Man

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.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Man carries the Ace of Hearts.

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 Ace of Hearts belongs to the suit this atlas records under love, emotion and relationships. It is an ace. In playing card cartomancy the aces are commonly read as the strongest or most concentrated expression of their suit, which gives this inset unusual weight for a reader who uses the layer at all.

Two systems in one deck

A reader who uses the insets is running an older cartomantic system, the reading of an ordinary playing pack, alongside the pictures. The two layers can disagree about a card, and nothing in the deck settles which should win. Many readers ignore the insets entirely and treat them as a leftover of the deck's origin as a game. Both approaches are current, and this atlas records the inset as part of the object rather than as an instruction.