Cartomancy

What it is

Divination using ordinary playing cards rather than a tarot deck.

Several systems are in use:

• The 52-card deck, read by suit and rank — hearts for love and home, diamonds for money, clubs for work, spades for difficulty, with rank modifying.
• The 32-card piquet deck, stripped of the twos through sixes, standard in French and German practice.
• Lenormand, a 36-card system with fixed pictorial symbols — the Rider, the Clover, the Ship, the Coffin, the Scythe — read in combinations and in large grids rather than singly.

Lenormand reading is structurally quite different from tarot. Cards have narrow, concrete meanings, and significance comes from adjacency: the Ship next to the Coffin says something specific, and neither card carries the psychological breadth a tarot card is expected to.

Where it came from

Playing cards reached Europe in the 1370s. Divination with them is attested from the eighteenth century, and it is worth noting that cartomancy with ordinary cards ran alongside — arguably ahead of — tarot divination. Etteilla, the man who commercialised tarot reading in Paris in the 1780s, began as a cartomancer with a piquet deck.

The Lenormand story is a good one and almost entirely a marketing exercise. Marie Anne Lenormand (1772–1843) was a genuinely famous Parisian fortune-teller, consulted, by her own account, by Josephine de Beauharnais and much of the Napoleonic elite. She was a real person with a real practice and a talent for publicity.

The deck bearing her name was not hers. Its images derive from Das Spiel der Hoffnung — "The Game of Hope" — a German parlour game published by Johann Kaspar Hechtel in 1799: a race game played with counters on a board of thirty-six pictures. After Lenormand's death the pictures were repackaged as a divinatory deck and attached to her name, which was commercially valuable. The "Petit Lenormand" that is now a substantial international practice is a renamed German board game she never saw.

How it is practised

Cards are shuffled and laid, often in a line of three or five, or in the Grand Tableau — all thirty-six cards laid out at once in a grid, read by position and by which cards fall near the card representing the querent.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the historical record is clear and, as with tarot, the practice is younger than commonly assumed. Cards were a game for four hundred years before anyone told fortunes with them.

We can say the Lenormand attribution is posthumous and commercial. This is not obscure; the Hechtel game survives and the connection is documented.

We can say the evidential position is the same as everywhere in this section, and the mechanisms described under what divination is apply.

And one thing has to be said carefully. Card-reading became strongly associated in the European imagination with Romani people, and the image of the "gypsy fortune-teller" is one of the most persistent ethnic stereotypes in Western culture.

That association is largely a projection. Romani communities have their own traditions, and some Romani women did read cards professionally — frequently because they were excluded from other work. But the figure of the mysterious itinerant fortune-teller was constructed by non-Roma, in fiction, advertising and eventually costume, and it was never harmless. The same association supported vagrancy prosecutions, licensing restrictions and persecution, and it fed the racialisation that culminated in the Porajmos, the Romani genocide, in which hundreds of thousands were murdered.

Decks and businesses still marketed with "gypsy" imagery are trading on that stereotype. This site notes it because a section on card divination that reproduced the costume without the history would be doing something it criticises elsewhere.

We cannot say how much of the folk practice originated where. Divination with cards was widespread across European populations, and attributing it to one persecuted minority was always more convenient than accurate.

Further reading

• Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards (1996) — on the eighteenth-century origins of card divination.
• On Hechtel's Das Spiel der Hoffnung and the Lenormand attribution — the World of Playing Cards archives document it in detail.
• Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People (2002) — for the stereotype and its consequences, from a Romani scholar.