Lily

The Lily is card number 30 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 lily. In the tradition its core sense is peace, maturity, virtue and, in older readings, the family elders; sometimes sensuality, and a sign of a settled, honourable life.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the King of Spades, 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 lily 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 Lilie. As House 30 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on maturity, peace and, in older strata of the tradition, an elder or father figure, alongside a secondary association with sexuality that some modern readers downplay in favour of the card's peace and virtue senses. In combination, Lily followed by Man reads as an older man or a father figure, while Lily preceding Heart reads as a mature, settled love rather than a new infatuation, a reading that contrasts directly with the Child's association with new and small beginnings elsewhere in the deck.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Lily carries the King of Spades.

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 King of Spades belongs to the suit this atlas records under conflict, intellect and hardship. 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.

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.