Today is the birthday of Mlle. Marie Anne Adelaide Lenormand, the French card reader whose name is now synonymous with the Lenormand system of divination. To read more about her, check out the info at Wikipedia. May 1st was the birthdate of Johan Kaspar Hetchel, the creator of a little parlor game called “The Game of Hope” that evolved into the Lenormand system of divination we know today. You can read more about him at the Wikipedia link provided.
May is a great month for Lenormand, to say the least, & my good friend, Den Elder, decided to choose one of these two birthdays as World Lenormand Day. Den is the founder of World Tarot Day, celebrated on May 25th worldwide. You can check out her official site for World Lenormand Day here. Her whole idea was to just have FUN with Lenormand, an idea that she & I have carried on over to Facebook where we co-administer both a Page and a Group for World Lenormand Day.
At first it was a toss up as to which birthday we would choose on which to celebrate World Lenormand Day, but after some discussion and asking friends what they thought, we all settled on May 27th due to the strong name recognition of Mlle. Lenormand with the Lenormand divination system, although she herself never used Hetchel’s deck of cards, as far as anyone today can determine. She did use playing cards, however, and several decks combined for her readings, as well as astrological correspondences. I’m sure receiving a reading from her was a very interesting experience.
Den and I welcome you to celebrate World Lenormand Day with us at the Page and also at the Group. The Page is public and is set up for announcements & promotions of the Lenormand and NON-Tarot projects of those who have liked the Page. You can have your work promoted there for FREE. The Group, is set to Closed for now as it’s for private exchanges among Group members & sharing information, but there you can also share your Lenormand and NON-Tarot related projects there as well, and also for FREE. We will never charge a fee for sharing as we wish to promote everyone’s work equally. Just please don’t spam the group. We ask you limit sharing links to once a week for now as we don’t want the Group or Page to be over-run by advertising. Thanks for understanding.
PAGE Link
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How will you celebrate World Lenormand Day today? I’m celebrating by starting a new project! It is debuting here & in the World Lenormand Day Group and on the World Lenormand Page today, so if you’d like to see what I’ve been up to in my spare time since yesterday, do please like the Page & join the Group where I will be posting more as more comes to me. Den and I look forward to seeing you all there. In the meantime, get out your favorite Lenormand deck, or your entire collection. What the heck, right? The more the merrier! Celebrate by giving yourself a reading, a friend or loved one, even your pets. I’ve read Sheila’s Lenormand cards before, she’s our dog. She always receives The Birds card, which I find very funny since her entire motto is, “if it flies, it dies,” but never fear. She has yet to catch a bird, though a month ago she came really close! She also receives The Dog card all the time. Gee, makes perfect sense, don’t you all think? She also receives Heart a lot, and she is a very loving, sweet dog, so that also makes perfect sense. It also proves you can use Lenormand to read for people and even animals, so have fun and give your pets a reading today. Let us know in the Group or on the Page what their cards told you today.
The most important thing is to always remember to have fun with Lenormand. It can be as serious or as fun as you’d like to make it. And now for a bit of sharing of the fun that I began to have with it just yesterday. Newly created and debuting here on my blog, my latest Lenormand project. It does not yet have a title. I am tossing a few around. It’s meant to be fun with a bit of whimsy, but still a traditional Lenormand deck. I will be sticking strictly to traditional imagery this time, but done in a style I hope you all will enjoy. Here are the first three images that are now complete. The first two were created so they fit together. Design permitting, I will try to make it so that every image has one partner. We’ll see how that goes since the best laid plans of mice & men …, well, you probably know the rest!
- Rider. (C) Nefer Khepri, 2013
- Clover (C) Nefer Khepri, 2013.
Yes, I am now at work on yet another project, not forgetting about my Magickal Musings Tarot that has been languishing since I began work on my Egyptian Lenormand deck last September & completed on February 14, 2013, what would have been my mother’s 87th birthday. That deck is dedicated to her memory & for those who have purchased it & read the PDF you know why.
I am using watercolor pencils, Copic line markers, & Caran D’Ache is used for the backgrounds. I also decided to incorporate the card numbers directly into the design. I debated about also doing that with the card name, but decided against it.
My chief goal is to create something FUN that I enjoy creating & later using. I also wanted something very bright since I love bright colors. The idea here was to quickly create the images so they were drawn with MARKERS, I did not first draw these with pencil then erase repeatedly
until I got it right. If there are little mistakes, so be it. I want the images to not only be simple & fun to create, but to also look simple & uncomplicated. I also did not want to spend a lot of time on each image. I created these 2 cards, plus the Coffin in a single day. I’m hoping the rest don’t take very long. They shouldn’t since the imagery is very simple, and intentionally so. I am also including doodles here & there. I create those with the Copic line markers. I may add more into each card, it all depends. I’m still debating that since I do not wish for the images to look too cluttered. Simplicity and ease of creation are the two main themes at work here.
The Magickal-Musings of Nefer Khepri, PhD 