Sun

The Sun is card number 31 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 the sun. In the tradition its core sense is success, vitality, warmth and joy; one of the strongest positive cards, lending its energy to whatever sits near it.

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

In the original German tradition the card is Die Sonne. As House 31 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on success, vitality and clear, positive energy, and the card is conventionally treated as one of the strongest favourable cards in the entire deck, capable of softening even a difficult neighbour. In combination, Sun followed by Fish reads as financial success, while Sun preceding Clouds reads as success currently obscured by confusion but fundamentally sound underneath it, since Sun's presence in a pairing is generally read as improving whatever it touches rather than the reverse.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Sun carries the Ace 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 Ace of Diamonds belongs to the suit this atlas records under money, work and the material. It is an ace. In playing card cartomancy the aces are commonly read as the strongest or most concentrated expression of their suit, which gives this inset unusual weight for a reader who uses the layer at all.

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.