GUIDE · FOUNDATIONS
Cartomancy: reading with other cards
Cartomancy is divination with cards. How playing cards, Lenormand, Kipper and Sibilla decks are read, how their suits map to tarot, and how each differs.
Cartomancy is divination with cards: the practice of laying out cards and reading meaning from their faces, their order and the company they keep. Tarot is one form of cartomancy among several. Others use an ordinary pack of playing cards, the 36-card Lenormand deck, German Kipper cards or Italian Sibilla cards, and each tradition has its own meanings and its own way of reading.
What is cartomancy?
Cartomancy is the reading of cards for insight or, in its older and more popular forms, for fortune telling. The word joins the French carte, a card, with the Greek manteia, divination. In the fortune-telling tradition, a reader describes the events the cards are said to foreshadow: a letter, a journey, a marriage. Many modern readers use the same cards reflectively instead. This Library takes the reflective view, and describes the older traditions as traditions. TarotSeeker itself reads tarot only; this guide is a map of its neighbours.
Where does cartomancy come from?
Cartomancy with ordinary playing cards is recorded in Europe from at least the eighteenth century, and informal practice may well be older. At least one sixteenth-century Italian book used cards to pick out verses of fortune, though more as a pastime than a method of reading. The first widely known manual came from Paris: around 1770, the reader who called himself Etteilla published a method for the short piquet pack, some years before he turned to tarot.
In the nineteenth century, printers began to issue decks made for fortune telling: Lenormand, Kipper, Sibilla and many others. The guide A short history of tarot, in this Library, follows tarot’s own path from game to reading.
How do you read ordinary playing cards?
Ordinary playing cards are read through their suits, numbers and court figures, much as the Minor Arcana of tarot are. Readers have long paired the four French suits of the standard pack with the tarot suits:
- Hearts and Cups. Feeling, love, friendship, home and the life of the heart.
- Diamonds and Pentacles. Money, trade, practical matters and the material world.
- Clubs and Wands. Work, enterprise, energy and ambition.
- Spades and Swords. Thought, conflict, difficulty and hard truths.
The pairing is common but not universal. Some traditions give Clubs to Pentacles and Diamonds to Wands instead. Neither version is a matter of descent: the French suits, which appeared in the fifteenth century, were a new design rather than a translation of the Italian ones, so the match is a reader’s convention, if a long-standing one.
What does each suit mean in playing-card cartomancy?
Each suit in playing-card cartomancy has a broad territory, and the traditions agree on the outline more than on the details.
- Hearts. Love, affection, family, home and good feeling; in most traditions, the kindest suit in the pack.
- Diamonds. Money, business and practical dealings; sometimes news, messages or travel.
- Clubs. Work, effort, standing, friendship and enterprise; in some readings, success earned by labour.
- Spades. Obstacles, worry, sorrow and warning. Spades also mark change, and many readers now treat them as a call for care rather than bad news.
Numbers add their own shading: Aces mark something beginning or something of weight, low cards small matters, Tens a matter at its fullest. The Ace of Spades has the darkest name in the older lore, where it was read as grave news. Modern readers usually take it as a decisive ending or a turning point, closer in spirit to tarot’s Death card than to any literal loss.
The Ace of Cups shows the pairing at work. In tarot it describes feeling arriving in abundance; the Ace of Hearts is read in many traditions as love, home or a happy beginning. The idiom differs, the territory is the same.
What do the court cards mean?
The court cards in playing-card cartomancy usually stand for people. A tarot suit has four court cards (Page, Knight, Queen and King), while a playing-card suit has three: the Jack, the Queen and the King. The Jack, long called the Knave in English, is usually matched to the Page, and the Knight has no counterpart in the ordinary pack.
Older traditions sorted the courts by colouring, giving the red suits to fair-haired people and the black suits to dark. Many readers now read them by role and temperament instead: the King as authority or maturity, the Queen as care and influence, the Jack as youth, a message, or someone close to the question. Reading the court cards, a deeper guide for Adept members in the app’s Library, treats the tarot courts in a similar spirit.
What is a piquet deck?
The piquet deck is a 32-card pack, Seven to Ace in each suit, used in several European cartomancy traditions. It takes its name from piquet, an old French game played with the short pack, and it is the pack of Etteilla’s early method. French and German readers in particular have worked with it, often laying all 32 cards at once.
What are Lenormand cards?
Lenormand cards are a 36-card fortune-telling deck named after Marie Anne Lenormand, the celebrated Parisian fortune teller, and published after her death in 1843. Each card shows one plain image, such as a ship, a house or a key, usually with a small playing card printed on it. They are read in combinations, like words in a sentence. The guide Lenormand cards, in this Library, describes all 36 and how they are read.
What are Kipper cards?
Kipper cards are a 36-card German fortune-telling deck from the late nineteenth century, whose cards show people and everyday situations rather than symbols. Typical subjects include a main male and female figure, a house, a journey, a letter and a marriage, each drawn as a small domestic or social scene. The origin of the name is uncertain. Readers often lay the whole deck in a large tableau and read outward from the main figure, so that the cards closest to it frame the story.
What are Sibilla cards?
Sibilla cards are an Italian oracle deck, usually of 52 cards, each showing a figure or situation from daily life with a caption and a small playing card in a corner. The name recalls the sibyls, the prophetesses of the ancient world. Like Kipper cards, Sibilla decks describe people and events plainly, and each card is read through its picture, its title and its inset. Several traditional designs are still printed and used in Italy.
What about oracle decks?
Oracle decks are modern card decks with no fixed structure: each has its own number of cards, themes and guidebook. The guide Tarot and oracle cards, in this Library, sets out how they differ from tarot and how the two can be used together.
How does each system differ from tarot?
Each card system differs from tarot in its number of cards, its structure and its way of reading.
- Tarot. 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana in four suits, with elements, numbers and court cards shared across nearly every deck. Read by position in a spread, often with reversals.
- Playing cards. 52 cards, or 32 in the piquet pack, in four suits with three court cards each. The suits echo tarot’s, but nothing plays the part of the Major Arcana.
- Lenormand. 36 single-image cards, read in pairs and lines like a sentence. Meanings are concrete, combinations matter more than positions, and most traditions read no reversals.
- Kipper. 36 cards of people and everyday scenes, read mostly in large layouts around a main figure.
- Sibilla. Usually 52 captioned scenes with playing-card insets, read largely through each card’s picture and title.
- Oracle decks. Any number of cards and no shared structure; each deck’s meanings belong to its creator.
The deepest difference is grammar. Only in tarot does every card sit inside a shared scheme of suit, number, element and archetype, so that two cards can be related by more than their pictures. Readers who come from playing cards know the suits already; the Major Arcana and the Knights are the new country.
Why TarotSeeker reads tarot
TarotSeeker reads tarot because tarot’s structure lets the companion show its reasoning. When it relates two cards, it can name the ground: a shared element, a number repeated across the spread, a Major Arcana card setting the larger theme, a court card standing for a person or for a part of you. Those grounds belong to the deck itself, so you can test each one. The other systems in this guide have their own methods, and the companion does not read them.
If you already read playing cards, tarot is a natural next step. The Ace of Swords, a breakthrough in thinking, may feel like an old acquaintance from the Spades, and the Three of Swords, heartache and painful truth, sits squarely among that suit’s harder cards. Shuffle a tarot deck of your own and enter the cards as they fall, or let the app draw them. Your eye for suits does much of the early work.
Questions readers ask
What is the difference between tarot and cartomancy?
Tarot is one form of cartomancy, the general term for divination with cards. Cartomancy also includes reading ordinary playing cards, the 36-card Lenormand deck, German Kipper cards, Italian Sibilla cards and modern oracle decks. Tarot stands apart for its fixed structure of 78 cards, 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana, with suits, numbers and elements shared across nearly every deck.
Can you read tarot with playing cards?
You can read playing cards in a tarot-like way, because the four suits correspond: Hearts to Cups, Diamonds to Pentacles, Clubs to Wands and Spades to Swords, though some traditions swap Clubs and Diamonds. What a playing-card pack cannot supply is the Major Arcana or the Knights, so a reading with playing cards resembles a reading of the Minor Arcana alone, in a different idiom.
What does each playing card suit mean in fortune telling?
In playing-card fortune telling, Hearts usually stand for love, family and home; Diamonds for money, business and news; Clubs for work, effort and friendship; and Spades for obstacles, worry and change. Court cards generally represent people. Meanings differ between traditions and between readers, so a card read one way in one book may be weighed differently in another.
Is cartomancy the same as fortune telling?
Cartomancy has a long history as fortune telling, and many traditional card meanings were written to describe events: a letter arriving, a journey, a marriage. Cartomancy is not only fortune telling, however. Many readers use cards reflectively, as a way to see a situation from fresh angles, without treating any card as a forecast. TarotSeeker reads tarot in that reflective spirit.
