Birds

The Birds is card number 12 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 pair of birds. In the tradition its core sense is talk, gossip, nervousness and short exchanges; being a pair, it can also mark two people or a brief conversation.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 7 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 birds 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 Voegel, literally the birds, conventionally depicted as a pair. As House 12 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on conversation, gossip or nervous energy. In combination, Birds followed by Letter reads as a phone call or spoken message rather than a written one, while Birds followed by Snake reads as gossip with a malicious edge. The card's pairing of two birds rather than one is itself read by some practitioners as marking any question involving two people talking or negotiating, distinct from the single-figure cards elsewhere in the deck.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Birds carries the 7 of Diamonds.

Why the deck has thirty-six cards

Taken together the insets across the deck make up a complete thirty-six card playing pack, running from the six to the ace in each of the four suits. That is not a correspondence scheme laid over the pictures afterwards. The deck was published in Nuremberg in 1799 as a race game called Das Spiel der Hoffnung, the Game of Hope, generally attributed to Johann Kaspar Hechtel, and the insets meant the same printed sheet could be cut up and used for ordinary card games as well. The pictures were the board and the playing cards were the pack.

What the suit adds

The 7 of Diamonds belongs to the suit this atlas records under money, work and the material. It is a pip card. In playing card cartomancy the numbered cards are generally read as circumstances rather than as people, and the number is read alongside the suit.

Why a single card is rarely read alone

Lenormand practice reads cards in pairs and in the Grand Tableau, the layout of all thirty-six at once, rather than drawing meaning out of one card in depth. A card is modified by what sits beside it, and the same card in two positions is two different statements. That is the sharpest difference between this system and tarot reading, and it means the playing card inset is one more thing a reader may or may not bring to a combination.