Crossroads

The Crossroads is card number 22 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 fork or crossing of paths. In the tradition its core sense is choice, decision and branching paths; more than one option, and sometimes a scattering of energies.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Queen 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 crossroads 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 Weg, more fully Der Kreuzweg, the crossroads or parting of ways. As House 22 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on choice and decision points. In combination, Crossroads followed by Man or Woman reads as a person facing a decision, while Crossroads preceding Fox reads as a choice that requires caution or that conceals a hidden agenda among the available options. The card is one of the few in the deck read as fundamentally open-ended rather than describing a fixed outcome, since its whole meaning concerns a decision not yet made.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Crossroads carries the Queen 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 Queen of Diamonds belongs to the suit this atlas records under money, work and the material. It is a court card. In playing card cartomancy the courts are the cards most often read as people rather than as circumstances, so a reader working with the insets may take this one as someone in the querent's situation.

Two systems in one deck

A reader who uses the insets is running an older cartomantic system, the reading of an ordinary playing pack, alongside the pictures. The two layers can disagree about a card, and nothing in the deck settles which should win. Many readers ignore the insets entirely and treat them as a leftover of the deck's origin as a game. Both approaches are current, and this atlas records the inset as part of the object rather than as an instruction.