← the temple the Game of Hope · Nuremberg, 1799; Mlle Lenormand's name, after 1843
Thirty-six small cards with plain pictures on them: a rider, a clover, a ship, a house, a tree, and so on to the cross. They are not the tarot and do not pretend to be; they are a parlour game from Nuremberg in 1799, the Game of Hope, a race round the board with the cards laid out in six rows, which the rules at the back said could also be used to tell fortunes, and which took the name of Marie Anne Lenormand, the most famous card-reader in Paris, after she died and could not object. Each card carries the playing card the old packs printed in its corner. They are read in lines, by what lies next to what, and in the Grand Tableau, all thirty-six at once, by where the man or the woman has fallen and what surrounds them. The words under the cards are plain ones and this site's own.
read for
tap a card in the layout for its line; in the tableau the significator is in the other ink, and a card's number is too when it fell in its own house
tap a card for its meaning and its house
Johann Kaspar Hechtel, a Nuremberg maker of games, published Das Spiel der Hoffnung in 1799: thirty-six cards to be laid out in a six-by-six board and raced across with dice, the ship a good square to land on and the coffin a bad one, each card also bearing a German playing card in its corner so that the pack could be used for ordinary games. Mlle Lenormand, who read cards for Josephine and was arrested under Napoleon, used ordinary piquet packs and left no deck; within a few years of her death in 1843 the printers had put her name on Hechtel's game, and it has been the petit Lenormand ever since, the everyday pack of Germany, France and the Low Countries while the tarot became the occultists'. The pictures are deliberately plain: a mouse is a mouse, and a reader learns to say what mice do.
How it is read. Not one card at a time but in strings: a card is a noun and its neighbour an adjective, so the Rider beside the Letter is news in writing and beside the Coffin is news of a death, and three in a line are read as a sentence. The nine-card square puts the matter in the middle and reads the rows, the columns and the diagonals through it. The Grand Tableau lays the whole pack in four rows of nine (the older way; the other is eight by four with four below): the Man or the Woman is the asker, the cards above are what weighs on them, below what they stand on, behind what has passed and before what is coming; the cards that touch count most and distance weakens; the first card is the theme and the last the outcome; and each place on the table is a house, the first the Rider's and the thirty-sixth the Cross's, so that a card is also read by whose house it landed in, and a card in its own house speaks plainly. The page does that much of the work and leaves the sentences to you. Nothing is stored or sent.
The Game of Hope, 1799, is in the public domain and in the British Museum; the pack's standard order, insets and meanings are common property. The emblems are drawn here and are this site's own. One script.