Lenormand Houses as “Environmental Backdrop”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The Lenormand Grand Tableau spread is laid out upon a grid of 36 “house” positions beginning with the Rider and ending with the Cross, in either a 9×4 or an 8×4+4 array; in its customary form this is essentially the Game of Hope game-board pressed into divinatory service. While some people use a large spread cloth (or panel as below) with 36 rectangles on it, the slightly swifter ones — not me, I can’t even remember a four-item grocery list — just memorize the positions and don’t use a visual aid.
In practice, when the cards are dealt into the chosen pattern, each one will land in a pre-established “house.” The idea is that each house provides additional detail for interpretation of the transient card. For example, the Gentleman (28) in the house of the Rider (1) could mean that you will receive a message from a certain man, or perhaps that the man himself will soon arrive on your doorstep. Rather than just “any random traveler,” it will be a specific individual. Another example would be the Gentleman in the house of the Fox: “the man is devious and not to be trusted.” This is all fine as far as it goes, but it seems to lend itself to a very narrow point of view (which is most likely intentional in a system as literal as Lenormand).
I’ve been thinking that these houses actually form an “environmental backdrop” against which the cards can stretch out and take on more character. In the case of the Gentleman in the house of the Fox, we might expand it to deduce that “the man moves in an atmosphere of deceit, which may either compromise his integrity or forewarn him against dishonesty.” See what I did there? In the first case the man takes on the quality of the house, but in the second instance he recognizes his peril and can move to avert it. Thus, house placement isn’t always about the resident card taking on the “coloration” of its environs, but can also mean that the environment can be bent to the will of the tenant, making it useful and not simply “there” to be stoically endured.
There is also the concept of “moveable houses.” (One wag has called them “mobile homes.”) In this method, 36 large-format cards are shuffled and dealt into the array of choice without putting the cards in numerical order, and then a second smaller deck is shuffled and the cards are laid on top of the previous set, from left-to-right and top-to-bottom. This creates a much more dynamic scenario in which there are no “fixed” house positions. For example, a card landing in the eleventh position would not invariably be subjected to the “tender mercies” of the Whip. Depending on the “foundation” card that was placed there first, the second card could wind up being paired with any one of the cards of the “base” deck. This strikes me as a wonderfully flexible learning tool and an intriguing way to shake up the GT.
Although I appreciate the utility of the house system, I don’t use it with any great frequency or fidelity. There are readers who diligently run down every card in the layout according to house placement in order to obtain supplemental information, and some even chain houses or “count rounds” from the central theme card to create a secondary story line, often getting a dozen supplemental cards beyond the two dozen or so that form the nucleus of the “near/far” web around the Significator. I usually reach my conclusions about a reading long before I ever get to that level of minutiae. Thus, I only pay attention to house placement if something catches my eye. If a card lands in a particular house and the card that is the “landlord” of that house in turn occupies the “natural” home of the first card, it establishes some sympathy between the two akin to “mutual reception” in astrology even if the two cards aren’t close to one another in the spread. Another example would be a card that lands in a house of an especially friendly or supportive nature, giving the incoming card a little extra “oomph.” If it shows up in its own house, so much the better for simplicity and clarity of interpretation, if not always for improvement of its nature. I’m always looking for this type of nuance in a GT without getting too anal about it since there is little to be gained by being slavish with card-and-house correlations.
There are experienced and thoughtful readers of my acquaintance who dismiss the Lenormand house system as information overload, and a few who actively despise it as “clogging up the works” with irrelevant detail that is no more than incidentally applicable to a wide range of querents. I can’t really argue with either opinion, since lately I’ve been more into economy of expression than endless elaboration, and the Method of Distance already supplies ample insight. But while the obvious rebuttal is “There is no right way, just do whatever works for you,” I’m finding that I’m no longer as amenable to that rubric as I once was. It’s dawning on me that, in any method of divination other than the mystical free-for-all of psychism, there is an irreducible core of functionality that is entirely reliable and needs no embellishment. I like to think of myself as a creative thinker, but there are times when method trumps “free-range” supposition, at least at the level of basic interpretation. Once the essentials are nailed, there is plenty of room for imaginative extemporizing that need not rely on a “belt-and-suspenders” safety net like the Lenormand houses, which smack too much of the unnecessary use of “clarifiers” in tarot reading.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on August 24, 2023.
