AUTHOR’S NOTE: When I first encountered the concepts of “counting round” and “mirroring” in the Lenormand Grand Tableau, I noticed a strong similarity between those 18th-Century cartomantic practices and the “counting-and-pairing” steps of the “Opening of the Key” (OotK) method for working with the tarot that was developed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late 19th Century.

Lenormand counting begins with the main Significator card (usually the Gentleman or Lady) and moves a fixed number of cards (with the Significator as “1”) from left-to-right, repeating the step multiple times across and down the rows from top-to-bottom and then back to the top until the sequence returns once again to the Significator. The cards earmarked by this process are then read as a narrative. The number of cards spanning each iteration of the count varies according to authority: Andy Boroveshengra counts increments of 13, but others count 7 or 9. It seems to depend on how many cards one wants in the final “story.” The separate technique of “mirroring” pairs the cards in a row or column, going toward the center from both ends, and draws conclusions from their relationship.

I learned from Aleister Crowley’s explanation of the OotK in the Book of Thoth that, after the shuffle and cut, the reader locates the pre-selected Significator card (typically a court card bearing a human figure to represent the Querent) in one of the four “elemental” sub-packs that stipulates the relevant “area of life” for the reading, noting which direction the figure on the card is facing.

The next step is to count off a fixed number of cards in the indicated direction based on the rank of the figure (including the starting card as “1”):

Count “4” for Knights, Queens and Princes
Count “7” for Princesses

Although it doesn’t come into play until the next tier of the count (something Crowley doesn’t bother to elucidate but that others have addressed as mentioned below), subsequent non-court-cards in the sequence are handled as follows:

Count “11” for Aces
Count “according to the number” for the other “small” cards
Count “3” for elemental trumps
Count “9” for planetary trumps
Count “12” for zodiacal trumps.

The idea is to interpret the cards that are singled out by the act of segmenting as a “story” that explains the “beginning of the matter.” Once that is completed, the First Operation continues by pairing the two cards adjacent to the Significator, then working from inside-out by pairing the two cards next to those, “and so on,” fashioning a second, expanded story from the two-card sets that adds more detail to the narrative. (I won’t go into the other four “operations” here because I already discussed them in a recent post.)

Crowley doesn’t define where or how to end this counting-and-pairing, nor what to do if we wind up with an incomplete count (i.e. a “numerical dead-end”) or an unpaired card at either extremity of the series.* If I recall correctly, both Paul Foster Case in his tarot divination material and Christopher Hyatt in Israel Regardie’s Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic proceed in the same direction by wrapping around to the opposite end of the row and resuming the counting-and-pairing there, progressing the forecast by counting forward the number of cards stipulated by the rank of each interim “milestone” until the sequence returns to the Significator. Case even lays out the cards of the original sub-pack in a circle to provide a visual cue to this seamless transition.

In the “short form” of the OotK that I understand was normally performed by the initiates of the Outer Order of the Golden Dawn, the prefatory tale from the “counting” step was apparently where the narrative ended, with the cards of the opening segment comprising the entire prediction. It’s unclear whether they went as far as the “pairing” steps but I suspect that the more advanced “junior members” did just that. I can sympathize with this reluctance to bite off an indigestible amount of information, although in recognizing the resemblance of the OotK’s counting-and-pairing technique to that of the Lenormand Grand Tableau I can see where the model for gathering more detail originated.

*Afterthought: You might get the impression that I find Crowley’s guidance in this case to lack thoroughness, and you would be right. I have a technical and engineering background whereas Crowley was a self-styled occult philosopher-scientist and mystical scholar with a broad syncretic outlook that sought systemic convergence, so I tend to be principled and meticulous about the specifics while he was less comprehensive in his instructions than I would have liked. Later writers were more focused on the mechanics of the OotK.