The Mountain is card number 21 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 mountain. In the tradition its core sense is a large obstacle, delay or blockage; something that stands squarely in the way and must be gone around or waited out.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 8 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 mountain 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 Berg. As House 21 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on obstacles, delay and blockage generally. In combination, Mountain followed by Ring reads as a blocked commitment or a stalled contract, an example the overview of Lenormand's combination method already cites, while Mountain preceding Ship reads as a journey delayed or blocked before it can begin. Some readers additionally treat the card's size and position in a spread as indicating how large or how persistent the obstacle is expected to be relative to the querent's other concerns.