Cross

The Cross is card number 36 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 cross. In the tradition its core sense is burden, fate, suffering and destiny; a heavy card of hardship or of trials that must be borne, and of matters of faith.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 6 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 cross takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.

In the original German tradition the card is Das Kreuz, and it closes the thirty-six-card sequence as the final and, by convention, heaviest card in the deck. As House 36 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that final numbered position is read as touching on burden, fate and matters largely outside the querent's own control. In combination, Cross followed by Heart reads as suffering connected to love, while Cross preceding Coffin reads as a heavy burden reaching its end, one of the deck's more starkly difficult pairings. Some modern readers soften the Cross toward a broader sense of an unavoidable trial to be endured rather than a purely negative fatalism, without disputing its position as the deck's structurally final and weightiest card.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Cross carries the 6 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 6 of Clubs belongs to the suit this atlas records under action, ambition and growth. It is a pip card. In playing card cartomancy the numbered cards are generally read as circumstances rather than as people, and the number is read alongside the suit.

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.