Snake

The Snake is card number 7 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 coiled snake. In the tradition its core sense is complication, deviousness and desire; in a woman's reading it can also stand for a rival or another woman.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Queen 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 snake 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 Schlange. As House 7 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on complication or a third party working against the querent's interest. In combination, Snake followed by Man or Woman reads as a devious rival or a person not to be trusted, while Snake followed by Ring reads as a commitment complicated by deception or a third party's interference. The card is among those readers most often reach for when a question specifically concerns betrayal, rivalry or an unseen obstacle deliberately placed rather than merely encountered.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Snake carries the Queen 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 Queen 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.

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.