Don’t Accept “Maybe . . .”
. . . when “Yes” or “No” will do.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: There is a strong bias in the cartomantic community against putting simple “yes-or-no” questions to the cards. Such efforts are seen as no better than a coin-flip, an odd-or-even roll of the dice or any other 50/50 divination method, and when they do invoke the narrative prowess of the cards they often produce a conflicted answer.
It is almost a foregone conclusion that the question at the top of any sitter’s mind will have a “yes-or-no” dimension. They are usually in doubt about something and are seeking confirmation one way or the other; dressing it up in fancy words is just “putting lipstick on a pig.” This binary focus may be apparent, but the cards want to tell them a story that may dance all around the answer without nailing it. The worst-case scenario involves asking “Will I? Can I? Should I?” which is basically the “future tense” of the remorseful pastiche “woulda, coulda, shoulda.” We don’t want to be trapped in a box defined by our own failure to recognize the signs. (A brief digression for those unfamiliar: “woulda” means “I would have if I knew then what I know now;” “shoulda” suggests that “I had the motive and the means but I missed the boat;” and “coulda” implies that “The opportunity was staring me in the face but I didn’t pull the trigger.”)
I wasn’t entirely serious about the pig. The best solution is obviously to ask the question in a way that doesn’t invite this kind of rueful second-guessing, typically by rephrasing it in the form of what I call “the five W’s plus one” — “What, why and how” and sometimes “who, where and when.” (I should add that one of the best lists of non-binary sample questions I’ve seen is in Lisa Young-Sutton’s book The Petit Lenormand Oracle.*)
The “doo-doo” gets even deeper if a querent tries to pose a compound question. “Will I achieve my goal? And if so, when?” Timing in any form of divination is notoriously slippery; circumstances may change, the seeker may be a procrastinator or the issue may involve input from other people who have a personal agenda and a different time-line. For those reasons and others, the more time that passes between the day of the reading and the projected end-date, the less likely it is to transpire as and when predicted. What was at first assumed to be a taut rope of certainty begins to fray and unravel. The best option for the reader would be to “soft-peddle” the timing angle and tackle only the binary judgment; no point in exposing ourselves to being wrong twice in one reading!
All joking aside, if a “yes-or-no” answer is still the preferred outcome there are a couple of conventions that can be brought to bear to make it more straightforward. In the realm of tarot-reading, where the cards are adamantly viewed as neither positive nor negative, the reader is stuck with examining the nuances of their inherent nature, in which case a one-card pull avoids excessive hair-splitting.** But in the Lenormand world things are much plainer since all 36 cards carry a generally positive, neutral or negative connotation. Furthermore, a Lenormand-specific reformulation of the “red-or-black” cartomantic significance of the suits can be derived from the playing-card insets. In her book The Complete Lenormand Oracle Handbook, Caitlin Matthews points out that Hearts indicate an unequivocal “Yes;” Diamonds suggest “Maybe Yes;” Spades imply “Maybe No” and Clubs convey a definite “No.” However, a close look at the insets in conjunction with the polarity of the cards shows that Spades (the cartomantic suit of pain and suffering) are nowhere near as dire in Lenormand as one might suppose, while the Diamonds (the “money” cards of cartomancy) are less fortunate than they probably should be.
In any event, if a one-card pull is considered to be too sparse for a suitably comprehensive answer, any larger spread should contain an odd number of cards so there is less likelihood of an even split between the indicators (which would signify a “hung jury”). Thus, two positive cards to one negative card or two red cards to one black card would deliver a “Yes” answer, and vice versa, while the “story” in the array can be read in the usual way to furnish context. But it gets stickier when the neutral cards with their “Maybe” slant are included, which can create a toss-up. This introduces three variables and the possibility of a tie between at least two them in various combinations yielding a null result, often with one maverick outlier that can only mean “Don’t look here, this is not the answer.” These situations amount to a divinatory “fail.”
In all cases it is critical to success that we use only one type of decision-making “flag” for the multi-part call — suit, polarity or standard definition (e.g. the hopeful — or at least non-threatening — cards would indicate “Yes” and the traditionally unpleasant ones would mean “No”); trying to mix the categories will only complicate and confuse things. It’s noteworthy that, according to Andy Boroveshengra, there are 16 “Yes-leaning” cards and 12 “No-leaning” cards in the deck, making a “Yes” answer slightly more likely but not unconscionably so; the 8 neutral cards do not figure into the verdict other than as deflection from the goal since they respond with “Why are you asking me?”
Since this increased complexity would defeat the purpose of asking “yes-or-no,” I’m thinking that the best idea would be to remove the neutral cards from the deck (see the graphic below) for this one purpose of avoiding “binary gridlock.” However, this workaround could hamstring the reading from the standpoint of giving a well-rounded perspective that misses no associated references, so I’m going to propose an alternate approach. If a neutral card comes up in a single-card draw or if such cards comprise the majority of the population in a spread, the “yes-or-no” approach should be abandoned and the question should be rephrased from a more customary narrative point-of-view (a fallback position that could have been sidestepped if we just did that up-front). Despite my wisecracking title, “Maybe” isn’t going to satisfy anyone except as a reprieve from dealing with the decision, so we will just have to bear down and interpret the card or series of cards with the intent of extracting a persuasive “Yes” or “No” from the testimony. But (isn’t there always a “but?”), like the wry bit of Maine humor, we still may not be able to “get there from here” because the evidence is entirely anecdotal rather than conclusive.
*Full Disclosure: I’m not a huge fan of the book because it has far too much filler (aka “fluff”) and too many influences from outside standard Lenormand usage to be an important addition to the literature, but it isn’t completely without merit (although I doubt I will read it again or refer to it in my practice).
**See my table of “Yes-Leaning, No-Leaning and Maybe” cards elsewhere in this blog for a way to systematically codify the answer in tarot terms.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on September 13, 2023.
