Whip

The Whip is card number 11 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 whip or birch rod. In the tradition its core sense is argument, repetition, discord and physical exertion; quarrels that recur rather than settle.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Jack 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 whip 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 Rute, the rod or whip. As House 11 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on conflict, argument or a repeating pattern rather than a single sharp event. In combination, Whip followed by Man or Woman reads as an argumentative or aggressive person, while Whip followed by House reads as domestic conflict or repeated tension within a household. The card's association with repetition specifically, rather than only conflict, leads some readers to use it for questions about a recurring problem even outside interpersonal disputes.

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

Whose name is on the box

Marie Anne Lenormand died in 1843, and the deck was named after her by publishers afterwards. She did not design it, and there is no evidence that she used it. The name is a bookseller's attribution attached to an existing German game some decades after both the game and the woman had appeared, and this atlas records the system under her name because that is what it is called, not because she made it.