“Chunky, Not Creamy” — A Lenormand Working Model
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Although I’ve been focusing mostly on tarot writing in recent months, my true love in cartomantic divination has become the 36-card Lenormand Grand Tableau. I think of it as the “Swiss-Army-knife” of cartomancy, a multi-tool that is able to cover a wide range of topics in a single pull. But when it is sliced-and-diced too finely it can become a casualty of “information overload,” if not actually a counter-productive exercise in diminishing returns that gets too far down into the narrative minutiae (aka “bug-dust”) to be worth the effort. As with any complex undertaking, it is all too possible to drown in the details unless a strong organizational sensibility is brought to bear that separates the essential from the incidental. In short, it is vital to sink one’s teeth into the main theme and avoid too much extraneous nibbling around the edges. An effective reading should make its most compelling points in “big bites,” exclaiming more than it insinuates. The fanciful analogy I’m offering here is that I want my GT readings to be like “chunky peanut butter,” not the over-processed “creamy” style that is homogenized to a fault and loses most of its character. In terms of textural (and textual) refinement, think of it as “coarse-grained” rather than “fine-grained” (a 36-card forecast already takes long enough!)
Several key concepts are typically used in crafting a Grand Tableau interpretation that, when intelligently woven together, can yield a comprehensive yet entirely coherent picture of a querent’s present and future conditions. They begin at the “Significator,” a single card that represents the querent or subject, usually the Gentleman or Lady card but it can also be the “topic” card for a specific area of life: health, home, family, career, money, etc. My idea (which is far from original) is to strike at the “heart of the matter” first (symbolized by the Significator, whether person or premise) and then evolve the reading into less visceral spheres of interest, which can give the sitter a good grasp of what is most important to know. Some might argue that the GT is “all of a piece” in one gem-like gestalt (and there is truth in that assumption) but I like to bring orderly transitions and a bit of compartmentalization to my approach, which relies heavily on the “topic-card vortex” notion described below.
The inquiry ventures out from this locus via a number of interpretive conventions. First and foremost is “proximity:” the agreeable or disagreeable impact of the cards immediately adjacent to the Significator. This creates a nine-card mini-tableau within the larger structure that is read as what I’ve labeled a local “vortex of influence” that latches onto surrounding nuances and correlates them into a nucleus of meaning. It represents the most active engagement of the querent with his or her immediate environment. (These independent “vortices” can then be linked in various ways, but that is beyond my scope here.)
From that matrix, the reading enters the “distance” or “near/far” stage; the next set of cards out along the horizontal, vertical and diagonal axes are slightly less influential than those immediately touching the Significator, and the cards beyond those decline in their impact the farther one moves away from center until they can be more speculative than consequential. (However, increased separation can have special significance for cards like the Tree the Bear.) At some point I stop addressing them within the context of the reading beyond their more general implications as “house” occupants (see below).
Next in order are three techniques that are similar in their degree of abstraction: mirroring, intersection and knighting. I think of them as “shading” or inflection rather than integral components like proximity and distance. Although I’m loath to invoke tarot principles that I usually avoid even in that discipline, we might consider them built-in “clarifiers.”
Mirroring assumes that the cards that sit at the same distance from the opposite ends of their row or column have some commonality of purpose (diagonals could also be used but most readers don’t); so the Significator and its equidistant counterparts are combined in their effect (this can be applied to any cards within the Significator’s reach and beyond but its value becomes less certain).
Intersection infuses the core meaning of the topic card with the ramifications of those cards that appear at the point-of-intersection between the rows and columns emanating from the central position; there will usually be two, one on the horizontal run and one on the vertical run.
Knighting employs the path of the identically-named chess move: count out from the Significator two cards in one direction horizontally or vertically and one card perpendicular to that line in an “L-shaped” pattern and also in a one-and-two sequence following the same design, and treat the cards found there as being paired in functionality with the Significator. There will often be several instances of this for any 3×3 square, creating what I call knighting “arrays” or complexes.
There are also the concepts of left/right, above/below and the four quadrants (e.g. placement “above or below” the querent’s card has import for cards like the Lilies). My online mentor, Andy Boroveshengra, talked about the cards to the left of the Significator declining in their influence and those to its right increasing, while those above have leverage over the querent and those below are subject to the querent’s control. Using this model, the upper-right region of the GT becomes the most important to the prognostication and the lower-left is the least impactful; taking this idea further, the card at the upper-right corner can be considered the most potent in the “future tense” while the card at the lower-left corner has the least to say about it. We’re starting to approach “bug-dust” territory.
A further iteration comes from what is known as the GT “house system.” The standard sequencing of the 36 cards from the Rider (1) to the Cross (36) is treated as a backdrop for the cards randomly pulled during the deal. So a particular card in a specific house takes on some of the meaning of its “residence.” (The Rider deposited in the domain of the House could mean the imminent arrival of a visitor at your front door.) This can be further extrapolated to come up with the notion of “movable houses” (one clever wag calls them “mobile homes”) in which the cards of the house template are randomly drawn from a second deck rather than following the traditional order. We are beginning to enter the “Twilight Zone” of interpretive relevance.
Last and definitely least is the method of “counting round,” in which one starts from the Significator and counts a fixed number of cards forward in the layout (for example, some readers go nine positions including the starting card, others thirteen; the larger the range of each iteration, the smaller the resulting number of supplemental reading cards before you reach the end), and then repeats this at each “stop,” resuming at the beginning of the spread as necessary until the count returns to the Significator. This series of cards is then read as a “second-line” narrative that supplies additional insights on the topic of the reading. We are now fully immersed in the “bug-dust challenge.”
Obviously, not all of these considerations will apply to every reading; unless one is a completist, how far we take it depends largely on the inscrutability of the basic “signature.” Unless there is a good reason to do more, I typically limit my detailed analysis to proximity, near/far, mirroring, intersection, knighting and quadrant emphasis, with perhaps a passing nod to house position if I think of it. But as the “Lenormand James Brown” might exhort: “Gotta keep it chunky! Gotta keep it chunky!”
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on July 7, 2023.
