Divinity Atlas
A Deck of Twenty-Five Cards and the Study That Made It Famous
Sacred Objects, Dress and Symbols and Metaphysics and Matter, two sections of this atlas, connect at only two points site-wide, and one runs from a deck of twenty-five laboratory cards to the study that made them famous.
A Laboratory Instrument, Not a Divinatory One
Zener cards are a deck of twenty-five cards bearing five symbols, a circle, a cross, three wavy lines, a square and a five-pointed star, five of each. They were designed by the perceptual psychologist Karl Zener for J. B. Rhine's extrasensory perception experiments at Duke University in the early 1930s, and the point of the design, the atlas records, is that the five shapes are easy to distinguish and equally probable, so a run of correct calls can be measured against chance. They are, by the atlas's own account, a laboratory instrument rather than a divinatory one, though they have been used as both since.
The Series That Made ESP Part of Ordinary English
The Duke series is the study this atlas records the cards as having been made for, and the atlas calls it the series that turned a claim argued in drawing rooms into one argued in journals. Rhine separated the conditions carefully, testing clairvoyance, telepathy and precognition through distinct arrangements rather than treating them as one faculty. The results, published in 1934, made the abbreviation ESP part of ordinary English and made Duke the centre of the field for thirty years, and they also drew, the record states plainly, immediate and detailed methodological criticism that was never fully answered.