Compendium of Magical Things: Communicating with the Divine to Create the Life of Your Dreams

The Lenormand is a set of 36 cards used for divination. While tarot, oracle, and Lenormand cards can all give you answers about any question, whether deeply spiritual or mundane, some see tarot as more for the deeply spiritual and the Lenormand as more for daily life.

The cards are usually small in size—smaller even than regular playing cards—because spreads tend to be quite large. In fact, the most famous spread for the Lenormand uses all 36 cards. Each card is considered to be either positive, neutral, or negative. However, as in tarot, context is everything; a card that is generally considered to be negative might be quite positive in the right position, sitting next to the right cards.

The 36 cards of the Lenormand in their traditional order (with commentary by me) are Rider, Clover, Ship, House, Tree, Clouds, Snake (ew), Coffin (double ew), Bouquet, Scythe, Whip, Birds, Child, Fox, Bear, Stars, Stork, Dog, Tower, Garden, Mountain, Crossroads, Mice, Heart, Ring, Book, Letter, Man, Woman, Lilies, Sun, Moon, Key, Fish, Anchor, and Cross.

Actually, the Lenormand is usually and historically 36 cards. For several reasons, many modern decks have more than that.

Within a traditional deck, there’s one card for Man and one card for Woman. Often in readings, the card that matches the gender of the person getting a reading is looked at as representing them in the spread. That’s called a significator. The card of the opposite gender might represent their spouse or a best friend or close relative. In many contemporary Lenormand decks, there are two cards for Man and two cards for Woman to allow for same-sex relationships or just to allow the person getting a reading to pick the card of their gender that they feel more represents them. So that brings us up to 38 cards.

There’s also a card called Child. Again, there might be a male and a female child in the deck if that is important to the question. Now we’re up to 39 cards.

Some deck creators have added their own cards. In fact, the Lenormand deck that I most resonated with had 44 cards! Lenormand purists seem to be fine with the additional gender cards, but they are not so happy about added cards with nontraditional meanings.

Like tarot, the Lenormand has historical aspects that are associated with a parlor game. And while tarot and the Lenormand are both card decks used for divination, they’re very different oracles. Whereas each tarot card has a singular meaning, the Lenormand delivers its messages via combinations of cards. Pulling a single card for a reading, as you can do with tarot and oracle decks, isn’t generally done with the Lenormand.

The Lenormand tells a story; the cards are much like words in a sentence. Each card has many meanings, some of them only vaguely related to one another. On top of it all, the order of the cards in a spread completely changes the reading. If you pulled the cards Key, Dog, and Bouquet, the message would be completely different than if the cards order was Bouquet, Dog, and Key. To give you an idea of how this works, take the words in the sentence That class is real as an example. If you rearrange the words to That is real class, you’ll see how the same word can refer to either a course or to elegance, depending on order.

Traditionally, every Lenormand card has a reference to a regular playing card. Of course, there are 52 cards in a poker deck but only 36 in the Lenormand. In the Lenormand, all of the twos, threes, fours and fives are removed. This is similar to another parlor game that was created in the 1600s called Piquet, which used regular playing cards with the twos through sixes removed to leave 32 cards.

Some decks (especially very old ones) have a picture of a playing card on the face of the Lenormand card along with the usual illustration that complements the card name. For example, you might see an image of the Nine of Clubs on the Fox card or the Queen of Diamonds on the Crossroads card. More contemporary sets of cards might have a reference to the playing cards in the corner without displaying the entire image—something like 9 ♣ or Q ♦.

Naturally, the Lenormand has a connection to cartomancy, which is the reading of playing cards for divination. For advanced users of the Lenormand, cartomancy references become a part of the reading. The challenging aspect is that the meanings of the playing cards on the Lenormand cards do not correspond directly to traditional cartomancy.

The tale of the Lenormand takes a lot of twists and turns, and the historical documents can contradict one another. Compared to the other oracles in this compendium, the Lenormand is a newborn. The first deck of cards was offered in the early 1800s, so the oracle is “only” a little over 200 years old.

The cards are named for Mlle Marie Anne Lenormand—even though she had nothing to do with their creation. (Mlle is the abbreviation for the French word mademoiselle.) Mlle Lenormand was a very famous fortune-teller (as she described herself) in France in the early 1800s. She was said to have been the card reader for Napoleon Bonaparte’s wife, Empress Josephine, as well as for many other famous folks. Her fame was so widespread that when she passed away, her name was placed on all kinds of products that she had no involvement with.

The card game that the Lenormand is based upon was called the Game of Hope and was actually “created” by a German man named Johann Hechtel. I place the word created in quotation marks because there’s strong evidence that he took the symbols for the cards directly from a book on how to read coffee grounds as a divination tool. Hechtel passed away right before the Game of Hope was published in 1799. When Mlle Lenormand passed away in 1843, the publisher renamed the game Le Petit Lenormand as a way to take advantage of her great fame, marketing it as her “secret oracle.”

Whether Mlle Lenormand ever used the Game of Hope cards that would eventually be renamed for her is doubtful. She is thought to have primarily been a cartomancer, using regular playing cards as her divination tool. There are some references that suggest she may have used Piquet, but that isn’t the same as actually having laid hands on the cards that would eventually bear her name.

While the methodology and construction of the Lenormand is quite different from tarot or oracle cards, the way they work is virtually the same. (See “Talking to Yourself” in the previous chapter.) The imagery and meanings of the cards are read through intuition, and perhaps a bit of the subconscious, to get messages from the Divine.

Most authors and teachers of the Lenormand will tell you that it’s very easy to learn, but I’m not sure I agree with that. The Lenormand requires a great deal of memorization, and some of it is challenging. To successfully do a reading, you’ll first need to have memorized all of the meanings for each card.

Here’s a typical example showing just a few of the possible meanings of the Lenormand card Stars: hope, dreams, inspiration, universe, recognition, antiseptic, psychic, Divine guidance, and electricity. Some of these meanings make sense and are related to one another. But antiseptic and electricity?

In the books I consulted, the minimum number of words listed for the meaning of Stars was 45. Multiply that times 36 cards and that’s a lot to learn. (And for all you tarot lovers out there, don’t think that just because the Lenormand has a few similar cards—Stars, the Sun, the Moon, and the Tower—that the cards have similar meanings. There is some crossover, but it’s not at all the same.)

Then, once you’ve memorized the meanings of each card, you’ll need to figure out what their meanings mean in relation to each other. Let’s say that you want to ask the cards, “Should I write a book?” You shuffle the deck and pull out the cards Key, Book, and Ring.

In the Lenormand, the Key represents good fortune, the unlocking of opportunity, and breakthroughs (among many other things). The Book can be wisdom, secrets, or literally a book. Finally, among the many meanings for the Ring is a contract. The natural conclusion is, “Yes! You should write a book! It’ll be a big success and will get you a publishing contract.”

Now, I purposefully made this a very simple example to show you how the Lenormand works. My experience with this oracle is rarely that specific to any particular question. However, I have always been able to piece things together to get an answer that made sense to me.

Spreads in the Lenormand are very similar to those used in tarot and oracle-card readings. Although some spreads are used more often for one type of card than another, the general concept remains the same.

The Lenormand’s most famous spread, the Grand Tableau, is absolutely fascinating. It uses all of the cards in the deck, and there are so many ways in which cards on one side of the spread can relate to cards on the other side of the spread to tell a story. It’s usually laid out as four rows of eight cards stacked on top of each other with the final four cards in the fifth row.

Plenty of information is usually extracted from a Grand Tableau reading. For this spread, it’s helpful to have the card order memorized even though the numbers are on the cards. If you know something about astrology (Chapter 9), then you’ll be familiar with the concept of houses. There’s a similar concept in the Lenormand Grand Tableau.

As an example, let’s say that the Garden card has landed on the 14th position, or “house,” in the spread. The Garden card represents crowds, parties, and events. Just as in astrology, the house has a certain energy to it that matches Lenormand card 14, the Fox. Among other things, Fox represents work, career, and employment. So the Garden card sitting in the 14th house (Fox energy) might represent something like a business conference or an office party.

Manifesting with the Lenormand is much like manifesting with tarot or oracle cards. The primary difference is that while you might carry or meditate on a single tarot card, that’s not the way the Lenormand works. The Lenormand is about taking several cards and reading the story like a sentence. So when choosing Lenormand cards for this purpose, you need to pick cards to create a sentence or message for yourself that you want to manifest. For example, if you’re trying to manifest a new romance, you might choose Rider (new love interest,) Bouquet (blooming relationship,) and House (stable relationship or moving in together).

RIGHT ON THE MONEY!

Professional tarot and Lenormand reader Andrew Barker remembers his first time working with these cards. As he told me in his own words:

I had just bought my first Lenormand deck, and I had no idea what to do with it. I bought it because of the art! However, I was interested in learning more about it, so I watched a lot of online videos about different card spreads and meanings and got a book or two as well.

After getting the gist of it, I decided I wanted to practice a bit to see if I was retaining what I’d learned and just to see what came through. I posted on my personal Facebook page that I wanted to do free practice readings, and within seconds I had over 10 comments from volunteers!

I was already kind of nervous. Having read tarot for a few years, I knew this was very different. However, one of my Facebook friends messaged me, and I agreed to give them a reading. They asked about their career, so I shuffled the cards, asked the specific question, and drew the Bear and the Fish.

Based on what I’d learned and the context of the question, I knew the Bear was talking about management and the Fish referred to abundance and prosperity. So I told my friend that a management opportunity was coming up for them. They seemed a bit hesitant but thanked me for my time.

Shortly after that, I received a message from my friend that their manager was going on vacation. They were going to take over the management role and get paid more during that time.

The Lenormand was right on the money!

In general, I’ve found the Lenormand to be enchanting. I love that it’s simple yet also very complex. Like tarot, the cards are now available in a dizzying array of styles and themes. Finding the right deck was key for me, as the old 1800s images just left me flat. But once I found something contemporary and lush, I was totally fascinated. Honestly, I am charmed by the Lenormand.

That being said, it’s a lot of memorization. If you have the time for a lot of practice and learning all the card meanings, what the combinations of the cards mean, and all the magical ways these cards interweave with one another, then I highly recommend the Lenormand.