Coffin

The Coffin is card number 8 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 coffin. In the tradition its core sense is an ending, loss, illness or the close of a phase; a difficult card, though what ends may clear the ground for what follows.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 9 of Diamonds, 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 coffin 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 Sarg. As House 8 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on endings, and, in a health question specifically, the card carries a weight some readers soften by treating it as transformation or a hard close rather than literal death, a convention comparable to how tarot's Death card is customarily read. In combination, Coffin followed by Sun reads as an ending that clears the way for renewal, while Coffin followed by Heart reads as the end of a relationship or affection, one of the more direct and least ambiguous pairings in the deck.

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

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 Diamonds belongs to the suit this atlas records under money, work and the material. 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.