I will introduce (focusing on the case of elliptic curves) two essential theorems of arithmetic geometry that bind the geometry of an algebraic variety over a local field (or number field) to its arithmetic, Galois-theoretic properties. The l-adic monodromy theorem is in fact entirely elementary (one needn't even know what 'monodromy' means!) but will motivate the subtler p-adic theorem. Together these results will help us make sense of the Fontaine-Mazur conjecture, one of the fundamental open problems in arithmetic geometry.