Lenormand Techniques: Intention and Realization in the Topic Card
AUTHOR’S NOTE: There is a common practice when reading the Lenormand five-card cross and nine-card “box” by which the central “topic” card (aka Significator) is intentionally chosen to represent the subject of the reading. Some traditional readers don’t use this approach and instead allow the Significator to fall randomly. I can see advantages to both methods but decided that I really ought to settle on one or the other for topic-specific interpretation.
I’ve been contemplating this decision for a number of years. When I first encountered the nine-card box, I had the notion that, if I in fact choose the Significator in advance, I could just lay another “reading” card on top of it during the draw since the topic card is kind of a “signpost” and not really an active element in the reading (in other words, it is a recipient — or at most a tacit accomplice — rather than an originator of influence). I didn’t follow through with this by experimenting, but lately, while working with the five-card cross, I found it useful to deliberately pick a topic card to show the “intention” of the reading and then place a random card on top of it to reflect the pivotal “realization” of that prospect, creating a two-phase interpretation. Think of one as an “underlying” motif and the other as an “explicit” emphasis for development of the subject that the rest of the cards then amplify.
Obviously, this has no applicability when reading the Grand Tableau, in which all of the “life-area” topic cards are distributed arbitrarily, but I’m thinking it might be worth considering for any odd-numbered line spread in which the middle card is the focus of the narrative. In general, though, I think I will leave line spreads alone in this regard. Here is an example of a five-card cross in which I used this technique; I won’t include the full interpretation since my only purpose is to show the structure I’m talking about here.
A couple of months ago, I decided to do a Lenormand reading to look at my prospects for safe travel over the next three months. The question was “What will be the outlook for my local and regional movement over this period?” I selected the five-card “cross” spread for this with an intentionally-chosen focus card; I picked the Birds for the middle card due to its alternate meaning of “short-distance travel” coupled with its mild stress-related implications (each outing will typically be of short duration in moderate traffic). However, I’ve found lately that placing a randomly-pulled “covering” card over the previously-selected focus card as part of a five-card draw gives me more precise results, so I did that here. This lets me “have it both ways” with the main thrust of the reading. (Nothing harmful happened over the period, but I did almost get t-boned by a police cruiser — Tower as “officialdom” — that was running a stop-light on the way to an emergency.)
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on January 18, 2024.
