The Lily is card number 30 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 lily. In the tradition its core sense is peace, maturity, virtue and, in older readings, the family elders; sometimes sensuality, and a sign of a settled, honourable life.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the King 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 lily takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Die Lilie. As House 30 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on maturity, peace and, in older strata of the tradition, an elder or father figure, alongside a secondary association with sexuality that some modern readers downplay in favour of the card's peace and virtue senses. In combination, Lily followed by Man reads as an older man or a father figure, while Lily preceding Heart reads as a mature, settled love rather than a new infatuation, a reading that contrasts directly with the Child's association with new and small beginnings elsewhere in the deck.