The Scythe is card number 10 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 scythe or sickle. In the tradition its core sense is a sudden cut, a decision, danger or a sharp and abrupt event; its blade is read directionally toward the cards it threatens.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Jack 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 scythe 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 Sense. As House 10 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on a sudden, decisive cut, an abrupt ending or a hasty decision rather than the gradual close the Coffin represents. In combination, Scythe followed by Cross reads as a painful, unavoidable event, while Scythe preceding Tree reads as a sudden threat interrupting steady growth, an ordering readers distinguish carefully from Tree preceding Scythe, since Lenormand convention treats the first card as the subject and the second as what modifies or follows it in time.