Scout in the Litter Bank

Organism: Metarhizium anisopliae (in the broad sense), the green muscardine fungus

When you meet a friend who is probably yourself from the future, it's the Page of Pentacles (PP). So old PP there is gonna talk to you about love and forgiveness. This is a lie. Forgive no one. Why? Because no person can ever forget. Forgiveness requires forgetfulness and you don't wanna be forgotten. Right?

— Franky Forlorn

The standard Page of Pentacles is a young man standing in a green field, holding a coin up in front of his face and staring at it as if it might talk. He's a student, a beginner, a messenger of practical news. He's also suspiciously patient for someone his age. Franky thinks he's you, from the future, lying about forgiveness. The fungus agrees about the memory part.

Metarhizium is the white Beauveria's green cousin. It's a close relation in the same fungal order and in the same line of work. It lives in soil, especially around plant roots, and its spores wait there for an insect. When one comes by, the fungus goes through its skin, grows inside it, kills it, and then covers the body in a crust of olive-green spores. In the late 1870s, the Russian zoologist Ilya Metchnikoff (who later won a Nobel Prize for discovering how white blood cells eat invaders) grew it and proposed using it against a beetle pest of grain. It was one of the first serious ideas for using a fungus as a pesticide. Its relatives are still sold for that purpose today.

The part that makes it Franky's Page is what happens next. Metarhizium also lives on and inside the roots of plants. In a 2012 experiment, researchers let it kill insect larvae in soil with bean and grass plants growing nearby. They tracked nitrogen from the dead insects and found it had turned up in the plants, carried there by the fungus, which was getting sugar from the roots in exchange. The soil doesn't forgive. It doesn't forget. It files every dead beetle as income and moves the balance to someone else's account.

So when the Page shows up, pay attention to small messages about money, work, study, and the body, and to the long memory of the ground you're standing on. The opportunity is apprenticeship. The Page is patient and curious and learns by staying close to the roots. The risk is the one Franky names. Some of the advice you'll get about letting go comes from people who have never had to let anything go. And some of what you won't forgive is quietly feeding something else.

Scene: a young gardener kneeling in leaf litter at dawn, holding up a green-dusted beetle between finger and thumb like a coin. Beneath the soil, drawn as a cross-section, fine threads run from the beetle's body into the roots of a bean plant, which is flowering.

Prompt: Write a letter from yourself ten years from now. Have your future self tell you one thing you should never forgive, and one thing you should never forget. Are they the same thing?

Knight of Pentacles: Orange Wind

Organism: Hemileia vastatrix, coffee leaf rust

Hey, this is going to be very long, so don't worry about not reading this. Whatever this is, it doesn't need to be read ever. I promise you're good. If anything you should probably go to sleep. Even if it's not the normal time you go to sleep at, you should just lie down and eventually you'll fall asleep, that's freaking true, bro. You know Edison slept like all the time but never for longer than a few hours. So like go to freaking sleep, fool.

— Franky Forlorn

Every other knight in the deck is charging. The Knight of Pentacles is sitting still. His big dark horse is standing in a plowed field and he's holding up a coin, looking at it, not going anywhere in a hurry. He's the slow knight: steady, reliable, stubborn, the one who finishes the job and bores everyone at dinner describing how he did it. He's also, as Franky noticed, the one telling you to go to sleep.

So it's only fitting that his fungus eats coffee.

Hemileia vastatrix is a rust that lives only on coffee plants. It makes powdery orange spots on the undersides of the leaves, and heavily infected trees drop their leaves and set little fruit. Its spores travel on wind, rain, workers' clothes, and anything else that moves. It was first recorded in 1869 in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), which was then one of the world's great coffee exporters. Within two decades Ceylon's coffee was ruined, and planters turned their estates over to tea. Then the rust took the long way around the world. It was found in Brazil in 1970. In 2012 and 2013 an epidemic swept through Central America, costing hundreds of thousands of jobs in countries where coffee is how many families pay the rent. A charge that took a hundred years to cross an ocean. That's the Knight of Pentacles.

The Knight's opportunity is persistence. He'll get there. Slowly, reliably, through every terrace in the hills. If you have work that can only be done by showing up every day, this is your card. The risk is that persistence doesn't care what it destroys along the way, and a steady advance can go on for a century before anyone calls it a threat. The other risk is the one in the note. If you're powering through on coffee and pride, the Knight has some advice for you. Lie down. The rust is coming for your beans anyway.

Scene: a heavy black horse standing still on a terrace of coffee trees in the hills, the knight in the saddle holding up a single orange-spotted leaf like a coin. A warm wind blows across the slope, carrying a faint orange haze from one terrace to the next. On the ground, an empty coffee cup.

Prompt: What are you doing slowly and stubbornly that no one has noticed yet? Write it as a report from someone who notices it a hundred years from now.

Queen of Pentacles: Court of Soft Crowns

Organism: Hypocreales, the fungal order that holds the Ace's Beauveria, the Page's Metarhizium, the Three's Epichloë, the Four's Claviceps, and many more

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.

Scene: a queen on a throne of moss and stone in a walled garden, her crown made of soft white and green fungal bloom. Around her, the court: a white powdered silkworm, a green-dusted beetle, a blade of grass with a thread through it, a dark rye pearl, and at her feet a sleeping rabbit, which may or may not be dreaming.

Prompt: Write about someone who took care of you in a way that also kept you. Then write about someone you took care of the same way.

King of Pentacles: Leaf-Ledger Law

Organism: Pucciniales, the rust fungi, as an order

The King of Pentacles is the richest man in the deck. He sits on a throne carved with bulls, wearing a robe covered in grapes and vines, a coin on his knee, a castle behind him and a garden overflowing at his feet. He's the successful businessman, the landlord, the patron, the one who made it and means to keep it.

Shelley's radical young poem asks a question that sounds as if it was written for this card: "Whence, thinkest thou, kings and parasites arose?" (Queen Mab III.118). His answer was political. Kings and their courtiers live off the work of the people who build their palaces. Franky's is biological. Look at the rusts.

The rust fungi are the largest group of plant-disease fungi in the world, with something like seven or eight thousand known species. In nature they live only on living plants; a few have been coaxed onto a lab dish, and they sulk there. Out in the world they need the real thing, a green leaf making food in the sun. Many of them have the most complicated life cycles of any fungi, with up to five kinds of spore, and many move between two unrelated host plants, as the Two and Five showed. Where a leaf banks sugar, a rust can move in and make the leaf pay out in orange.

This is the oldest empire in agriculture. The Romans had a god of rust, Robigus, and every April they held a festival, the Robigalia, to beg him to spare the wheat. The wheat belts of the twentieth century fought the rusts with barberry eradication and plant breeding. Coffee growers are still fighting. Nobody has won.

So when the King shows up, he's the fortune that's been built and the system that keeps it running. The opportunity is real mastery of the material world: knowing how money moves, and being the one who sets the terms. The risk is to forget what the rust never forgets. The King eats at somebody else's table. Every empire is a leaf somebody else is lighting. Ask who's doing the photosynthesis in your life, and what they'd say about your crown.

Scene: a king on a throne carved from a single great leaf, its veins the lines of a ledger. His robe is embroidered with the rust's five kinds of spore in orange, red, and black. At his feet, fields of wheat and rows of coffee roll off to a castle, and in the corner a small stone altar to Robigus with a sheaf of wheat laid on it.

Prompt: Write down one thing in your life that runs on someone else's sunlight. What would change if they stopped?

Sources for the Pentacles

• Ace: Porter JR 1973, "Agostino Bassi bicentennial (1773–1973)," Bacteriol Rev 37:284–288 (biography and naming history); Bassi A 1835, Del mal del segno, calcinaccio o moscardino; Zimmermann G 2007, Biocontrol Sci Technol 17:553–596; Vega FE 2008, J Invertebr Pathol 98:277–279.
• Two: Leonard KJ & Szabo LJ 2005, Mol Plant Pathol 6:99–111; Roelfs AP 1982, Plant Disease 66:177ff; Pretorius ZA et al. 2000, Plant Disease 84:203.
• Three: Schardl CL, Leuchtmann A & Spiering MJ 2004, Annu Rev Plant Biol 55:315–340; Saikkonen K et al. 1998, Annu Rev Ecol Syst 29:319–343; Strickland JR et al. 2011, J Anim Sci 89:1603–1626.
• Four: Haarmann T et al. 2009, Mol Plant Pathol 10:563–577; Hofmann A 1980, LSD: My Problem Child.
• Five: Geils BW, Hummer KE & Hunt RS 2010, Forest Pathology 40:147–185; Tomback DF 1982, J Anim Ecol 51:451ff; US Fish and Wildlife Service final rule, 87 FR 76882 (15 Dec 2022).
• Six: Krasnoff SB et al. 1995, J Insect Physiol 41:895–903; Elya C et al. 2018, eLife 7:e34414; Møller AP 1993, Behav Ecol Sociobiol 33(6); Naundrup A et al. 2022, ISME J 16(10):2388–2397.
• Seven: Williams KS & Simon C 1995, Annu Rev Entomol 40:269–295; Cooley JR, Marshall DC & Hill KBR 2018, Sci Rep 8:1432; Boyce GR et al. 2019, Fungal Ecology 41:147–164.
• Eight: Haelewaters D, Blackwell M & Pfister DH 2021, Annu Rev Entomol 66:257–276; Knapp M et al. 2022, Proc R Soc B 289, doi:10.1098/rspb.2021.2538; Thaxter R, Contribution towards a monograph of the Laboulbeniaceae, 1896–1931.
• Nine: Ferguson BA et al. 2003, Can J For Res 33:612–623; Baumgartner K, Coetzee MPA & Hoffmeister D 2011, Mol Plant Pathol 12:515–534; Mihail JD 2015, Fungal Biol 119:528–537.
• Ten: Brefort T et al. 2009, Annu Rev Phytopathol 47:423–445; Kämper J et al. 2006, Nature 444:97–101; Valverde ME et al. 1995, Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr 35:191–229.
• Page: Lord JC 2005, J Invertebr Pathol 89:19–29 (Metchnikoff history); Behie SW, Zelisko PM & Bidochka MJ 2012, Science 336:1576–1577; Behie SW et al. 2017, Nat Commun 8:14245; Sung G-H et al. 2007, Stud Mycol 57:5–59.
• Knight: Talhinhas P et al. 2017, Mol Plant Pathol 18:1039–1051; McCook S 2006, J Global Hist 1:177–195; International Coffee Organization 2013, Report on the outbreak of coffee leaf rust in Central America (ED-2157/13), for the roughly 374,000 jobs lost.
• Queen: Sung G-H et al. 2007; Harman GE et al. 2004, Nat Rev Microbiol 2:43–56; Hodge KT, Krasnoff SB & Humber RA 1996, Mycologia 88:715–719; Borel JF et al. 1976, Agents Actions 6:468–475; Liddell–Scott–Jones, s.v. parasitos.
• King: Aime MC & McTaggart AR 2021, Fungal Syst Evol 7:21–47; Aime MC et al. 2017, Adv Genet 100:267–307; Ovid, Fasti 4.901–942; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab (1813), III.118.