Lenormand Houses: “Lights Are On But Nobody’s Home”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: In the song of the title, bluesman Albert Collins complains of a wife who is clueless about her devoted husband’s faithfulness toward her and is always doubting him without proof. Her eyes are open (“lights are on”) but her head seems to be empty of reason (“nobody’s home”). Some Lenormand readers experience an equal-but-opposite frustration with use of the supplemental “house” system of delineation when performing a Grand Tableau (GT) reading: there may be “somebody home” but “the lights are off.” The argument goes that background or “base” houses weren’t described in the Philippe Lenormand Sheet (also called the “Original Translation, or “PLOT”) and were a later accretion that only serves to complicate things for little added benefit. They are an incidental outgrowth of the Game of Hope “game board” that sheds little light on the subject and can be safely ignored.
I’m ambivalent about applying the house meanings across the board in a GT. While there may be isolated instances in the layout where something stands out in terms of a specific house-and-card combination (I like to think of it as a “landlord-and-tenant” relationship), for the most part I don’t have to drill down nearly that far into the details to get my answers. The GT is already sophisticated enough without making it any more complex, although further profundity is always there if I feel I need it. I was an advocate of houses early on in my practice but I now find that using them can take more time and effort than it’s worth if pursued assiduously, and to be honest they slow me down too much.
However, during my reading of Lisa Young-Sutton’s book The Petit Lenormand Oracle, I discovered her concurrence with my favorable opinion of the even-less-traditional technique called “movable houses.” She doesn’t label them as such herself, but the idea is identical. In this approach (which works best for smaller spreads because it can create the same information overload as the standard houses if used in a GT), house positions are created “on-the-fly” by pulling random cards and laying them as a spread template on top of which another set of randomly-pulled cards is placed for the reading. (I use two decks for this — although I don’t shuffle them together as Lisa does — since with a single deck a card will be disqualified for “active duty” if it lands in the template. I should also mention here that — taking my cue from the way planets-in-houses are handled in astrology — I consider the house card to show the “home environment,” in which the transient card will take on the shading of its surroundings; in other words one is atmospheric and the other is dynamic, together delivering a nuanced scenario.)
This creates a series of two-card vignettes in which one card is dominant and the other is recessive. The pair may be either congruent or discordant in their shared function and thus produce either a harmonious blending or a jarring dissonance of the influences involved. If we already look at a Lenormand reading as a roller-coaster of ups-and-downs due to the positive and negative polarity of the cards, these combinations can result in higher peaks and lower valleys by tweaking the dominant or “active” card of the pair one way or the other due to the subtle persuasions of its more passive partner.
As I see it, anything that enhances the testimony of a given card by modulating its scope and intensity is a welcome addition to my toolbox. Although I don’t normally read Lenormand cards intuitively or impressionistically via free-association, favoring a literal approach to interpretation, a certain amount of latitude is permissible when merging two cards because we are trying to find a commonality of purpose (although the “landlord-and-tenant” pairing is a bit different from just matching up any two cards of equal strength at random).
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on October 5, 2023.
