AUTHOR’S NOTE: For my purpose here I’ve tweaked the business-management definition of economy of scale to read: “a proportionate saving in effort gained by an increased level of organization.” The idea is that – up to a point – the broader the range of facts presented for analysis, the more productive it is to identify which are most important by ranking, comparing and reducing them to their essence. Duplication of effort is avoided by subjecting all operations to a “normalizing” routine that conforms any outliers to the model. As for what that means in the Lenormand universe, read on.

In writing my recent essay about the various traditional Lenormand spreads, I stumbled upon the concept of “economies of scale” regarding the larger spreads in the group. My finding was that more cards do not necessarily deliver the desired improvement in the accuracy and effectiveness of narrative exposition, although additional detail definitely results. My question is whether there is a way to use larger line spreads like the 7-card and 9-card array without succumbing to interpretive hyperventilation. This malady does not affect the 3×3 “box” spread or the Grand Tableau and its cousins because they all include ways to deconstruct the whole into smaller, integrated “bites” of information.

The usual way to sort out a line spread is to interpret the various three-card combinations (with optional two-card sub-elements) as different “windows” on the scenario depending on the cards involved. A three-card line has only one of these (with two subordinate “adds”), while a five-card line has three with five supplemental considerations. It gets stickier with seven cards, with the array sporting five 3-card combos and seven possible 2-card contributors for a maximum twelve-factor challenge, and it is even worse with nine cards, where there are seven 3-card sets with nine 2-carders, for a sixteen-part “full-dress” analysis. Of course it is much less iterative in practice, with the eye scanning and picking out the most relevant combinations to bring into the narrative and downplaying or disregarding the rest. Still, it can be a slog.

By way of contrast, the nine-card, 3×3 “box” spread includes eight linear 3-card sets – horizontal, vertical and diagonal – with eight “mirroring” events (but those are really just features of the linear readings), the four-card “corner” array, and the chance for numerous “knighting” opportunities that I seldom see used in any consistent manner. (There is also the “internal” five-card cross but I don’t see it mentioned much in practice.) Call it a “nine-mode” evolution. It’s easy to see that it makes eminent sense to jump straight to the “3×3” if there is a perceived need to go beyond the five-card line, and this corroborates my own experience with the expanded line spreads.