"Ritual as Punctuation": our guest blog at Tarot Elements.

"A wheel of fortune (hereafter called the reference wheel)."
—Management Science, Vol. 24

Our interview about the intricacies of the Punctuated Tarot may be read here.

See our guest blog at Bonnie Cehovet's place, in which we reexamine one of Bonnie's personal card readings in the light of our Punctuated Tarot.

The Tilde gives a letter a liquid sound.
—John Wilson, A Treatise on English Punctuation

"I slipped over to the gardens and to the Lover's section."
—Once Upon A Time In Berbice

In what we call "Divinatory Sentences," Tarot cards form the basic parts of a sentence and are "read" as a single statement. Of course, the divinatory sentence could follow any pre-determined structure -- the noun could very naturally be the significator, for example. The point is simply to create a structure for the cards to communicate their message.

"The Saints' days marked between brackets [ ], are not appointed by the Church."
—Charles Walker, A Prayer Book for the Young

"She sees the sun like a bullet."
—Sue Walker, The Critical Response to Flannery O'Connor

"For like a double dagger, it may stab both ways."
—Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 1913

The asterisk "originated as the sign that an enraged Hera placed on Zeus's brow when he slept where he shouldn't to remind him when he gazed into the mirror that he should be somewhere else." —Sylvia Söderlind, Liminal Postmodernisms (1994)

"It means we have justice for all, for everyone. That is 100 percent."
—Congressional Record, Nov. 12, 2002, p. 28768

"Death is a textual ellipsis."
—Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992)

"Her marks on the pillars of wisdom are those of the question mark."
—Heather Busch & Burton Silver, Why Cats Paint (1994)

Gordon inquires why it is that stage magicians ask, "What's your favorite card?" Gordon adds that this question is a pet peeve of his, and he contends that the question is "almost always rhetorical as many magicians barely pause to allow the participant to answer."

Here's our answer:

Like electricity that loses potential with each step through a circuit, solemn rites lose meaning and become mundane over time. Today, when a magician casually asks an audience member to name a favorite playing card, we hear a faint echo of the mystic of old seeking a "significator"—the one Tarot archetype best representing the supplicant.