A Thirty-Six Card Oracle

The Lenormand is a thirty-six-card oracle deck whose cards carry plain, concrete images (the rider, the clover, the ship, the house, the tree, the coffin), rather than the allegorical scenes of the tarot. It is read by combining cards, so that meaning arises from pairs and lines and from a large tableau of all thirty-six, rather than from a single card's symbolism.

The deck descends from the Game of Hope, a German parlour game published by Johann Kaspar Hechtel around 1799, and took the name of the celebrated French fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand after her death, though she did not use it.