Lenormand & Playing-Card Divination

Tarot is the best-known divination deck, but many practitioners work just as well with Lenormand cards, a deck of thirty-six plain, bright pictures (a bear, a clover, a coffin, a letter, a ship) that are read in combinations to tell a story. The system is named after the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand (1772–1843), but the deck itself descends from a German parlour game, Johann Kaspar Hechtel's Game of Hope (Das Spiel der Hoffnung, around 1799), and was sold under her famous name only after her death. The link to her is more tradition than documented fact.