The Petit Lenormand, the 36 cards

A race game that became a reading deck

The Petit Lenormand was not born as an oracle. It was born as a parlour amusement.

In 1799, in Nuremberg, Johann Kaspar Hechtel registered the copyright of a game he titled Das Spiel der Hoffnung, the Game of Hope, published by G. P. J. Bieling. The principle is that of a race game: thirty-six squares laid out in a grid, tokens, a die, a progression from square to square. The same thirty-six images were printed on cards, which also allowed the set to be used as an ordinary deck. The attribution to Hechtel was established by the researcher Detlev Hoffmann in 1972, and the oldest known copy is held at the British Museum.

The shift to cartomancy came almost fifty years later. Around 1846, German printers attached to the deck the name of Marie Anne Adelaide Lenormand (1772-1843), a French cartomancer famous under the Empire. She had died three years earlier. She never saw this deck, and she created neither its images nor its system. A name that sells, placed on a product that already existed: the operation was purely commercial, and the name stuck.

The imagery everyone recognises comes from somewhere else again. It was fixed by the Dondorf house of Frankfurt, printed in chromolithography around 1890. Blue Owl, Piatnik and Old Style all descend from it. That line settled the scenes, the framing, and above all the small playing-card insert tucked into a corner of each card.

Practical consequence: the system, the numbers, the names, the correspondences and the spread methods belong to a very solid public domain. Only the illustrations of modern editions, the texts of current booklets and registered trademarks remain protected.

What separates Lenormand from tarot

This is the point where a reader trained in tarot drifts, every time, unless they watch for it.

Four rules are enough to describe the mechanism.

Lenormand is read like a sentence. Each card is a word: a noun, a verb, an adjective. It is not an image to contemplate. You never write “this card invites you to meditate on”, you write “this card names”.

The pair is noun plus qualifier. In a couple, the first card is the noun, the second is the qualifier. The two merge into a single concrete expression. Order changes the meaning: The Fox followed by The Letter speaks of a deceptive piece of mail, whereas the Letter followed by the Fox speaks of a message that concerns work. That is the subject of the page on reading by combination.

A card is never read alone. The isolated keyword is not a reading, it is a dictionary entry. The Rider says that something is arriving, it says neither what nor whether it is favourable. The judgement always comes from the neighbour. This is why the minimum useful format is the line of three, not the single card.

There are no reversals. The large majority of practitioners do not read upside-down cards. A difficult card stays difficult by its nature, not by its orientation. No page in this module therefore describes a reversed meaning.

The school RunAstra follows

Lenormand keywords are not universal. There is a French school, a German school with its Swiss and Austrian branches, a Dutch school and a Russian school, and they genuinely diverge, not merely in shading.

RunAstra follows the German school, in the Dondorf line. Two reasons, and both are verifiable.

First, it is the best documented tradition, that of the country the deck came from, where the practice was never interrupted. Second, it is the only one consistent with the playing-card inserts. Those small inserts are not decorative: they tie the deck to the thirty-six card piquet pack, and that correspondence steers the reading. A school that ignores them can assign a card a keyword that contradicts its suit, which is not a problem in itself, but becomes incoherent as soon as the insert is displayed.

This declaration has to be explicit, otherwise any practitioner could contest the keywords of the module, and would be right to. If you practise in the French or Dutch school, some of our entries will look shifted to you: that is expected, and it is the price of a module that chooses one tradition rather than blending four.

A naming trap while we are here: card 2 is called The Clover and corresponds to the Six of Diamonds, not to a club, even though the club suit is itself a trefoil. The suit is never deduced from the name of the card. That card 36, The Cross, does land on the Six of Clubs is a coincidence, not a rule.

The 36 cards of the Petit Lenormand

Each row leads to the card page: its central word, its playing-card insert, its combinations and its meaning as a house of the Grand Tableau.

The thirty-six inserts form exactly one piquet pack: nine ranks, four suits, every combination present once and only once. It is this bijection test, and not the agreement of sources, that makes the table safe. Several tables circulating on the web fail it.

Two cards have a status of their own. The Man, card 28, and The Woman, card 29, are the subject cards: they stand for the person the reading is made for, and the whole geometry of a tableau organises itself around their position.

Where to go next

Six method pages complete this one, from the simplest to the most demanding.

• Reading by combination: the grammar of pairs, the order of the cards, chains of three and more. To be read before everything else.
• The line of 3 spread: the minimum useful format, the one you learn on.
• The cross spread: a short format organised around a central position.
• The Petit Tableau 3x3: nine cards in a grid, the first real geometry.
• The Grand Tableau: thirty-six cards laid out at once, its three formats, its axes and its reading techniques.
• The 36 houses: what each position of the tableau means in itself.

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