Tower

The Tower is card number 19 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 tall tower. In the tradition its core sense is authority, institutions, officialdom and isolation; large organisations, and sometimes solitude or a long view.

Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 6 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 tower 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 Turm. As House 19 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on institutions, authority and formal structure, government offices, large organisations or, in a personal reading, a person who keeps themselves emotionally isolated or apart. In combination, Tower followed by Letter reads as official correspondence or a formal document, while Tower preceding Woman or Man reads as a person who is solitary, self-protective or institutionally powerful. Unlike the card of the same name in tarot, the Lenormand Tower carries no association with sudden catastrophic collapse.

Every card in a Lenormand deck carries a small inset of an ordinary playing card in one corner, and the Tower carries the 6 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 6 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.

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.