What is a Lenormand

Since cre­at­ing the Melissa Lenor­mand I’ve had the oppor­tu­nity to talk to many peo­ple about the cards. One of the most dis­cour­ag­ing things I’ve heard in these con­ver­sa­tions is, “The cards are beau­ti­ful, but I don’t know how to read Lenormand.”

And when we talk a lit­tle more about the sub­ject, inevitably the con­ver­sa­tion leads toward the Lenor­mand lit­er­a­ture out there that give spe­cific mean­ings for spe­cific cards in spe­cific com­bi­na­tions in spe­cific spreads. While the idea of learn­ing 36-cards isn’t ter­ri­bly intim­i­dat­ing to any­one who has spent a lot of time with a 78-card tarot deck, the idea of learn­ing so many com­bi­na­tions and mem­o­riz­ing and access­ing those mean­ings on the fly dur­ing a read­ing can be really daunting.

It’s often said that the Lenor­mand is more pre­scrip­tive than descrip­tive in its read­ings. Typ­i­cally, it is said that one doesn’t “intuit” an answer based on a spe­cific image in the card — rather, one sim­ply inter­nal­izes what the card means — so any of the many var­ied Lenor­mand decks out there should give the same kind of reading.

This is really only half true — and I stand by that for all readers. The mood of the Melissa Lenor­mand is so dif­fer­ent than the mood of one of the his­tor­i­cal repro­duc­tion decks. Besides that, one shouldn’t have to inter­nal­ize the mean­ings of sym­bols used in the Lenor­mand. They are already part of the dic­tio­nary of our sym­bolic language.

When I was cre­at­ing my deck, I was struck by a few things that pro­foundly shaped my Lenor­mand philosophy.

The deck is mod­ern. The orig­i­nals were first pub­lished in the 1840s. We have a Rider in this deck — not a Knight or Page. There’s no reli­gios­ity except for the Cross card — which is more like the “sec­u­lar cross” we talk about in Amer­ica today. There is no color sym­bol­ism. There were no astro­log­i­cal cor­re­spon­dences drawn in the originals.

The images are imme­di­ate. I feel like the cre­ators must have picked these 36 sym­bols because they were imme­di­ately acces­si­ble to peo­ple at the time. If the orig­i­nal read­ing sys­tems were as arbi­trary as some schools of thought suggest — why use such obvi­ous symbols?

The beauty is in the sim­plic­ity. I feel really lib­er­ated when I do a Lenor­mand read­ing. The fla­vor is dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent and I read with a dif­fer­ent style. Many peo­ple feel like the ora­cle is more direct — which is exactly why it has the rep­u­ta­tion of being a fortune-teller-type deck. But even that is mis­lead­ing. A deck of cards is what you make of them. If you use your Lenor­mand to pre­dict what you’ll have for din­ner tonight, that’s awe­some and totally apt. If you use your Lenor­mand to exam­ine the nature of the soul, that’s also a per­fect use of the cards, you just may need to phrase it differently than you would a Tarot reading.

Don’t mis­un­der­stand what I’m say­ing though. I’m a firm believer that any sys­tem that you read with should have some kind of inter­nal logic. Ded­i­cated Lenor­mand stu­dents should truly con­sider my Lenor­mand 101 course and my advanced Grand Tableau class, which includes video tuto­ri­als that break down every step and offer exam­ples of how an actual read­ing goes.

But if you're itching to get started, I invite you to LEARN LENORMAND IN FIVE MINUTES. A quick and dirty fortune telling workshop designed to get you reading your pack right now.

If you're wanting more systematic instruction, I'd recommend you jump right to the section on taking a class.