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Another Deck



Die Zauberkarten der Mademoiselle Le Normand

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As most of you already know I read the cards professionally as my full time job. Tarot, Lenormand, Kipper and even Gypsy cards are available to my client’s depending on their needs and what is appropriate to their situation. But at night…………. other cards come out !!

I love to work with decks and systems that are a bit more obscure during my free time. Yes I am a hooked on divination and I make no excuses for it. This being said about a year or perhaps more ago I came across this deck – Die Zauberkarten der Mademoiselle Le Normand – or – The Magickal Cards of Mlle Le Normand. These cards were rediscovered by Caitlín Matthews who had the good fortune of also acquiring the booklet that went with them. The translation of the booklet was done for her by Helen Riding.

This deck is a delight for those like me who like multiple systems because you find different systems within this deck. We have a mix of Gypsy, Kipper and Lenormand cards all here as well as some I have not seen anywhere else. This deck is compromised of 46 cards so not all cards of any one system are found within AND you will find the cards you may know from another system have a much different meaning here. For those of you who are up for a challenge – I highly suggest working with this deck. The art work of the cards is wonderful and I must admit my photography skills are woefully inadequate to how beautiful these cards truly are.

Caitlin did a lot of work on the booklet that was supplied with the deck I purchased. Besides the translation she added more contemporary or modern meanings to the cards and these proved quite helpful. Then she also clarified and made sense of what I must admit is the most confusing system of shuffling and sorting cards out that I have seen in quite some time. I admire Caitlín for her ability to “cut to the chase” and in setting the system of laying out the cards to be more simplified she did just that. Bravo !!

Now where you get to have more fun is this – you have to really decide how to lay out the cards. There are a couple of spreads in Caitlín’s booklet but I decided to go out on my own and work it differently, with what I think is great success. You do have two significator cards, a Woman and Man (very reminiscent of other systems) and I always pull out one to lay with the spread I am working on giving me a deck of 45 then in play. From there I use what you may think of as a more a directional based Kipper style of reading method and as above I used a Star of 13 spread. You will note the Woman card is center as the significator with the cards spread around it. Depending on my question depends on the method of how I read it, again based on a Kipper spread. Is this the only way to read with these cards – absolutely not but half the fun is figuring out what will work best for you!

So is this a Deck Review? No it’s not. What this blog is about is the idea that sometimes we have to shake things up, learning something new and change (as in this time the meanings of some cards) what we already know. This leads us to exercise our divination minds, expand and modify how we work and hopefully learn how to work with cards, any cards that is, in a more flexible and fluid way. I am all for working with traditional systems, anyone who knows me will attest to that, but I also find it interesting when we find a system without “all the pieces/parts” laid out for us, to use what we already know and put it to use in different ways. Knowledge is never wasted unless it is not used.

You may find this deck at Caitlín’s website, Hallowquest.org clicking this link should bring you right to the page with this deck but also look around at what other treasures she has there.

Shuffle well my friends!

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