Ring

The Ring is card number 25 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 ring. In the tradition its core sense is commitment, agreement, contracts and partnership; bonds that bind, whether a marriage or a business tie.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Ace 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 ring 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 Ring. As House 25 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on contracts, formal agreements and binding commitments of any kind, not only marriage. In combination, Ring followed by Man or Woman reads as a marriage proposal or formal partnership with a specific person, while Ring preceding Mountain reads as a blocked or delayed commitment, an example the overview of Lenormand's combination method already cites. The card's circular, unbroken shape is conventionally read as marking the binding, ongoing quality of whatever commitment is indicated.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Ring carries the Ace of Clubs.

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 Ace of Clubs belongs to the suit this atlas records under action, ambition and growth. It is an ace. In playing card cartomancy the aces are commonly read as the strongest or most concentrated expression of their suit, which gives this inset unusual weight for a reader who uses the layer at all.

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.