The Crossroads is card number 22 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 fork or crossing of paths. In the tradition its core sense is choice, decision and branching paths; more than one option, and sometimes a scattering of energies.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Queen of Diamonds, 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 crossroads takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Der Weg, more fully Der Kreuzweg, the crossroads or parting of ways. As House 22 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on choice and decision points. In combination, Crossroads followed by Man or Woman reads as a person facing a decision, while Crossroads preceding Fox reads as a choice that requires caution or that conceals a hidden agenda among the available options. The card is one of the few in the deck read as fundamentally open-ended rather than describing a fixed outcome, since its whole meaning concerns a decision not yet made.