AUTHOR’S NOTE: This essay has been brewing for over a year but it was finally triggered by a recent online conversation with my original Lenormand mentor-at-large from Aeclectic Tarot, Andy Boroveshengra. It arises from an unpleasant experience I had on one of the Lenormand Facebook pages.

First a bit of stage-setting. When I lived in rural New Hampshire from 1980 to 2018, I had a rustic neighbor who raised chickens for slaughter. Every autumn she would lead her adolescent brood (the proverbial “spring chickens”) into the barnyard, chop off their heads and let them run around so they would bleed out from the neck, presumably so they would yield the prized white meat. I reached the conclusion that they were dead-on-their-feet and – chicken brains being what they are (or more accurately aren’t) – they just didn’t know it. I wouldn’t say that my online Lenormand contacts are brain-dead just yet, but a few of them seem to have one foot in the barnyard.

When Aeclectic folded in 2017, I hunted around online for an equivalent community of experienced peers but never connected with one for very long due to the overabundance of novices, so I started this blog to at least have an outlet. Although I had a solid grounding in the traditional lore thanks to the Phillipe Lenormand Sheet (I call it the “original LWB”) and Andy’s long-distance tutelage supplemented by his eventual book, as a Lenormand reader I had become something of a maverick and experimenter. I chalk it up to my graphic-art education and the fact that the creative juxtaposition of shapes is the “prime directive” of the designer’s artistic manifesto. The Lenormand Grand Tableau is chock-full of such conceptual relationships when all of the available techniques are brought to bear on its interpretation: fundamental distance, knighting, mirroring, intersection, above-and-below, quadrant emphasis, etc. I avidly undertook pulling all of those threads as described in my previous posts. (See my essay “Ripples on a Pond” for some of the details.)

Ultimately, I landed at one of the Facebook pages that billed itself as “traditional Lenormand.” Things went well for a while, but every time I proposed even a modestly original idea, I was slapped down for being too imaginative. I left once, was coaxed back by the lead administrator, but when it happened again I left for good. The atmosphere reminded me of a fossilized “fly in amber:” perfectly preserved but completely motionless. I revere the tradition but I prefer to approach it as a “living testament” to the art that invites conversation if nothing more substantive in the way of inquiry. I did encounter the techniques of Bjorn Meuris at that site to augment my earlier exposure to Andy’s methods and found that they coincide with some of my own innovations, but it wasn’t enough to get me to spring for his rather pricey and, shall we say, “lean” books.

The opposite extreme of this discouraging state of affairs appears in the tarot world, where change for its own sake is viewed as progress. Contrary to Lenormand’s pragmatic focus on the essential themes, intuitive speculation is king and any kind of “book-learning” is summarily dismissed as unnecessary. Modern influencers beat the drum for constant evolution in the direction of unstructured free-association from the images accompanied by mystical impressions to the detriment of the long-established core knowledge and concomitant wisdom.

The result is a seemingly-irreversible dilution of the “full-proof” experience with personal bias and subjective innuendo. If some of the Lenormand enthusiasts I’ve met on social-media platforms come across as the “walking dead,” the more loopy tarot practitioners strike me as the “bastard children” of the warped cartoon characters that have accosted me in recent animated offerings on the TV shows that punctuate my grandchildren’s’ visits. There are exceptions, of course (some of them coming out of Eastern Europe), but far too many are not only insipid in content but shockingly offensive to my artistic sensibilities. As a self-styled armchair philosopher of the metaphysical and a curmudgeonly “half mad-scientist/half hedge-mystic,” all I can say is “Arrrgh!”