The Cross is card number 36 of the Petit Lenormand, the thirty-six card deck read in the nineteenth-century French cartomantic tradition that took its name, after her death in 1843, from the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand.
Image, meaning and playing card
The card shows a cross. In the tradition its core sense is burden, fate, suffering and destiny; a heavy card of hardship or of trials that must be borne, and of matters of faith.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 6 of Clubs, a survival of the ordinary piquet pack over which the pictorial Lenormand was laid. Lenormand cards are read less as standing symbols than in combination, each modifying the cards to either side, so that the cross takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Das Kreuz, and it closes the thirty-six-card sequence as the final and, by convention, heaviest card in the deck. As House 36 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that final numbered position is read as touching on burden, fate and matters largely outside the querent's own control. In combination, Cross followed by Heart reads as suffering connected to love, while Cross preceding Coffin reads as a heavy burden reaching its end, one of the deck's more starkly difficult pairings. Some modern readers soften the Cross toward a broader sense of an unavoidable trial to be endured rather than a purely negative fatalism, without disputing its position as the deck's structurally final and weightiest card.