THE SECRET OF THE SNAIL
In the art of the classic Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, the Nine of Pentacles depicts a noblewoman alone, surrounded by a decadence of grapes. In her left hand is a hooded falcon, as calm and indifferent to the surrounding world as she is. This is the card of Venus in Virgo. It expresses the conservation of beauty and wealth as the establishment of one’s own private, walled garden; yet despite its seemingly favorable imagery, this arcanum reflects a position where its ruling planet is in fall.
There is a another star character to this card: at her feet lies a lone, intrepid snail. Were the lady to look down, or step slightly to her right, or remove the veil from her winged companion, his adventure would quickly come to an end. This will not come to pass, however, for he is already present to haunt her moment of triumph. Here, he will eat many a hole through the grape leaves, before climbing to the peak of their stalks and falling asleep within the hermitage that he carries on his back.
Likely, this little trespasser is taxonomically known as Cernuella virgata, the “vineyard snail” native to the Mediterranean. Due to their perniciousness and portability, they have become an invasive species on multiple continents, with particularly large populations now proving endemic to Australia and the Pacific Northwest. When not announcing their presence in a graffiti of slime, they can be found in closely-packed clusters of spirals high on foliage and fenceposts during periods of aestivation, creating a nuisance for farmers year over year.
While Pamela Coleman Smith was finishing this tarot deck in 1909, vineyards like the one depicted in the Nine of Pentacles faced perpetual threats to their survival far greater than snails alone. Just decades prior, the New World parasite known as phylloxera brought plague to European grapes, drastically reducing the supplies of wine and brandy worldwide by killing the plants at their roots. Though this problem was eventually mitigated by grafting local cultivars onto American rootstock to fortify against the disease, the resultant produce and wines were permanently altered by this hybridization. To this day, there is no true cure.
The nines in Tarot are false endings; stories which seem complete, yet fall one step short of the finality exhibited in the tens. There is no walled garden that cannot be breached, as the Romanov dynasty would learn less than a decade after this card took form. There is no variety of grape that does not exist without its surrounding material conditions; the last French colonists learned this when the Algerian people brought revolution's flame to their vineyards. Only the snail knows that there is no true boundary between the world and the self that can be maintained forever, for the snail is the shell, and the shell is the world.