Child

The Child is card number 13 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 young child. In the tradition its core sense is a new beginning, innocence, something small or young; beside another card it can shrink or soften that card's meaning.

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

In the original German tradition the card is Das Kind. As House 13 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on new beginnings and small scale, whatever the surrounding cards' subject happens to be. In combination, Child followed by Ship reads as a new journey just beginning, while Child preceding Tree reads as something newly planted that will take time to mature. Because the card marks smallness and newness generically rather than only literal childhood, readers apply it to a new job, a new relationship or a small version of whatever the neighbouring cards describe, not only to questions about children.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Child carries the Jack 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 Jack of Spades belongs to the suit this atlas records under conflict, intellect and hardship. 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.