Lenormand Cards

The Lenormand is a thirty-six-card oracle deck whose cards carry plain, concrete images (the rider, the clover, the ship, the house, the tree, the coffin), rather than the allegorical scenes of the tarot. It is read by combining cards, so that meaning arises from pairs and lines and from a large tableau of all thirty-six, rather than from a single card's symbolism.

The deck descends from the Game of Hope, a German parlour game published by Johann Kaspar Hechtel around 1799, and took the name of the celebrated French fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand after her death, though she did not use it.

Where a tarot reading dwells on the rich imagery of each card, Lenormand reading is more like reading a sentence: the cards are relatively fixed in meaning and combine grammatically, one modifying the next. This makes it more literal and situational and less meditative than the tarot.

The atlas records each card's image, its core meaning, and the conventions of combination that give the system its character. The related ordinary playing-card cartomancy and the tarot are treated in their own categories.