A red playing card with a Queen of Hearts in it. Text at the top states, “You have a true loving woman friend. You can trust her fully.” Text at the bottom states, “Love and happiness are within your reach; grasp them.” On the side of the card, the number 24 is circled in red. This Queen belongs to a set of 52 Revelation Fortune Telling Playing Cards from 1919 that were used as a simple fortune-telling device; everyone had the ability to interpret the cards, unlike the esoteric nature of tarot cards. Normally the cards are used in a “Circle of Seven” format where the entire deck is shuffled and every 7th card is counted for the reading (the rest of the cards are discarded). The seven cards are then analyzed to tell one’s fortune. Each card also has a circled number on its side, either red or black, which denotes the power value of the card (if this Queen were pulled during a reading, the red 24 would hold a lot of power). The power values are summed together if they’re red, and then the black power values are subtracted from that total. The higher the number, the stronger and more accurate the reading will be. After calculating the number, the phrases on the top of the cards are read to give a fortune. It is unclear what the purpose on the phrase on the bottom of the cards is used for. I wish I had come across an entire deck instead of one lone card.
Raina Puels ’16 contributed and helped catalogue this item as part of a collaborative, interdisciplinary initiative at St. Lawrence University called “Weaving the Streets & People’s History Archive,” funded during 2013-2017 by a mini-grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation entitled “Crossing Boundaries: Re-envisioning the Humanities for the 21st Century.” For the project, students and young alumni participants were asked to examine “the creative and complex ways ordinary people make use of public space to express themselves.” Participants selected three to six items for the “Street Art Graphics" digital archive in Shared Shelf Commons and also wrote blog posts for “The Weave: Mediocracy Unspun.” See http://weavenews.org/content/weaving-streets.
Acknowledgement
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Council of Independent Colleges provided funding support for this project.
Notes
This card was given to me at the People’s Climate March on September 21, 2014, somewhere between 86th Street and 59th Street on Central Park West, but it advertises for an event on September 22, 2014, on Broadway and Wall Street in the financial district of Manhattan, New York City, New York. -- Raina Puels
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