The Letter is card number 27 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 letter or written sheet. In the tradition its core sense is messages, documents, news and written communication; correspondence and paperwork of every kind.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 7 of Spades, 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 letter 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 Brief. As House 27 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on messages, documents and written communication specifically, distinguished from the Birds' association with spoken conversation. In combination, Letter followed by Heart reads as a love letter or welcome written news, an example the overview of Lenormand's combination method already cites, while Letter preceding Coffin reads as a document that ends something, formal notice of a termination or closure. In modern practice many readers extend the Letter's meaning to email and text messages as well as physical mail.