The Grammar of Symbols
All cartomantic systems propose to define the future—or at least, to describe human experience—by means of a set number of symbols. In the tarot, we have potentially seventy-eight, although in this book we’re mostly using the twenty-two major arcana. In the Petit Lenormand, we have thirty-six. In other systems, we may have even fewer, although there are few cartomantic decks with fewer than thirty-two cards.
Each card, therefore, must be a slice of life. Whether that slice is a thick one or a thin one is a function of the number of cards in the deck, as well as the nature of its symbols. The tarot has some thin slices, at least in the minor arcana, but each slice is large enough to cover an equal range of experience, largely due to the structure of the deck as a matrix. For example, in the minor arcana, each human endeavor is classified in one of four domains: wands, cups, swords, and pentacles. Moreover, in each of these four domains, four people are defined: the elder male, the elder female, the younger male, the younger female. Finally, in each domain, “what can happen” is divided into ten slices, the ten pip cards.
In the Lenormand, the cake has not been cut so cleanly, and there is overlap and fuzziness. However, this overlap is not a flaw, but a feature. One can read the overlaps as if each combination of cards is a potential Venn diagram of experience. A Venn diagram is a graphic representation of interlocking sets in which some members of one group share characteristics from another group. We can imagine Venn diagrams that describe the relationships between individual cards as sets of meaning. For example, if 15–Bear and 34–Fish come together, we know that the issue is one of money, because of the possible sets of meaning in these two cards, they share the idea of “money.” However, if 15–Bear and 5–Tree come together, it might instead be one of health and food. Bear can indicate both cash flow and “food flow,” if I may coin a term. Tree can indicate both family and health. Together they share the domain of the body.
This grammar of combinations is also true in the tarot, but to a lesser degree. The lines between the slices are more defined, less ragged. This, also, isn’t a flaw. Sometimes it’s useful to have a clean box to put experience in.
Ultimately, both approaches are features, not bugs. When we need a clean set of cubbyholes, we have the tarot. When we want a wide-open desktop to spread our ideas on, we have the Lenormand.
It’s worth mentioning again that the tarot was not always so tidy. The occult revival of which Waite was a part helped to define some of the clear demarcations between ideas. Waite, and those around him, were modernists: they believed firmly in the meaningfulness of symbols. And they came from an occult tradition of natural magic, which sought to categorize all experience into taxonomical structures. Our current taxonomy of animals and plants is a legacy of this approach to knowledge.
When Waite and his fellow occultists took up the tarot, the work of categorization of its symbols had already been begun by Levi. They merely refined and defined these meanings. Still, some of the ragged edges had to stick out. For example, the Six of Swords traditionally meant “travel by water,” probably for no other reason than it was an idea that needed a place. Waite’s meaning for the Six of Swords, in his Pictorial Guide, hints at his ambivalence:
A ferryman carrying passengers in his punt to the further shore. The course is smooth, and seeing that the freight is light, it may be noted that the work is not beyond his strength. Divinatory Meanings: journey by water, route, way, envoy, commissionary, expedient. Reversed: Declaration, confession, publicity; one account says that it is a proposal of love.
He tries to move out from the specificity of “water” to the idea of “way.” He also tries to fit in the “proposal of love,” by simply relegating it to the anonymous “one account.” What Waite was dealing with were a dozen different ways of slicing this cake, and none of them agreed. Waite’s images (or, more accurately, Pamela Colman Smith’s images) helped cement this particular way of dividing the cake, so much so that even those who read older tarot decks sometimes use the meanings depicted in the Rider-Waite.
There has been no similar effort to categorize the Lenormand. The Petit Lenormand was, by its nature, rather underneath Waite’s notice. While he could shuffle off “proposal of love” into a corner of a reversed meaning of one card in his book on the tarot, how might he have dealt with 25–Ring?
With one exception, I can find little reference to Marie-Anne Lenormand by any of the luminaries of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occult revival, despite the fact that her name remained, and remains, synonymous with fortune-telling in Germany and France. Eliphas Levi, however, does mention her, and manages to criticize her learning, her politics (Legitimists were a pro-royal political movement), and—elsewhere—even her appearance:
Mlle. Lenormand, the most celebrated of our modern fortune-tellers, was unacquainted with the science of the Tarot. … She knew neither high Magic nor the Kabalah, but her head was filled with ill-digested erudition, and she was intuitive by instinct, which deceived her rarely. The works she left behind her are Legitimist tomfoolery, ornamented with classical quotations; but her oracles, inspired by the presence and magnetism of those who consulted her, were often astounding.21
So we see that Levi considers the tarot a science, which is to say, an organized system of knowledge, and the Lenormand method of reading, if not the deck of cards that bears her name, are ill-organized, incomplete, and rely excessively upon those womanly traits of intuition and enthusiasm. On the same page, he accuses her of “mental rambling” and “extravagance of imagination,” which replace the “natural affections of her sex.” Then he mentions her lack of beauty. This is a vicious attack of misogyny, even for this time: what is it that drives Levi to such cruelty? Many of the traits he describes—imagination, organic rather than ordered discourse (or “rambling”)—are also the elements of the Romantic movement. I will explore this idea more fully in chapter thirteen. Levi is not just being sexist here; he is also taking a philosophical stand against Romanticism in favor of his own occult Neoclassicism.
We who wish to increase our intuition, to encourage our enthusiasm, would hardly find that a ringing denunciation. And even Levi offers her some praise, through the opaque veils of his sexism and classism. Her erudition is “ill-digested,” her works “tomfoolery.” But he can’t deny that she was rarely wrong in her divinations, as much as he seems to want to. So, finally, he calls her ugly.
At one point, at least, the Lenormand—or the philosophy it reflects—and the tarot were at odds, to the point where usually intelligent and witty scholars like Levi could be reduced to playground taunts. Can the two systems hold hands as friends now, and if so, how do these symbols interact? What is the difference between the tarot and the Lenormand in the ways in which the symbols can be read?
Symbolic Domains
The first and greatest of differences is this: in the tarot, especially in the minor arcana, the symbolic domains are fixed. There are four categories of experience: air, water, earth, and fire; swords, cups, pentacles, and wands; or mind, emotions, body, and action. All permutations of the symbols of the minor arcana interact in those four symbolic domains.
But in the Lenormand, the symbolic domains are determined by the question. This relationship with symbols and their domains mirrors what we experience in most of the rest of our lives. Perhaps this is why I have heard several readers of both systems say that the tarot is like talking to a philosopher, while the Lenormand is like talking to a friend. A philosopher categorizes; a friend speaks in the expectation you will understand the relevant domains.
A symbolic domain, as I’m using the term here, is simply a collection of symbols around a particular idea. If I am going to talk about music, the symbols “bass” and “tempo” and “treble” are part of the domain. Many symbols can stretch across domains: for example, the word “bass” in music is pronounced differently and means something different from the word “bass” in fishing. Perhaps a better example is the experience of many college freshmen, who suddenly take an introductory course in a new field: psychology, mathematics, or biology. They quickly find themselves perusing and memorizing lists of words they thought they knew: “affect” and “function” and “mantle.” But in the symbolic domains of those fields, those words take on new meaning: affect becomes a noun meaning emotional reaction; a function is a kind of equation; a mantle is a part of a mollusc.
Similarly, we quickly realize that 25–Ring is not always marriage. We must step back and get a larger view of the meaning of the card in this context. For example, if someone is asking about a business, perhaps it shows up in the future. Do you predict a proposal? Or do you step back and say, “A marriage is a kind of contract; businesses have their own kinds of contracts.” You’re probably going to generalize, at least if you’re wise.
Each of the Lenormand cards can do this: sometimes, 18–Dog means “a dog” in the literal sense; sometimes it means “a friend,” sometime “a partner,” and sometimes just the abstract idea of “loyalty.” It always depends upon the context.
This is true, as well, of the major arcana of the tarot. Rarely will XIII–Death mean actual death. Instead, it usually means change. And in some contexts, it might not even be an earth-shattering kind of change. In some imaginable contexts, it might just mean a change of socks.
It is a useful exercise with both the Lenormand and the tarot to take each card and permute it through certain symbolic domains. What would this card mean if it were about a relationship? About a business? About an artistic project? About a job? And so on. I’ve explained this procedure earlier, but if you haven’t done it, now would be a good time to start thinking about how the symbols of the cards change in different contexts.
For example, if we take III–The Empress, in a relationship she represents nurturing love. In a business? Growth of the business. In an artistic project? Emotion and, perhaps, sentimentality. For a job? One with room for advancement and growth. What about card 23–Mouse: In love? Nagging worry and perhaps jealousy. In a business? Loss, perhaps from theft or unforeseen overhead. In an artistic project? Lack of focus and busywork. For a job? Busyness, but perhaps with no ultimate benefit.
We can break these down to small domains, if we like. As described briefly in chapter 2, Ferrer offers an exercise where one imagines what kind of car, house, etc., each of the cards might indicate.22 So, for example, 31–Sun might indicate a big, bright, impressive sports car and a warm inviting house with lots of windows. Similarly, with the tarot, IX–the Hermit might indicate a “private” car, perhaps with tinted windows. Or perhaps it’s a “seeking” car, one used for surveillance. The house will be lonely and secluded and contemplative.
I am tempted to create a table of my own for you to memorize, but if I do, I’ll be defeating the real purpose, which is to slice that pie for yourself. I would encourage you to do this now, if you haven’t already, for each of the cards in the Lenormand or the major arcana. Ask yourself, if this card were X, what kind of X would it be?
Write down your answers in a notebook or on your computer, so you can review and revise them later. Doing this in your head is good, too, but you’ll want a record later. Especially as some of them will be puzzlers that you’ll have to leave blank for the time being. For each, ask yourself “what kind of …
Car
House
Person
Job or career
Monetary situation
Relationship
Pastime or hobby
… would this card be?”
You can create some of your own categories. For example, if this card were a kind of movie, what kind of movie would it be? Would 10–Scythe be a horror movie? 34–Fish, an adventure movie?
Eventually, you will come to a stage in understanding the cards where you can classify your daily experience by means of them. So, for example, with the tarot, you might encounter a problem at work and think, “The boss was really IX–Hermit today, trying to guide everyone all the time. I kind of wish he’d let me XVII–Star and do it my own way.”
For me, and perhaps for you, this is an easier process to accomplish with the Petit Lenormand than with the tarot. It’s easier to say, “The boss was trying to be a 22–Crossroad kind of guy, but he really ended up just being 6–Clouds.” The reason why these day-to-day concerns are a bit easier to relate to the Lenormand than the tarot lies in the nature of their symbols, and the fuzzy relationships each has to its meaning.
The Symbolic Nimbus
It’s easy to assume that each symbol—be it a word or a cultural symbol—connects to a single meaning, so many people conceive of a direct line between a symbol and its meaning. But we know that meaning is actually much more complex than that. A symbol corresponds not to a single thing, but to a fuzzy set of things. For example, the symbol “dog” (I’m just talking about the word here, not the card) can refer to an animal. But it also contains ideas like loyalty and friendliness. At the same time, it can be an insult, a symbol of persistence (“she dogged me for that report”). I can call the animal a dog, sure, but I can call a person a dog, a picture of a dog a dog, a statue a dog. I can’t refer to, say, cheese as a dog. But I can refer to a frankfurter as a dog, so food is not completely excluded.
It’s more accurate to think of a symbol, not as pointing to a thing, but as a location on a kind of map, from which its various meanings are other locations. A meaning closer to the center of this map is one more often associated with the symbol. With “dog,” the “animal” meaning is close to the center. Ideas closer to the edge are ideas less often associated with it. But the edge itself is fuzzy; we could apply “dog” metaphorically to nearly any concept. For some it would be a stretch. But we could still do it and be understood.
Around each of the cards of your cartomancy deck, whether the tarot or the Petit Lenormand or a deck of playing cards, is a nimbus or cloud of meaning. This is why 25–Ring doesn’t mean “marriage” in every situation. It can apply to many different situations. And 21–Mountain means “delay,” but “delay” itself means any number of things, depending on your own location in the overlapping fuzzy sets of meaning. A delay on a trip is a delayed flight, perhaps, or a mix-up at the hotel. A delay when asking about pregnancy tells of a late birth. A delay might even be a good thing, depending on the question.
Our job in reading the cards isn’t matching each card with a meaning in a book or in our rote memory. Our job is mapping the location of the querent amid the overlapping nimbuses of the cards themselves.
This job is complicated by the relationship of a single card to several different fuzzy sets of meaning. The tarot, particularly, covers huge ground with each of the cards in the major arcana. But even the Lenormand displays a wide range of meanings. If we say that 21–Mountain means delay, it also means obstacles of all other varieties. And at the same time, it’s a mountain and sometimes just means “mountain.”
Traditional ways of reading the Lenormand have taken into account this structure of meaning, which is interesting when you realize the cards were made by the philosophically naïve in a time when no one, not even philosophers, understood meaning this way. Perhaps the creators of these cards were not so naïve as we thought.
Combinations
In the Lenormand, combinations of cards take on more detailed and nuanced meanings than cards alone. I’ve already described this in brief, but there’s more to the grammar of these combinations than has been described above.
The structure of any Lenormand combination is what we call in linguistics a topic-comment structure. The topic is what we’re talking about. The comment is what is said about that topic. So, in the simplest form, we can think of the topic as the subject and the comment as the predicate of a sentence: “Bill eats cake.” Bill is the topic. His eating of cake is the comment on Bill. But it can become rather more complex in language; we can reverse the order of these things. “Cake is what Bill ate.” In this case, by placing “cake” first, we’ve made it the topic, and Bill’s eating becomes the comment.
There are two ways of creating the topic-comment distinction in cartomancy. The first is that the location in the spread determines the topic, and the card that lands upon it is the comment. So if I lay VIII–Strength in the place of “hopes,” the topic is “hope” and the comment is the complex, fuzzy set of meanings attached to VIII–Strength. I discard some of those meanings because they do not fit with the topic, and others because they do not match the context, and then select one that fits my felt sense.
We can also read combinations of tarot cards, making one card the topic and the other the comment. Lay down two cards, one after the other. The first is the topic; the next is the comment. So I lay down X–Wheel of Fortune, and say to the querent, “There has been an upset in your fortunes, perhaps a turn for the positive.” I turn over the next card and say, “This is Strength. It shows that change in your fortune has given you increased power and responsibility.” The Wheel of Fortune is the topic: a change in fortune. The Strength card defines the results of that change of fortune. This is what we do with the three-card reading, in which the middle card takes on the topic and the other two cards provide comment on that theme.
In the Lenormand, similarly, we can read two cards in sequence as a topic and comment. But we can also charge a place. As already explained, one common reading method is to project the signifier card on the middle place of three or five cards. One then reads the signifier as the topic, and the card that lands on that place as the comment.
The other complexity is that a comment can become a new topic with its own comment. So, “Bill eats cake. The cake was delicious.” In one sentence, the comment is “eats cake.” In the next, this comment is picked up and transformed into a topic. Similarly, once I read the projected signifier as the topic, and the card that lands on that place as the comment, I can combine those two meanings and use them as a topic that the other cards act as another comment for.
These interactions can become extremely complicated. Some books on the Lenormand offer lists of combinations, but I find them of relatively little use. Instead, it’s better to understand how the topic and comment of combinations fit together in cartomancy. At least, if you have a mind like I do, it’s better. I like to reason things out for myself.
There are multiple ways a topic and a comment can relate in cartomancy. Below I will explain some, and then give a concrete example of how they might be used in a reading.
1. Equation (T = C). The comment may be equated with the topic, as in “Pizza is what I want for supper.” In this case, the topic of pizza equates to the comment of “what I want for supper.” Similarly, two cards can lie in a combination that encourages equation of their two symbols. If I have 27–Letter and 25–Ring, I can see the topic, the documents, equated with the ring, a promise: this is a combination that can indicate a contract, in which the document is a promise.
2. Description (T is like C). Closely related to equation are combinations of description. In “This pizza is good,” the topic of the pizza has the comment of goodness. Similarly, 28–Gentleman and 23–Mice might indicate a person (the topic) who is mousey (the comment). This combination blends into the next, as well, which is:
3. Classification (C is a type of T). In this combination, the comment is a kind of thing or a subset of things identified by the topic. So 36–Cross as the topic, and 11–Whip as the comment, might indicate a kind of pain or burden that is physical or sexual in nature. As you can see, this relationship is much like that of description above.
4. Action (T does C). The above three combinations are those that many readers rely upon, but it’s important to remember that each of the cards is also an action, as well as an object. Here, we can see the comment acting as a verb or active predicate. So 15–Bear followed by 7–Snake could be a powerful person like a boss who betrays someone.
These four relationships are marked in language through choices in syntax and grammar. But in the Lenormand or tarot, all we have are two cards lying next to each other. How, then, can we know which relationship applies? Moreover, how can we know which of several possible meanings for each card apply?
The answer, simply put, is intuition: which is an answer that answers nothing. However, in the next chapter, I will describe specific techniques you can employ to use your intuition as a specific tool to help discern what the cards mean in any given pattern.