The Man and Woman cards are the only two in the deck that ordinarily stand for the person being read for, and this gives them a mechanical role the other thirty-four do not have.
Choosing one
Convention picks the card matching the querent, Man for a man, Woman for a woman, and it becomes the significator. In a reading about a relationship the other of the pair usually stands for the other person.
Where the querent does not fit that scheme, readers do what readers have always done and choose the card that represents the person in question, or read both.
The Grand Tableau
The full spread lays out all thirty-six cards, typically nine across and four down, and everything is read in relation to where the significator falls.
Several techniques operate at once:
- Proximity. Cards touching the significator (to the sides, above, below, diagonally), describe what is immediately present. Distant cards are distant concerns.
- Direction. Cards in front of the significator, in the direction the figure faces, are generally read as approaching or future; cards behind are past or receding. Which way the figure on the card faces is therefore a real feature of a Lenormand deck, and different editions do not always agree.
- Houses. The thirty-six positions of the layout are themselves numbered and carry the meanings of the cards that belong to those numbers. A card falling in the position numbered for the Heart is read as touching on love. This is the layer most often skipped by beginners and it is where the method gets genuinely intricate.
- Knighting. A chess-knight's move from the significator picks out further cards, a technique borrowed straight from the board.
What kind of instrument this makes it
The Grand Tableau is closer to a map than to a narrative. Nothing is drawn for a position that asks a question, as in a tarot spread. The whole deck is present, and the reading is an act of navigation across it from where the querent stands.
It takes considerably longer to learn than a ten-card tarot spread and produces a different sort of answer: a picture of a whole situation and its parts, rather than a sequence.