Bärtschi Lenormand – The Grand Tableau

Instead of doing my usual weekly draw with the Tea Leaf Fortune Cards today, I laid out the Grand Tableau with the Bärtschi Lenormand Cards. This is a birthday tradition for me and today is my birthday!  In this spread, all 36 cards are used, they are put in 4 rows of 8 cards and the last row of 4 cards like this:

This is such a great way to use the Lenormand cards – you can find out so many things from just this one spread. In today’s post, I’m mostly going to show how I like to interpret this spread and then tomorrow start in with the actual interpretation.

The first thing to do is find the key card – for me, that is the Lady, since I’m doing the spread for myself. If you were doing this spread for a male, the Man would be the key card.

 

The arrows on the picture show how I like to interpret the lines of cards. The card(s) above the Lady represent the present. The cards behind the Lady (left) show the past, the cards in front of the Lady (right) show the future and the cards under the Lady show what is hidden or repressed – the things you don’t want to think about or face or what might be in your subconscious bothering you.

You need to be careful which lines of cards represent the future and past – it depends on which way the Man or Woman on the card is facing. The future will always be in the direction the person is looking- you need to check which way they are facing. If I was using this deck to read for a male – the future would face to the left rather than the right as the Man card is looking that way. In decks where the Woman or Man is looking straight ahead the future goes to the right and the past to the left.

Just by looking at the spread as a whole you can see that in this reading, the future and what is repressed are more important than the past or present. There is only one card above the Lady (present), there are only two cards behind her (past) but there are 5 cards ahead of her in the future and 4 cards underneath her showing what is repressed. Every once in a while, when using the Grand Tableau, the Lady or Man card will turn up at one of the very edges of the spread so there will be no cards in one of the lines. This just shows, that at this time, the other categories of the reading are more important.

Another thing to notice at first glance is the very first card – it can indicate the general theme of the reading. In this case, The Coffin, would indicate that the underlying theme of this reading is about transformation.  So, already, in a very quick glance at the whole spread I know that this reading is going to have an underlying theme of transformation and that it will point more to the future and what I have repressed or don’t want to think about.

After interpreting the 4 major lines of past, present, future and repressed – then, I like to look around the spread and see what other information I can find. I look for the Man card  to represent my husband, and check what cards are near the Man card and how I want to interpret them. Sometimes, the other cards you want to check are already in the main lines of interpretation but you can draw new lines from them. This is very much up to you – use your intuition. When you look at the spread, it will come to you which is the best way. Many times, for these secondary lines of interpretation, I like to use a diagonal line. So, in this lay out, since the Man is up in the corner, I can draw a long line right down to the bottom of the spread and read these cards:

Another thing I always like to check on is the Child card (to represent my children) – I find it and read diagonally from it like this:

In this lay out the interpretation lines from the Child card cross right through the Lady and the Tree – something I think is significant. Since the Tree is already included in one of the diagonal lines of interpretation I will go ahead and draw one more diagonal line from the Tree to find out more about health issues like this:

As you can see – there are no hard and fast rules. If you wanted – you could do this with other areas of your life. Read the cards around the Ring for relationship issues, around the Fish (or Bear if so inclined) for financial issues, around the House for home issues. You can make the Grand Tableau reading as in-depth as you want! For this birthday reading of mine, I think I’ll stop here.

This is such a cool way of reading the cards! All the lines intersect and play on each other – just like in life.

Right now, I don’t have time to post larger versions of the pictures. I will get that done later in the day so you can see them better. I’m kind of wishing I used a different deck so the images would be more familiar to everyone but I went ahead with this one before I thought of that!

Tomorrow, I’ll get started on the interpretation!