Clouds

The Clouds is card number 6 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 clouds, dark on one side and light on the other. In the tradition its core sense is confusion, doubt and passing trouble; the card is read directionally, the dark side marking where difficulty lies.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the King of Clubs, 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 clouds takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.

In the original German tradition the card is Die Wolken. As House 6 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on confusion, worry or an unresolved question. The card's own image, part clear sky and part cloud, is sometimes read directionally, the clearing side indicating resolution approaching and the clouded side indicating trouble still to come, depending on which neighbouring card it faces. In combination, Clouds followed by Sun reads as confusion about to lift, while Clouds followed by Mountain reads as an obstacle made worse by uncertainty or deliberate obscurity.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Clouds carries the King of Clubs.

Why the deck has thirty-six cards

Taken together the insets across the deck make up a complete thirty-six card playing pack, running from the six to the ace in each of the four suits. That is not a correspondence scheme laid over the pictures afterwards. The deck was published in Nuremberg in 1799 as a race game called Das Spiel der Hoffnung, the Game of Hope, generally attributed to Johann Kaspar Hechtel, and the insets meant the same printed sheet could be cut up and used for ordinary card games as well. The pictures were the board and the playing cards were the pack.

What the suit adds

The King of Clubs belongs to the suit this atlas records under action, ambition and growth. It is a court card. In playing card cartomancy the courts are the cards most often read as people rather than as circumstances, so a reader working with the insets may take this one as someone in the querent's situation.

Why a single card is rarely read alone

Lenormand practice reads cards in pairs and in the Grand Tableau, the layout of all thirty-six at once, rather than drawing meaning out of one card in depth. A card is modified by what sits beside it, and the same card in two positions is two different statements. That is the sharpest difference between this system and tarot reading, and it means the playing card inset is one more thing a reader may or may not bring to a combination.