TWO

Getting Started

L’Art de Tirer les Cartes (The Method of Using the Cards)

Donnant la maniere infallible de connaitre le passé, le present et l’avenir,
tant pour soi-meme, que pour autrui, d’aprese lese plus celebres
cartomanciens tells que la Mlle. Lenormand.

Giving the infallible way of knowing the past, present and future,
both for oneself, for others, in the manner of most famous
cartomancers such as Mlle. Lenormand.

Choosing a Lenormand Deck

There is a growing range of Lenormand-style decks—actually “Petit Lenormands,” with thirty-six cards—from which to choose. These have been less available outside of Germany, the Netherlands, and Russia, though a revival has widened the choice; new decks are being increasingly brought to the market.

We have published The Original Lenormand, a reproduction under license from the British Museum, carefully and painstakingly worked upon by the award-winning artist Ciro Marchetti to provide an authentic Lenormand for use with this book.14

Marcus uses the Mertz-style deck for its most simplistic images. You can also buy the French Cartomancy deck, which is actually based on a German design but is very traditional. We also particularly like the Blue Owl version, although we also have a soft spot for the Piatnik deck from Vienna.

Originally created in 1942, the Piatnik deck has a chintzy yet stylish design and the cards reflect the time period. Warner Brothers movies especially spring to mind; we look at the Ship card and see how it conjures up an image of Now Voyager (1942) with Joan Crawford, where the downtrodden character Charlotte Vale escapes on a cruise ship and returns dramatically transformed. If you have not come across this old movie, check it out, and see how the themes of journey, transformation and rites of passage assist your understanding of the Ship card. The movie puts us in the mood for reading in this style, and this is what makes the Lenormand very special—it has one voice but many different accents.

If you are looking for a contemporary deck, you can try the Mystical Lenormand by Urban Trosch, published by US Games Systems, although it does add more symbols to the starker original images. There are now many new decks being produced, including the Gilded Reverie Lenormand deck by Ciro Marchetti, the Minute Lenormand by Robyn Tisch Hollister, Anna Simonova’s Lilac Twilight Lenormand, and Andi (Rootweaver) Graf’s Vintage Lenormand. Gidget London has also produced a stick-figure deck, harking back to the original cards, which would have been hand-coloured, mixed with a mischievous pixie twist.15

It is possible that more new Lenormand decks will be produced in 2012–2013 than in the entire previous century.

Left to right: Figure 8. The Woman card; Figure 9. The Snake card;
Figure 10. The Ship card; Figure 11. The Messenger card

A new Lenormand by Carrie Paris and Roz Foster, the Lenormand Revolution, also known as “the Game of Change,” Le Jeu De Change, based on the French and American revolutions, is to be produced both as a deck and as an iPad app, bringing the Lenormand totally up to date.16

Figure 12. The Tree card

We have provided a list of decks in the appendices to get you started in discovering the Lenormand for yourself.

Learning the Lenormand Language

As the Lenormand cards have proven popular in Germany and across Europe, little of the material is written in English. In fact, this book is only the third comprehensive introduction to be published, and the first by a major publisher. We expect that many other titles will follow should the interest continue, and we look forward to the widening interest in this and many other forms of cartomancy.

Luckily, as the namesake of the cards was French, we have many words that mean the same in both French and English (we’ll leave German for the moment) and some stolen words that we will be using to good effect in our lessons later, such as Liaison, a meaning of the Rider/Messenger card.

Incidentally, it is “Mademoiselle” and not “Madame” for the lady herself, as she never married, and generally “Le Normand” or “Le-Normand”—not “Lenormand,” and it is pronounced “luh-nor-ma” with a nasal vowel at the end and a silent “d.” We use “Lenormand” throughout for simplicity.

A few other terms will help put us in the Lenormand-style space, which we would encourage you to start using instead of their tarot equivalents:

• Salon or boudoir: not “office” or “reading space”
• Sitter: not “querent”
• Sibyl: not “reader”
• Tableau: not “spread”
• Vignette: not “layout”

You may find other words come more to mind when reading Lenormand, as it has its own particular voice. We can’t wait for you to discover its unique spirit as it talks to you, no matter the accent.

The Two Towers

When we first approach the Lenormand cards, one of the first confusions for students is that there are alternative keywords given for each of the thirty-six cards. There then becomes a scramble to somehow find the “true” keywords or a “valid” traditional set. This becomes further confused by different authors then presenting different versions—in one or several cards—of key concepts whilst all belonging to a particular school or tradition.

We will present one set of keywords in the following chapter and then elaborate on these in the third chapter, whilst encouraging you to experiment with different traditions. Every reader has developed their own particular style, and you will eventually find your own version based on tradition. We will first look at one particular card in detail to discover how these meanings vary, and in this particular case, to the tarot, where the card has an equivalent.

It is of note that the only cards immediately comparable between the regularly recognised tarot structure and the majority of decks known as the Lenormand are the astral principles of the Star, the Moon, and the Sun, and the more manifest Tower. We will briefly outline how we can use the Tower as an illustration of the divergence between the two deck types: tarot and the Lenormand. You will also discover how meaning has been ascribed to the cards as a whole and understand that originally the cards had no meaning at all.

As we have mentioned, in the original Game of Hope, instructions were given for most of the cards to indicate their nature in the game—a nature that would have been carried across to their interpretative meaning. We’ll take a look at the Tower in the game and how it can be developed into this interpretative meaning.

The Lenormand Tower

Here is the instruction for a player landing on the Tower: “19: To enjoy the pleasant vista from the Tower, one pays 2 marks.”

The Lenormand Tower is specific in that it is a Watchtower in an interpretative sense, it is very much about being alert and prepared for something that has not yet happened—in order, when it does, to stop it in its tracks or to premeditate a more pleasant outcome. The Watchtower is more enabling and less intimidating. It is very much about keeping control of the physical state of being, and it has more promise of the material.

You could describe the Lenormand Watchtower as a promoter of autonomy (from ancient Greek, meaning “one who gives oneself one’s own law”), which fits in with the original intentions of the Game of Hope, that it would be a tool for didactic learning. The game presents thirty-six cards of moral lessons and how one deals with the “Vice and Virtue” each presents along the way. It tells us “you too can have a pleasant life if you look ahead and plan your life carefully and make the appropriate choices.”

The tarot’s Tower, by contrast, is almost saying “all is now lost to those who enter here.” The Lenormand offers more hope, in a way. The Lenormand Tower would not be out of place in a tourist guide book, and it does not elicit a gasp or a shock as the tarot Tower usually does.

The image of the Tower in the Game of Hope is clearly an observatory form rather than a defensive emplacement or a “House of God.” There is a balcony at the top providing a clear view of the surroundings to the distant horizons. A flag is raised to full mast and is caught in a full breeze, perhaps signifying that the sky is clear. There are no obstructions around it, and it is slightly raised upon a grassy mound emphasising its elevation. It is functional and unadorned, merely a watchtower—suspiciously identical to the eighteenth-century watchtower in Nuremberg where the game was devised and produced. A tourist in the Nuremberg of 1800 would no doubt discover many of the cards—garden, house, etc.—in plain sight throughout the town.

Left to right: Figure 13. The original Tower card;
Figure 14. Nuremberg Tower, Germany

Traditional and Contemporary Meanings

When we look at various schools of thought with regard to the Lenormand deck, we discover a variety of meanings for each card, some similar, some variant. We have used the original French and German books in our collection for these meanings; they are listed in the bibliography.

Halina Kamm (54) gives the Tower as rigidity and inflexibility, might, power, and egotism, whilst at the same time equating it with magic and occultism—perhaps as a watchtower within the inner world. There are often conflicts of meaning with the card as representing authority—is it self-mastery and wisdom, educational authority, or military might? At heart, the essence of the card to us is “vision”—the clear-sightedness the watcher in the watchtower brings, whether used for learning a lesson, martial victory, or inner knowledge.

Mertz (48–9) concentrates on the Tower as the house of wisdom, saying it depicts the place where wise men and women might live in the winter, suggesting interpretations of quiet success and isolation, to some extent. Kienle (2001) depicts the card more literally as a “school,” “education,” or “place of work.”

Dee (128), writing in English, stresses the “castle” nature of the card, suggesting that if it is surrounded by more negative cards, it could be that the sitter feels “under siege” or could be suffering from a debilitating illness.

Treppner concentrates on the “authority” aspects of the Tower (62–3), and Steinbach (85) extends the Tower symbolism to cover governmental institutions, the “power and hierarchy of the corporate pyramid system.” Whilst adding it covers colleges and other learning establishments of education, she also adds that it symbolises “the ego, someone’s ambitions and belief systems.”

In the Brazilian version, Dos Ventos (73) combines meanings of isolation and independence with similar meanings of “government offices and even foreign countries.” If the card comes up close to issues of employment, it signifies a “complete change of job,” possibly even “relocation.”

AndyBC on his “Journal of a Cartomante” site—shows that whilst the Tower may signify loneliness, it also separates out the cards to either side of it, which we think is an important placeholder function in the overall tone of a Grand Tableau reading in particular. It shows how cards can have functional effects in a layout, rather than purely symbolic ones, something that is not considered as much in tarot, where every card is read as an entity of itself.

The Tarot Tower

The Tower symbol in the tarot is very much about sudden catastrophic collapse and the end of an era. There is not much scope to be able to make amends or take action; it is more how we deal with the effect of an inevitable upheaval and how we come to terms with reacting to that loss and change. We have as much control over it as the figures usually falling from the Tower itself.

The first reference to the card that would become the Tower of the tarot was in a late fifteenth-century Italian manuscript, Sermons de Ludo Cum Aliis where it was called La Saggita (the Arrow). The oldest example of the card was in the Gringonneur deck of approximately 1475.17 The whole section of Farley’s piece on it in “Tower: Absent or Lost?” is of interest in tracing the history of this specific card.

In tarot, the Tower then starts to get extended in symbolic and interpretative meaning. If we look at Crowley’s take on the Tower and the inclusion of references to doctrines of yoga and the Eye of Horus (Eye of Shiva), Crowley says of this “that on the opening of which, according to the legend of this cult, the Universe is destroyed.” It is the card of “annihilation,” “to make of nothing,” which Crowley explains is the end goal, to become broken as the figures that fall from the garrison—lost but transformed into “mere geometrical expressions” without human form.

Here we are going mystical and spiritual, far away from the watchtower of the Lenormand. According to Crowley, this is the sought-after state to be in, a state of non-attachment to the physical realm and intellectual ego. This is partly why Tali uses the “essence word” of “vision” in her own Lenormand readings, as it does allow some overlap into tarot in this way.

In his appraisal of the Tower, Waite is very much of the same consensus of Crowley and the doctrines of yoga, in that he says, “I agree with Grand Orient (himself, writing under an earlier pseudonym!) that it is the ruin of the House of Life, when evil has prevailed therein, and above all it is the rending of a House of Doctrine. I understand that the reference is, however, to a House of Falsehood.”18 This would be the pride that goeth before the fall, the sin of Lucifer, the Devil (the card before the Tower).

So in tarot we have come a long way from the literal watchtower to the sin of pride. However that may be, the vice and virtue of each card, image, and symbol can be read according to its own nature—we read the cards. On that note, we will briefly look at the cartomantic reading of the Six of Spades, which is associated with the Lenormand Tower card.

The Six of Spades

In the earliest attributions of the playing cards to cartomantic divination, we find verses that dictate how the card is read depending on the gender of the sitter. These simple couplets, easily learnt, would have been a wonderful parlour game. We recently visited a library in Edinburgh to view a copy of Flamstead and Partridge’s Fortune Book from 1750. This is a very useful resource for those of you looking to read fortunes by the appearance of moles on the body! Be that as it may, here is the original reading for the Six of Spades, the first couplet applying to a gentleman, the second pair to a lady:

This six fortells that when you do wed
You will have a cracked maidenhead,
But the girl this number draws
She’ll wed one with great applause

It is interesting that by the time this gets to Dee (2004) the meaning has been slightly modified to avoid the “cracked maidenhead” allusion:

The six fortells whene’er wed
You’ll find expectations fled;
But if a maid the number own
She’ll wed a man of high renown.19

Again, this is a far cry from our “watchtower” or “fall of man” interpretations of Lenormand or tarot, although perhaps there is a common theme of surveying the landscape before you leap—into the unknown, yourself, or marriage alike.

Arranging the Lenormand cards into the order of the suits or other similar arrangements and patterns does not appear to show anything other than a relatively random attribution of suits, numbers, and cards to the inserts, however we are still investigating.

In presenting these parallel tracks of Lenormand, cartomancy, and tarot interpretations, it is perhaps important to remember that their coming together was often for marketing purposes, later brought into the service of divination. The playing card inserts were put into decks such as the Game of Hope simply to ensure they could be used for playing other card games, such as Piquet, and not limited to a niche market or singular usage. Similarly, when cards were originally used for divination along with dice, they were simply keys to look up interpretations in fortune books, not given any particular meaning in themselves.

We often wonder if it is likely that years ago, some marketing person thought, “Why not produce a little white book with a deck, or put the meanings onto the deck in verse, and then we can sell the deck without the big book?” and then went and undercut all those publishers selling expensive fortune books, particularly the Italian ones.

However that may be, we are now in a situation where people can read the Lenormand cards without any particular reference to the fact that they were never used by Lenormand, they came from a family card game, and their meaning is subject to drift and reinterpretation.

We will next list two suggested keywords for the cards, both Tali’s essence words and selected traditional meanings. We will then expand on each card before looking at how we read the Lenormand. If you are already working with a particular tradition, style, author, or course, you may substitute these lists with your own.

Table One: Essence Words

1. The Rider/Messenger: Communications (Liaison)
2. The Clover: Luck (Good fortune)
3. The Ship: Adventure (Travel)
4. The House: Security (Home)
5. The Tree: Longevity (Health)
6. The Clouds: Transition (Change)
7. The Snake: Stealth (Suddenness)
8. The Coffin: Initiation (Immediate health)
9. The Bouquet: Appreciation (Gift)
10. The Scythe: Clearing (Harvesting)
11. The Rod/Whip: Service (Disagreement)
12. The Birds/Owls: Divination (Discussion)
13. The Child/Little Girl: Innocence (Youth)
14. The Fox: Cunning (Planning)
15. The Bear: Headstrong (Power)
16. The Stars: Creation (Navigation)
17. The Stork: Deliverance (Delivery)
18. The Dog: Codependency (Loyalty)
19. The Tower: Vision (Authority)
20. The Garden: Communing (Society)
21. The Mountain: Durability (Obstacle)
22. The Ways: Choice (Decision)
23. The Mice: Productivity (Losses)
24. The Heart: Courage (Love)
25. The Ring: Continuity (Commitment)
26. The Book: Knowledge (Learning)
27. The Letter: Sentiment (Written word)
28. The Gentleman: Analytical (Man)
29. The Lady: Intuitive (Woman)
30. The Lily: Purity (Sex)
31. The Sun: Success (Will)
32. The Moon: Dreams (Fame)
33. The Key: Access (Discovery)
34. The Fish: Resources (Business)
35. The Anchor: Standstill (Stability)
36. The Cross: Burdens (Faith)

Here is a typical traditional set of keywords:

Table Two: Traditional Words

1. The Rider: News
2. The Clover: Luck
3. The Ship: Travel
4. The House: Home
5. The Tree: Long-term health
6. The Clouds: Confusion and trouble (lack of foresight)
7. The Snake: Someone who means harm, a liar, competitor
8. The Coffin: Immediate health
9. The Bouquet: Gift
10. The Scythe: A sudden cutting or planned harvesting
11. The Rod, Birch, Whip: Argument, troubled communication
12. The Birds: Communication, mass communication (gossip)
13. The Child: A young person, innocent and new
14. The Fox: Cunning, both bad and good (deceit and cleverness)
15. The Bear: Power and a powerful (influential) person
16. The Stars: Hopes
17. The Stork: Delivery (often of change)
18. The Dog: Loyalty and close friends and companion(ship)
19. The Tower: Solitude, borders (politics, law, education)
20. The Garden: Society and meetings with others
21. The Mountain: Blocks and obstacles, requiring detour
22. The Ways: Choices and decisions
23. The Mice: Gradual loss
24. The Heart: Love and romance
25. The Ring: Commitment and contracts
26. The Book: Knowledge (or secrets)
27. The Letter: Messages (but not necessarily 1: news, nor 12: gossip)
28. The Gentleman: A man
29. The Lady: A woman
30. The Lily: Sex
31. The Sun: Best/Big luck
32. The Moon: Dreams (in some traditions, work; see Alternate Traditions)
33. The Key: Certainty (locking or unlocking, security or insecurity, dependent on context)
34. The Fish: Resources and money (as in netting a good catch)
35. The Anchor: Stability (in some traditions, work)
36. The Cross: Struggle (as in “cross to bear”)

We have already seen that some cards will have different meanings in different traditions, and with authors and teachers within those schools. Some cards are similar but have subtle differences. Here we will list the cards that have similarity of image or meaning, but contain subtle differences:

The Letter and the Rider: In the first card, we have specific written or formal communication, perhaps a confirmation of something already decided or known (a contract, particularly with the Ring close by in a layout), and in the second case we have something new—news, information, a newcomer, or a visitor from afar. They may bring a letter, but they are themselves the new delivery in the reading.

The Fox and the Bear: The Fox as employment would be more connected with self-employment, or individual cunning in continuing one’s career. It could also be someone plotting against you in career matters, but not at a corporate level. The Bear may represent persons of power and long-term employment, perhaps more in a large, powerful organisation. If it were close to the Tower, for example, representing a border-post, this would be authority and hence a bigger institution for work prospects.

The Whip and the Scythe: These two implements, like the mice and the birds, may appear similar in some regards, but the birch/rod is a symbol of domestic servitude and trouble—the sound of the whip (hate speech, for example) causing pain and hurt. The Scythe is an agricultural tool belonging to the outdoors and references a more clear cutting away, even a harvesting and reaping. This depends too on the card closest to the point of the Scythe in the image (see “Facing Cards” below).

To some extent too, the Mice and the Birds both have multiple animals, but in the first case we have potential teamwork or long-term nibbling away of something (hence, loss), and in the second case we have individual birds flocking together and perhaps gossiping which comes to no good—the opposite of teamwork.

Facing Cards

Some cards may dictate—depending on the deck and the image—a direction of interpretation depending on which way they are facing. If your deck does not clearly depict a facing for these cards, you are not able to use this aspect of Lenormand reading.

In the original Game of Hope from which the first Lenormand deck derived, the Gentleman and Lady cards are drawn very clearly as a matching pair, set next to each other as cards 28 and 29, the Ace of Hearts and the Ace of Spades. They adopt matching and complementary poses, both dressed in formal attire—the Gentleman holding a walking stick in his right hand and the Lady a fan in her left. They are looking into each other’s eyes, both with similar expression.

It has been suggested to us that the positions of the Heart, Gentleman, and Lady cards and their particular racing rules (see appendix) are part of the “love game” embedded in the whole game, and that the deck is thus stacked in favour of the Lady players winning.

When the Gentleman and Lady are used in cartomancy, their respective poses allow us to have them facing each other or to fall into a layout with their backs to each other. This often is used to signify their relationship. Where other cards have been designed to have them both facing in the same direction, this allows for one to be looking at the back of another, signifying that one is looking to another who is disinterested. If both cards have been designed to be facing the viewer, we cannot tell the direction of their regard.

In the Mertz deck, the Gentleman looks face on and the Woman looks to the right.

It is best to experiment with different decks to determine which works best for you, particularly when also choosing to use the method of right/left of the charged card to determine past/future rather than the regard of the Gentleman/Lady cards.

A Brief Note on Same-Sex Relationship Readings

Where both partners are male or female, there are a number of solutions to the traditional Lady and Gentleman cards. You can purchase two packs of a deck and have two Gentleman or Lady cards (clearly marking one as the significator/charged card to be used as representing the sitter). A number of contemporary decks actually supply two of each of these cards. Alternatively, you can ask the sitter to select any of the other cards as their partner (or potential partner), although this does remove that card from being used as its traditional meaning.

The Main Facing Cards Are:

The Lady and the Gentleman: Their facing across a layout can be used to determine their attitude toward each other. If the man is facing the woman and they are positioned closely with positive cards between them, this bodes well. If our male sitter has a layout in which the Gentleman is looking toward the Lady, who has her back to him with a great distance and negative cards between them, it does not immediately bode well.

The Scythe: The point of the Scythe shows what is being cut away, cleared, or harvested. It can also indicate which direction and cards determine what can be reaped from the situation in the rest of the layout.

The Clouds: The edges of the clouds are sometimes depicted as having a brighter and darker lighting, one side and the other. If so, the darker side—if closer to the charged card/significator—brings trouble and lack of clarity, whereas the bright side being close indicates that such turbulence is quickly passing.

The Stork: The Stork is often seen as a delivery card with no other connotation, although of course with the Child card close at hand, we would be hard-pressed not to interpret this as a pregnancy. However, we can look at the two sides of the Stork and see the card before the Stork (either visually, the card “behind” the direction in which the Stork looks or flies) as what has come before the delivery or change, and the card after the Stork to see into what circumstances we are being taken.

The Ship: The direction in which the ship is sailing may be taken to denote where we are being taken—either literally or figuratively. The Ship followed by the Rider bordered by negative cards might indicate we are literally being “taken for a ride.” Look for that snake!

The Book can also be read as a facing card, if the image shows which side the book is opening toward. This can be read as from where (or whom) the information/knowledge is coming.

Different Names for Cards

Some of the Lenormand cards have variations in their names. This rarely affects the reading; however, you may describe a single bird on card 12 called “the Owl” as “wisdom” more easily than the identical card being called “the Birds” and featuring a picture of many birds on it, which would tend to be interpreted more as “gossip.”

Other cards that have variant names include:

• 1: Rider, Messenger, Cavalier
• 9: Bouquet, Flowers
• 11: Rod(s), Birch, Whip(s), Broom (this is possibly a mistaken drawing
  of the original, as it leads to more domestic interpretations other than
  the original implied by a birch)
• 22: The Ways, Paths, Crossroads

Different Meanings than Tarot

Several Lenormand cards hold different meanings than they would do in tarot, psychological symbolism, or other systems. It is best to change one’s mindset to enter L-space first, rather than trying to shoe-horn the L-meanings into one’s existing symbolism. This is one of the big stretches for those readers who are already used to dream symbolism, Jungian interpretation, Gestalt, tarot, astrology, etc., where such meanings will have already been internalised.

The most variant meanings might be considered to be the Cross, the Tower, and the Lily, with perhaps the Moon also carrying different connotations than its tarot equivalent.

• The Moon as Work/Fame
• The Cross as Pain and Grief
• The Lily as Sex
• The Tower as Authority

Whilst we can read all the cards literally—and we’ll learn methods to do so later—in order to free up our interpretative ability to combine cards, we’ll present here our first exercise, taken from our tarot work, but even more useful for Lenormand: the keyword kaleidoscope.20

Exercise: The Keyword Kaleidoscope

When we read Lenormand, we often put sequences or sets of cards together—far more than with tarot. The way in which we make meaning out of multiple images is quite spectacular and mostly unconscious. It is equal turns and inspirational. Sometimes it is as obvious as reading a list of standard meanings as a beginner and the interpretation applies accurately to the situation.

Here we are going to give you a practice method to install the unconscious pattern into your own brain—like training wheels that strengthen a particular process in your head. It is the pattern from experienced card readers, only taken out of their heads, polished, and given back to you.

We will start with two cards and move to three, from which the possibilities are endless. You’ll be surprised how this works for you.

The Method

1. Shuffle your Lenormand deck and take out any two cards, turning them face up.
2. Write down their two keywords from the list above or your own references.
3. Look at both of them and say them both out loud or clearly in your head. Move from one to another.
4. See or hear what sensation arises from merging both words.
5. Give that new sensation one word.

It is most important to come up with one word, although you may note down other phrases, concepts, feelings, snippets of meaning, etc. The one word is important to install and provoke the unconscious pattern into your head. You have to sort a lot of associative connections and meanings to produce the one word, and your unconscious is geared to do this automatically, far better than you can do consciously. We trick the conscious mind into keeping itself busy producing the one word whilst the unconscious does all the work—easily.

For example, we choose two cards, Bouquet (9) and Book (26).

Figure 15. The Bouquet and the Book cards

We look up the keywords: “appreciation” and “knowledge.”

We think about these two words and get “certificate.” We first thought about “teacher,” then “school,” but then “certificate” came to mind very clearly. On further reflection, we can also picture “libraries and learning,” or the awarding of a degree and similar ideas, all about the appreciation of knowledge.

Try it with two cards. You can repeat this exercise as often as you like.

1. 6. Now we move on to using this simple skill, in which we have combined meaning from two symbols (and you’ll realise this is what we do with a single tarot card, which is a metaphor, or constellation of symbols), to do something rather special. This is a skill that multiplies in such a way that you need nothing more than this in order to read a Grand Tableau of all thirty-six cards, as we will cover later in this book. If you can do two cards, you can do the rest.

Take three cards and lay them out in a triangle.

Repeat the exercise of combining two keywords for each of the three pairings that are possible. Make a note or write on a slip of paper between the cards the one word which arises out of each pairing.

In the example that follows, we have Tree (5), Mouse (23), and Moon (32). The choices of keywords for those cards are longevity, productivity, and dreams. So, we firstly consider Tree and Mouse, longevity and productivity. What comes into our mind are ideas of acorns becoming oaks, small things (mice) building up over a long period of time (tree), and suddenly we get the word “accumulation.” We write this word down between the two cards.

Figure 16. Lenormand Keyword Kaleidoscope 1

We then consider Tree and Moon, longevity and dreams. Don’t forget that you can use your own keywords from anywhere you like, be it from other books or simply the images (if you feel like going totally intuitive). We use this method for tarot and Lenormand to answer that old question, “Why do the books have different meanings? What is the meaning of that card?” or to work into our minds new words and meanings presented by a book.

When we think of Tree and Moon, longevity and dreams, we somehow get the image of forestry, then factories, like sawmills. We guess this is somewhat inspired by the image on the Moon card. We keep considering, and get “foresight,” like planning, long-term vision, that sort of thing. The song “Telegraph Road” by Dire Straits comes to mind. You can do this with songs too.

We write this word down between those two cards. You can sketch them out in your journal when you do this exercise, or do it on one large piece of paper.

Finally we have our third pair, Mice and Moon, productivity and dreams. We mull over these two words (although we quite like “Mice and Moon”—perhaps it is made of cheese after all!) and get ideas like “following a calling” when you work productively because you are working on making your own dream real … then the word “realisation” comes to us very clearly, so we write that one down.

Now we have three new words: accumulation, foresight, and realisation. Don’t forget too, these are our words; you’ll find your own unique voice. We like to teach in a “clean language” fashion so you can use your own words, ideas, and voice, draw on your own experience, and simply plug those into these teaching methods to discover your own style.

We now come to the trick, and it really is magic. We can now “kaleidoscope” the words together, backwards and forwards (remember the last time you held a kaleidoscope tube to your eye and turned the thing one way and another?) to come up with more meanings. Simply take the new words and write them on a new triangle, and repeat the process.

Figure 17. Lenormand Keyword Kaleidoscope 2

So we take accumulation and realisation, and out of that we get the idea of “investment” (“savings” also came to mind, but investment seemed a stronger idea). We mix realisation and foresight, and get the sense of “inevitability”—someone who can realise their plans, making them inevitable. Finally we kaleidoscope accumulation and foresight and out pops “planning.”

We now have three new words that have “kaleidoscoped” out of the others. You can keep repeating this as much as you like.

Optional Exercise: You can also collapse the three words inwards, to see if you can come up with one word that arises out of all three. You can do this with the first three actual keywords that we gave the cards, or the next layer of three words that you generate, or any combination. This is what goes on unconsciously in the mind of very experienced readers. You’ll also recognise it as a fractal if you’ve ever seen those types of diagrams—it’s a range of meanings approaching a never-ending vanishing point of what the card “actually” means. We can now (or at any level) turn this into a more useful exercise by simply making a sentence or story using the three new words. So if I were to take my three new words—investment, inevitability, and planning—I might say: With the right planning and investment, the outcome is inevitable. And that is a possible reading of the Tree, Mouse, and Moon cards.

Of course, the Mice in many traditions indicate loss—even theft, and the Moon is recognition or fame. So whilst the kaleidoscope exercise shows the advice, underneath is the message that (if it were a business question) our business health (tree) would only accumulate recognition slowly—hence the advice.

Interestingly enough, our single collapsed word for all three generated words was “reward.” So if these three cards were drawn for a business venture, given that advice above—get investment and plan, don’t rush into it, and long-term success is inevitable—the reward of the venture would likely be considerable and assured. We just have to watch those Mice nibbling away at our marketing (Moon).

Try it and see what happens for you. Practice with as many variations of three cards together, or go back to practising with just two for a while until you get the hang of it and then return to the kaleidoscope.

By the way, if you are ever thinking of designing a Lenormand or tarot deck, or want to work in a new book of meanings into your own readings, the kaleidoscope will work wonders to put all that apparently different information together, leading to unique insights. In effect, you are also short-cutting years of actual readings by this method. We like it when we can get a head-start on our readings before we even begin!

How Not To Learn Lenormand

The Fox is work …

The Secrets of the Lenormand Oracle, Sylvie Steinbach, 63

To say ‘John is’ anything, incidentally, always opens the door to spooks
and metaphysical debate. The historic logic of Aristotelian philosophy as embedded
in Standard English always carries an association of stasis with every ‘is,’
unless the speaker or writer remembers to include a date …

—Quantum Psychology, Robert Anton Wilson, 102

The Word Is

When I (Marcus) read sentences in which one thing “is” equated with another in an almost absolute manner, I physically flinch. This is probably because it was one of the logical fallacies that was beaten out of me over many months as a young neophyte in my occult training. My teacher would yell, “Correspondence! Correspondence! Not ‘is’!” In this section we will show (without physical torment) how that lesson has helped us not learn Lenormand (or any other system) in a limiting fashion. We’ll look at something called e-prime and the differences between tarot and Lenormand as simile and metaphor.

In Quantum Psychology, Robert Anton Wilson introduces the idea of e-prime from the work of Alfred Korzybski, who developed the field of General Semantics. The idea can be considered as straightforward as removing “is” from language. As an example, I could have said, “the idea is straightforward,” but I said “the idea can be considered … ” thus giving some room for your own decision as to whether it could be seen as straightforward or not.

As another example, let’s say I said to you, “John is the good-looking guy over there.” You look across the room and see John. Well, you see a good-looking guy next to three other guys. You may be able to see where this is going, particularly when you end up spending the evening talking to Clive by mistake. That word “is” can lead us astray when we take it as fact.

The notion of “is-ness” I believe might be seen as the bane of lazy writing in occultism and any system that relies on symbolism and correspondence. When we read “Mars is anger” or “the Hanged Man is Neptune in astrology” we create a totally invalid equation between a planet, an emotion, an image, and another planet. They are not each other, they are not the same. They are not fixed in anything; the mind creates a fictional equation.

Lenormand as Simile and Tarot as Metaphor

We like to use the symbol of a triangle above a straight line instead of two straight lines, which determine equivalency rather than equals. It is the same with metaphor or simile. A metaphor is defined as a group of symbols creating a mapping to another situation, and a simile might be something like “it is as easy as falling off a log.” When we say “life is a journey” (or a Fool’s journey) we are creating a metaphorical mapping, which has many correspondences between attributes of both parts, but they are still not identical.

So a card—in this case Lenormand—is more of a simile than a metaphor, as might be a tarot image. The image of a fox is a simile for certain attributes of a fox—as we will see—but not a complex metaphor such as the story of the Tower of Babel for the Tower card in tarot. These similes work together in a Lenormand reading to provide a tableau—a living set of relationships which then map to the sitters’ real lives.

The fox has no direct mapping—another difference from tarot; it is only in its relationship, context, and position to other cards the mapping is provided.

In a moment, we’ll see how this works and why I suggest it is important to learn bare keywords and raw concepts for each card before building them up into “meaning.” First we will take a look at the fox itself and look at how it functions as an analogy marker in a reading. We’ll examine one example in a Lenormand tradition and see how this symbol’s meaning has travelled over time since its first use in fortunetelling and cartomancy.

The Tale of the Fox

Halina Kamm (44) gives the fox as a false partner in any regard such as a tricky business partner or even a false prophet. Dos Ventos (58) picks up on this by concentrating on the aspects of betrayal and “sneakiness,” whilst suggesting it can show that it is the client who is secretive when positioned “in the back” of the sitter’s card.

Mertz (38) also depicts the fox as a cunning predator, ears flat, about to pounce on his unsuspecting prey. The card is hence a mixed card of being fixed on a goal, alert and sensitive, yet also being cunning—so it must be determined if one is the fox or the hen. This is as Kienle (14) who gives keywords such as “cleverness” and “intelligence” for the positive aspect of the card, and “falseness” and even “theft” for the negative.

Dee (136) provides a means of using distance in a reading with the Fox, in that whilst it symbolises deceit, its proximity to the sitter’s card (the Gentleman or Lady) indicates the likelihood of that deceit in the sitter’s immediate social circle. A Fox close to hand is troublesome; one far away shows that one can rely on close friends.

Steinbach (63) presents the fox as “work in general, like our daily job, career, employment.” She differentiates between the fox as “job” and the fish as “business.” However, she goes on to discuss the nature of the fox as disloyal friends.

AndyBC in his “Journal of a Cartomante” site demonstrates a number of factors that can influence how the Fox card applies in a reading depending on its order, and whether it is above or below a sitter’s card (he gives keywords such as “wrong,” “manipulation,” etc. for his language-based construct method of reading/teaching the cards). He also points out that the Fox is a symbol in itself and should not be dressed up with other symbolism or correspondences, such as the mirror in the Mystical Lenormand deck, or an association with Neptune. He also notes that there is far more similarity between traditions, i.e., French and German, than differences.

Reynard, the Original Fox

In the original Game of Hope from 1800, we see that the Fox was perceived as a negative card, one that would result in the player having to change course and take refuge. The little white book that came with the cards explains: “The cunning Fox leads the player astray … ”

At about this time, in fact six years prior to the publication of the deck, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had written his free translation of Reynard the Fox, so the tales of the cunning fox would have needed no introduction to the participants in the game. The story had been available in Germany (in Latin) as early as 1498, as Reinke de Vos. Reynard is the archetypal bestial trickster-cum-preacher, and these satires were part of the social fabric. The Fox then would have almost certainly been interpreted in divinatory terms as a trickster—one who spread a false gospel even, and was not to be trusted.

Other similar tales that give context to the original cards include the fable of the stork and the frog king. We see in the original Game of Hope that the Stork has a frog in its mouth. This is perhaps an allusion to the common European fable of the frogs who each plotted in the depths to rise to the surface and become king over all the others. They struggled with each other, and one eventually fought his way to the lily pad on the surface of the pond to declare his mastery and kingship over his peers—whence he was promptly swallowed whole by a waiting stork.

Furthermore, the association of the serpent (snake) card with a temptress or “other woman” hardly needs pointing out its biblical context.

Learning the Lenormand

When learning the elements of Lenormand, the language of L-space, consider that the terms of reference are like unlit bulbs—they may be coloured differently, like the Fox is not the Tower, however, they have no intrinsic light until they are plugged into the mains.

The Fox is a simile for trickery, the ability to hunt with cunning, and for single-minded determination. These mappings have no absolute meaning; the Fox is no more “workplace” than it is “intelligence”; it is no more a “false gospel” than it is “a cheating lover.” It is pointless arguing over interpretation at that secondary level. The important thing should be to learn the alphabet of the symbols in a consistent manner, then test them out in practice and, like any language, we will get corrected in our precise pronunciation along the way.

When “plugged in” to the other cards in combination (and in a Grand Tableau in particular), the circuit becomes connected and the individual bulbs are lit up. However, they also reflect the glare of the images around them, and the circuit transforms as it makes connections across different combinations of resistance and flow. Thus the Fox bulb might be totally shadowed in one corner of the tableau and of no import whatsoever at the oracular moment of reading. It may, however, be sneaking up right behind us, lit balefully by the Snake, the Bear, and the Tower, showing a prism of possibility that someone is indeed building up a strong position from which to leap upon us. The simile of the Fox is now constellated by the other images and forms in that relationship alone, an oracular mapping to our life. When it is removed from that relationship, it is merely a picture of a fox and a simple simile.

Let us now look at each of the cards in more detail before considering the far more important points of reading them in combinations and layouts. Unlike the tarot, Lenormand cards are quite simple in themselves. Many books give them individual meanings, but the real trick is reading them together.

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