AUTHOR’S NOTE: As I back away from involvement in the online tarot community, a decision I mentioned in a recent post, I’ve been seeking other divination sites that share my more exacting standards and expectations.
One discipline with which I’ve spent a good deal of time over the last fourteen years is Lenormand reading, but I had a bad experience with one Facebook group that soured me on the whole population. I’ve always been predominantly a traditionalist when working with the Lenormand cards, drawing my early inspiration from the “Philippe Lenormand Sheet” (the original packed-in “little white book”) and shortly thereafter discovering Andy Boroveshengra on the Aeclectic Tarot forum, with whom I had many stimulating conversations, and whose book I bought when it was eventually published. Around that time I chased down every Lenormand volume in English that I could find and downloaded every online source of information I could get my hands on, but none of it measured up to Andy’s work.
When Aeclectic folded in 2017, shortly after Andy went off on his own mission, I found a traditionalist site that seemed to be ideal, and at first it was. But I underestimated the rabid purist obsession of a couple of the leaders and was soon embroiled in controversy over some of my more flexible techniques. These were not centered so much on disagreements over card meanings (although there were a few), but rather on my creative re-imagining of the Grand Tableau spread as documented in many of my Lenormand blog posts, most notably the first one linked below.
I felt like I was being frozen out of the conversation due to my inquisitive nature, so I wound up leaving. I’ve always believed that there is room for experimentation in any metaphysical pursuit, and the formal structure of classical Lenormand interpretation is no exception. As long as we adhere to its fundamental principles, stay within the bounds of its utilitarian focus, and steer clear of excursions into mystical, spiritual and psychological territory, there should be a place for a little creative extemporizing that doesn’t deteriorate into visual free-association from the images. Barring that last indiscretion, it’s what the old video-game programmers used to call a “WYSIWYG” proposition: “What you see is what you get.” (For the record, I limit intuitive deliberation to choosing which of the handful of available meanings for each card fits best when analyzing combinations.)
I’ve just joined another Lenormand Facebook group, and so far it’s a mixed bag of superficial “love” questions and more substantive matters for which the deck is better suited, along with regular card-combination reading exercises. The only complaint I have at this point is that these exercises often use decks that are about as far away from the usual designs as one can get, with titles and images that have little or nothing to do with the tradition. The other minor irritation is that many contributors do not use the customary Lenormand spreads and instead “wing it” according to whatever whim strikes them. These are clearly people with their roots in tarot reading, and I find myself unable to contribute to the discussion when they ask for input.
The next major escalation in my Lenormand practice is going to be buying the three books by Bjorn Meuris, whose approach I was exposed to in one of my previous Facebook groups. I already have enough knowledge from online sources to use his instructions with relative confidence but I would rather hear them directly from the master. The only deterrent is that they are pricey for rather slender tomes, and I may not need Volume 1 and Volume 3 at all since the meat of his Grand Tableau guidance lies in Volume 2, with Volume 1 being too basic for a practitioner at my level while Volume 3 is too specialized for general use (according to someone who knows). Consequently, as I move in that direction I anticipate that the Lenormand quotient in my blog posts will go up considerably over the next year.
Here is my iconoclastic look at the Grand Tableau. I’m also linking my compendium of basic card meanings so you can decide whether they are really all that radical.
Parsifal's Wheel Tarot & Astrology 