The Spolia Tarot uses the image of a serpent shedding its skin as the central motif of Judgment. Upon closer inspection, as a trick of the deck’s collage style, the skin being shed is actually that of a different species of snake than the one emerging:
This is clearly deliberate, part of an interesting mythology that gets passed down as rhyme: the skin being molted is that of the deadly coral snake, identified by the red stripes crossing the yellow. The snake that emerges is a probably the harmless king or milk snake, identified by the red stripes crossing the black.
“Red on yellow kills the fellow, red on black, venom lack.” There are numerous subtleties and echoes to this rhyme. “Yellow on red, Jack is dead,” “Red on black, you’re alright Jack,” and others. Due to regional variations in patterning, this heuristic is not reliable, but survives as an interesting oral tradition that is now also part of Tarot’s continuum.
A serpent devouring its own tail (the ouroboros) is a traditional symbol of eternal life, but a snake shedding its skin is not, let alone a deadly coral snake. But this motif, of the serpent leaving behind broken scales and pestilence-ridden flesh to survive, is one of painful renewal. The choice of species is important, also, because herein, the toxic is being separated from the innocent. It’s a clever illustration of apocalyptic drama: what must be destroyed is destroyed for the sake of what deserves to remain.
Perhaps noteworthy is that tail-swallowing and skin-shedding are orthogonal relative to the axis of a snake’s body: an ouroboros would have great difficulty shedding its skin due to its impossible geometry. This could be said to illustrate the fact that the achievement of immortality and the renewal of life are matters of a separate nature, despite often being conflated.
The United States’ supply of coral snake antivenin expired in 2008, having been manufactured in 2006. The FDA altered the expiration dates, year over year, to allow the same small batch of medicine to continue to be used until January of 2020. There has not been an update from the FDA since that most recent change, which means that the national supply expired half a year ago. Coral snakes weren’t killing enough people or threatening enough lives to merit action under the present regime of dysfunction. There were other crises that required denial more urgently.
A lack of profitable demand allowed the supply chain to fall into disrepair, and while Pfizer, now owner of the former manufacturer, finally resumed production in the mid-2010s at a new facility in Florida, no news has followed surrounding antivenin clinical trials since they were said to be on hold in 2016. In the meantime, this forced scarcity of Coralmyn has resulted in a price upwards of $2000 a vial, and numerous vials are required to treat a single emergency patient. Such a number is enough to dissuade some from seeking the treatment that would otherwise save their lives.
Anyone who survives a coral snake bite in the United States now does so with the prayer that the remaining doses of antivenin being shuffled around the country haven’t denatured, if they can even be legally administered in their current state. The serpent’s lethality is a calculus of the systemic value of human life.
What does our molting look like?
The day coral snake antivenin is being produced routinely is the day that the United States has finally sloughed off all of the reasons why it wouldn’t be. It will take work, but it can happen. As the deck’s designers noted in their wonderful little white book:
“One does not simply shed, one has to feel the restriction of the old life, the dissatisfaction of it, and one must work to rid oneself of its confines. One crawls through this card, but it beckons you to a new, freer way of being.”