The first card of the tarot deck is the Fool.
With each successive Arcana, the Fool begins his journey through life.
The fortuneteller and the client sit at the squat table, flipping over the cards in unholy reverence.
They both accept that the Fool’s journey is their own;
they both accept that at heart, Man is Fool.
What would man be if not foolish?
He rose up from four legs to two, and with his new height,
declared himself king of the world. Two legs made man king atop the hill.
The two-legged man has seen the world turned to that what must be conquered by his now-widened reach.
Conquered, reaped, made barren.
In a town Kittery, there is a museum of animal abominations.
The five-legged goat.
The two-headed snake.
The dog born without legs.
They are displayed as aberrations. They are displayed in defiance of nature.
What words would the four-legged goat have for two-legged man?
Would he mock Man who contorted himself so,
who killed off his brother until he controlled the world?
The new era would come thundering in on the five legs of the goat’s cousin.
The four-legged rat is called a neophobe.
It fears the new, for with the new comes poison.
With the new comes death.
So when Man looks at the two-headed snake, he does not see a failure of nature.
He looks on in fear of what is to come.
He feels the knees made weak by his own body’s rejection of its primordial state.
His spine, beginning to compress over years of gravity, could be toppled forever when hit with the headbutt of the five-legged goat.
The fortuneteller draws The Devil. He looks down over man. He wears a goat’s head.
You cannot see his tail, folded up behind him.
The Fool does not stop on his journey.
He does not look to see if that tail is not perhaps a folded leg, waiting to strike his head. From his hill, he cannot see beyond the horizon,
where the un-Man of higher hills looks down
and waits for the ants to grow so populous that they are a nuisance.
In that time, Man will have no more appendages on which to push himself up.
The new dawn will start on the six legs of the roach.
CASSE-COUILLES 