Woman

The Woman is card number 29 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 standing woman. In the tradition its core sense is the female querent, or a significant woman in the reading; a person card rather than an event.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Ace 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 woman 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 Dame, the woman, and, together with Der Herr (the Man), it is one of the two cards ordinarily reserved as a significator standing for the person the reading concerns rather than for an event or quality in the way the other thirty-four cards function. As House 29 in the Grand Tableau, a card other than Woman herself landing in that numbered position is read as touching on the female querent or on a woman generally relevant to the question. When Woman appears near Man in a spread, the two are conventionally read together as describing the relationship between them, each card's neighbours describing what each person brings to it.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Woman carries the Ace 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 Ace of Spades belongs to the suit this atlas records under conflict, intellect and hardship. 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.

Whose name is on the box

Marie Anne Lenormand died in 1843, and the deck was named after her by publishers afterwards. She did not design it, and there is no evidence that she used it. The name is a bookseller's attribution attached to an existing German game some decades after both the game and the woman had appeared, and this atlas records the system under her name because that is what it is called, not because she made it.