AUTHOR’S NOTE: Even with nearly twelve years of study and practice behind me, I’m still far less experienced with divination using the Lenormand cards than I am with tarot reading after five decades of involvement, so I haven’t felt confident (or competent) in publishing a Lenormand e-book to accompany my five tarot volumes.
The fact of the matter is that I can’t hope to do any better than Andy Boroveshengra at informing beginners about the fundamentals, nor is it likely that I can top Bjorn Meuris although I don’t currently own his books and have only second-hand internet discussions of his material to go by.
However, I do adhere closely to traditional methods based on the “Philippe Lenormand Sheet” and its subsequent iterations even though I don’t deny having a strong experimental streak in my own mode of inquiry (something that has earned me the displeasure of the online Lenormand community in the same way that my iconoclastic approach to the Hermetic tarot once brought the Qabalistic crowd down on my head).
Recently I’ve been approached a couple of times to aid in mentoring those new to the Lenormand system. I have little interest in becoming an unpaid tutor (I’m retired for a reason), although I have no problem offering a few informal tips from my own catalogue of prior work, much of which has been presented in my previous posts. Here I’ll sketch in a few of them without becoming too pedantic (or redundant) about it.
At the top of my list of advice for those entering from the tarot world is “Leave your entrenched mystical and psychological assumptions at the door.” Lenormand is an inherently practical form of prognostication that does not respond well to intuitive guesswork of the psycho-spiritual kind that often reveals more about the reader’s bias than about the cards. It is crisply literal rather than impressionistic, promoting a “just read the cards” mindset, and there isn’t much room for freestyle extemporizing except perhaps when combining card meanings. Do yourself a favor and start with a clean slate (oh, and buy Andy’s book, you won’t regret it).
In the same vein, the cards have an economical set of core meanings that presents few handholds for the more intuitively-inclined interpreter, whose efforts at imaginative free-association from the pictures are frowned upon by purists. This misapplication of psychic conjecture has been aggravated by many of the newer Lenormand decks that add extraneous features to what should be spare imagery communicating each card’s main theme and nothing more. For example, there seems to be an increasing fondness among creators for inserting human figures into those scenes that have nothing at all to do with such intervention. All this does is muddy the waters.
There are two ways to read a Lenormand line spread. One is as a narrative that typically proceeds from left-to-right in the form of a sentence in which the first card is treated as the “noun” and the following cards are the “adjectives” that describe its condition (there can also be a “verb/adverb” slant to it). Another approach (for which it is essential to have an odd number of cards in the line) is to establish the middle card – sometimes called the “hinge” – as the focus of the reading and assign the bordering cards the role of modifiers “before and after the fact.” Both styles have their place in simple queries and they have further applicability in more complex spreads like the Grand Tableau.
The concept of “facing” in the Primary Significator card (normally the Gentleman or Lady representing the querent) as a way to determine the trajectory of the narrative has less validity in Lenormand reading than it does in its sister technique of Kipper (German “Kipperkarten”) divination. While it’s tempting to project events and circumstances in the direction the figure on the card is favoring with its gaze or posture, conventional practice has been to read from left-to-right in almost all cases (with the Grand Tableau – aka “GT” – being a partial exception). That said, when adjacent co-Significators are facing toward or away from one another, conclusions can be drawn about their interaction.
The nine-card “box” spread could be considered the “workhorse” of the Lenormand reader’s repertoire. It employs several conventions to wring more detail out of the scenario in the form of rows, columns, diagonals and “corner” cards. Generally speaking, the center card of this mini-tableau serves as the “nucleus” around which the rest of the reading revolves although, as I see it, this isn’t an ironclad rule. Another staple of this “mid-level” approach is the five-card “French Cross” or tirage en croix spread that is more typical of Tarot de Marseille reading but after a few positional tweaks it works just fine with Lenormand cards.
This brings me to the monumental Grand Tableau that engages all 36 cards of the deck in an elaborate layout. There is a tendency among beginners (often encouraged by their teachers) to shy away from the GT as being overly complicated and therefore too intimidating for the novice, to which I reply “Jump right in, the water’s fine!” It doesn’t have to be swallowed whole in one big gulp, it can and should be deconstructed into manageable bites.
The chief way to do this is through the examination of “topic hubs” and their retinue of peripheral cards in what is known as the “distance” or “near/far” proximity method of analysis. Beyond the Primary Significator cards that impart an entirely subjective partiality to the story-line, there are several “life-area” cards for specific subjects like romance, career, finances, domestic affairs, health and so forth that function as the multifaceted network for this more objective extrapolation. It isn’t mandatory to tackle every single nucleus and its surrounding pattern in every reading, but the option is there if the querent doesn’t have a specific area of interest to explore and just wants a general overview. (Be sure to charge accordingly!)
As I understand it from online conversations, in the Bjorn Meuris approach to interpretation there is also the concept of “clusters” or groups of topic cards that share a common theme, such as (in one system of Lenormand thought) the Moon, the Anchor and the Ship for investigation of work and career matters or the Rider and the Letter for incoming “news.” The overall condition of these related cards in the “proximity” analysis will provide a more complete picture of that area of life than any one of them can produce individually, thus reinforcing the message. Then there are Bjorn’s “constellations,” which I don’t really have a good handle on at this point except to assume that they align with my own idea of interconnected topic cards as described in the first post linked below. Finally, I’ve encountered the notion that, when a GT is performed for a single question (not, I would argue, its best use), all of the relevant topic cards will have a say in the answer and should be read as different facets of the specific situation.
After proximity of the subordinate cards to the “topic” card(s) has been addressed (as a general rule with some exceptions, the closer they are the more influential they will be), supplemental techniques like knighting, mirroring, intersection, “corners” and quadrant emphasis (above, below, left and right) can be applied to the array for further information. In addition, the GT incorporates elements of the “line” and “box” formats, so the skills learned in mastering those spreads can be brought to bear directly on its more comprehensive architecture.
The structural relationship between these subject-matter hubs has been the focus of much of my original thinking on the Grand Tableau. Rather than going into detail about my inspiration, I’ve linked the earlier essay that postulates what I’ve termed the “ripples-on-a-pond” or “spider-web” dynamic for information exchange within the GT. The second link is to a more in-depth exploration of topic “clusters.”
https://parsifalswheeldivination.org/2018/01/09/ripples-on-a-pond/
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 