The Snake is card number 7 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 coiled snake. In the tradition its core sense is complication, deviousness and desire; in a woman's reading it can also stand for a rival or another woman.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Queen 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 snake 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 Schlange. As House 7 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on complication or a third party working against the querent's interest. In combination, Snake followed by Man or Woman reads as a devious rival or a person not to be trusted, while Snake followed by Ring reads as a commitment complicated by deception or a third party's interference. The card is among those readers most often reach for when a question specifically concerns betrayal, rivalry or an unseen obstacle deliberately placed rather than merely encountered.