Anchor

The Anchor is card number 35 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 an anchor. In the tradition its core sense is stability, persistence, work and, at times, the hope that holds fast; a settled foundation, especially in employment.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 9 of Spades, 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 anchor takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.

In the original German tradition the card is Der Anker. As House 35 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on stability, steady work and persistence over time. In combination, Anchor followed by Fish reads as stable, secure income, while Anchor preceding Ship reads as a journey held in place, delayed rather than cancelled, echoing the card's role in the original 1799 Game of Hope, where landing on the Anchor square held a player in place rather than advancing or sending them back, one of the few Lenormand meanings that can be traced directly to a specific rule of the game the deck descends from.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Anchor carries the 9 of Spades.

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 9 of Spades belongs to the suit this atlas records under conflict, intellect and hardship. It is a pip card. In playing card cartomancy the numbered cards are generally read as circumstances rather than as people, and the number is read alongside the suit.

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.