The Coffin is card number 8 of the Petit Lenormand, the thirty-six card deck read in the nineteenth-century French cartomantic tradition that took its name, after her death in 1843, from the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand.
Image, meaning and playing card
The card shows a coffin. In the tradition its core sense is an ending, loss, illness or the close of a phase; a difficult card, though what ends may clear the ground for what follows.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 9 of Diamonds, a survival of the ordinary piquet pack over which the pictorial Lenormand was laid. Lenormand cards are read less as standing symbols than in combination, each modifying the cards to either side, so that the coffin takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Der Sarg. As House 8 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on endings, and, in a health question specifically, the card carries a weight some readers soften by treating it as transformation or a hard close rather than literal death, a convention comparable to how tarot's Death card is customarily read. In combination, Coffin followed by Sun reads as an ending that clears the way for renewal, while Coffin followed by Heart reads as the end of a relationship or affection, one of the more direct and least ambiguous pairings in the deck.