Scythe

The Scythe is card number 10 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 scythe or sickle. In the tradition its core sense is a sudden cut, a decision, danger or a sharp and abrupt event; its blade is read directionally toward the cards it threatens.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Jack 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 scythe 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 Sense. As House 10 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on a sudden, decisive cut, an abrupt ending or a hasty decision rather than the gradual close the Coffin represents. In combination, Scythe followed by Cross reads as a painful, unavoidable event, while Scythe preceding Tree reads as a sudden threat interrupting steady growth, an ordering readers distinguish carefully from Tree preceding Scythe, since Lenormand convention treats the first card as the subject and the second as what modifies or follows it in time.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Scythe carries the Jack of Diamonds.

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 Jack of Diamonds belongs to the suit this atlas records under money, work and the material. 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.

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.