In a previous missive, I discussed the decay of America’s supply of coral snake antivenin in the context of the Spolia Tarot’s portrayal of Judgment. It is not the piece I set out to write, but that is ultimately preferable. The original topic is best discussed on its own, as it provides some ground for what I’ve come to call the “tarot of the real.”
If you’re reading Compound Eye, you likely either believe divination works, or are curious about how the art informs it, and maybe why people like me believe in it. Or maybe you’re just here for the deck art and occasional photography.
But I have to stop and talk about king and coral snakes again.
Sorry. But there is so much more to discuss.
King snakes are known as “Batesian mimics,” which means that they have evolved to look like a more dangerous species (the highly lethal coral snake) to protect themselves. It is not the only harmless snake that has come to mimic the coral snake, but it can be considered alone for our example. The more likely it is for a predator to consider attacking a king snake, the less likely it is to survive: thus the king snake, on the scale of hundreds of generations, slowly comes to resemble the coral.
These exchanges and negotiations between predator and prey accumulate over eons. The judgment calls made by predators about whether or not it is safe to attack are informed by a whole host of factors beyond mere hunger: strength, venom immunity, intelligence, the availability of other food, the amount of light reaching the ground, competition with other populations, ability to subsist on vegetation instead, and so on and so forth. How certain a hawk is that a snake is not lethally venomous, as well as how likely it is to take the chance of finding out, together inform the pattern and coloration of the next generation of snake.
Every last element of the biome serves as an individual mechanism in a primordial Xerox machine that copies one snake’s coloration and patterns onto the other. Once a symbol like the snake’s banding obtains meaning, that meaning become resilient, independent of any intentional presentation on the part of the snake. It is not trying on colorations like a chameleon. Red, yellow, and black form an organic symbol for danger that predates the coming of humanity and its industry, yet still become a part of humanity’s symbology for danger ages later. Even children who will never go on a hike in the American south know chants and rhymes about the snake’s coloration.
Research has suggested that red-black mimic banding has evolved independently 26 times over the past 40 million years, and almost always in the presence of coral snakes: they are uniquely consistent engines of biological mimicry as we understand it. This mechanism is consistent and stable, and more arcane than the arcana. And though it is driven by “selection,” so to speak, that word is loaded. No intelligence or conscious decision making is necessary: a symbol can propagate of its own accord, and doesn’t require humanity at all, let alone our modes of mechanical reproduction.
Some have even argued that coral snakes themselves are mimics of moderately venomous banded snakes, through a process known as Mertensian mimicry, which may add even deeper complexity to this strange mode of genetic communication. There are more complex networks of banded snake mimicry than just two species at a time.
This is why I find it interesting to see Tarot’s imagery in reality: we have a tendency to dismiss the presence of a symbolic pattern in an unlikely place as being pareidolia. But we shouldn’t be surprised that consistent forms can move through the material world in unknown ways independently of conscious or even unconscious human activity. There are numerous terms for modes by which a form moves from one medium to another (let’s hold off on counterfeits and simulacra for now), but Batesian mimicry is interesting because it demonstrates a means of transmission that shrugs off the human altogether, and leads us to wonder how many other such mechanisms there are that we are engaging with right now beyond our knowledge.
Back to Tarot. Sometimes, the methods used to discern coral from king no longer work. Sometimes, we only see the snake once we’ve already been bit, and by then, it’s too late. The moment an intellectual strategy not only fails, but reaches its most disastrous possible conclusion, has a very famous card:
To paraphrase: Fuck around and find out.
That risk is the foundation of the coral snakes’ outsized evolutionary influence, and somehow, its expression in banding managed to display itself here. Though slightly obfuscated by a shock of blue, the black-yellow-red banding is present, carried forward by Pamela Colman Smith’s hand into Tarot over a century ago. The old symbol quietly slithers through the card by mechanisms beyond its origin, and here we have upheld it as the threat that it has always been, since a time before we could perceive it.
We don’t need to know how, but we ought to acknowledge that it might be able to do so without us knowing how. After all, that’s how it was for 40 million years of snakes.
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