Petit Lenormand history

[Rhinemaiden]

Originally Posted by IheartTarot

Thanks Rhinemaiden, I was just wondering about that deck (I don't have it). That is the popular suit association. Most sources I have found say that these associations are assumed but not proven. I am happy to go along with the likes of Paul Huson, Court de Gébelin, Comte de Mellett and Etteila. It makes a whole lot more sense in the Lenormand deck. For my purposes, I want to know what the creators of Lenormand believed and that is what matters not which playing card suit derives from which Tarot suit if that is even how it happened (the playing card suit symbols could be more arbitrary than that).

I agree... it's the historical association that is the concern in this thread. When I read your original post on acorns etc. I thought "wait a minute, I HAVE a tarot deck with these suits..." so posted merely as an observation. There's nothing in the mini-deck LWB that indicates what inspired the Fairy Tarot creator, Antonio Lupatelli, to use these names for his suits or what prompted his associations.

[IheartTarot]

Originally Posted by Rhinemaiden

I agree... it's the historical association that is the concern in this thread. When I read your original post on acorns etc. I thought "wait a minute, I HAVE a tarot deck with these suits..." so posted merely as an observation. There's nothing in the mini-deck LWB that indicates what inspired the Fairy Tarot creator, Antonio Lupatelli, to use these names for his suits or what prompted his associations.

I appreciate it.

I am sure he used those associations because they are the most common. However, I see now he also went with Swords/Fire and Wands/Air which is not so common.

[Rhinemaiden]

I didn't know until yesterday that hearts, bells, acorns and leaves were suits in German playing cards -- off to broaden my horizons!

[IheartTarot]

Originally Posted by Rhinemaiden

I didn't know until yesterday that hearts, bells, acorns and leaves were suits in German playing cards -- off to broaden my horizons!

I was thinking that with the Fairy Tarot it would be pretty easy for me to just work with elemental suits as the symbols other than hearts have no fixed meaning for me.

[IheartTarot]

I have written a blog post about the collection bequeathed to the British Museum that includes this deck ("Lady Charlotte's gift"). A few of the decks in the extensive collection are actually named after Mademoiselle Lenormand, including one 36 card "piquet pack" dated late 19th century that was published in France (see British Museum website - no picture online and I am not in a position to visit the museum unfortunately).

[IheartTarot]

Originally Posted by IheartTarot

I have written a blog post about the collection bequeathed to the British Museum that includes this deck ("Lady Charlotte's gift"). A few of the decks in the extensive collection are actually named after Mademoiselle Lenormand, including one 36 card "piquet pack" dated late 19th century that was published in France (see British Museum website - no picture online and I am not in a position to visit the museum unfortunately).

In this blog post I mention similarities in images between the Petit Lenormand deck and the Biribissi gambling game:

A few additional bequests related to cartomancy and board games are described for interest sake below:

... ♦ Nuovo Giuoco del Biribissi, a popular Renaissance gambling board game similar to bingo and roulette with numbered and illustrated compartments arranged in a grid (see British Museum website). (It is interesting to note that quite a few of the board compartments contain symbols that are also included in the Petit Lenormand deck.) ...

I am taking the liberty of copying some related posts here from the Antique Lenormand thread that was moved to the Oracle Decks section:

Originally Posted by Teheuti

I wonder if the Lenormand motifs could be related to the Game of the Owl, which was originally an Italian game based on the 56 throws of three dice - illustrated by pictures, many of which are found on the Lenormand cards.

http://expositions.bnf.fr/jeux/grand/111.htm

This is, of course, a type of what is know as the race game - Game of Goose - well described and illustrated here. It seems to have originated in Italy in the late 16th century.

http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/200...ard-games.html

Originally Posted by IheartTarot

I also noticed several common symbols in the Italian game of Biribissi aka Biribi (a gambling board game similar to bingo and roulette), i.e. sun, moon, stars, bird, house, dog, ring, tree, snake, ship, book, tower, heart, broom. I understand that the symbols represent a person's bet, i.e. you choose a square with a symbol to bet on and hold a marker for that square in exchange for your bet on it. This game was banned due to the gambling aspect. See example board dated 17th century from Wikipedia here.

Originally Posted by Teheuti

What a wonderful lead. It makes so much sense that the Lenormand cards represent a selection of these images. Here's a great example from a museum in Naples:

http://www.guide-campania.it/foto/po...sso_GRANDE.jpg

Originally Posted by Teheuti

Also found this - found in Milan's La Scala Theatre. The picture is only half of the full board (a folding board in two halves on hinges) that consists of 36 positions. Opera Houses were also centers for playing a variety of games.

http://www.tourism.milan.it/wps/wcm/...mod=-198074002

“Royal Tower” (Torre Reale) is a game that comes from “biribissi”, precursor of all the games based on a draw of numbers, like the most famous “Bingo” (Tombola) and “Roulette”.
The game is made up of two wooden panels and these ones in particular are from the first half of 19th century. They were found during the reorganization of the museum archives and restored for exhibition, just like the wonderful decorative painting from one of La Scala Theatre's boxes, which can be admired in the same room.
These two panels, from Sambon Collection bought in 1911, constitute the original centre of the collections in the Theatrical Museum.
Every game is made of two boards joined by iron hinges that allow the book-like closing. Extremely functional, they were closed and put away when the game was over.
A curiosity: one of the most famous Italian theatre managers, Domenico Barbaja, obtained concession for the game of chance in La Scala Theatre.

Originally Posted by Teheuti

Here's an article on the recent recreation of a 17th century Biribi game board in Finland, where people are now playing it again. Notice that cards of the 36 figures accompany the board. Really this makes so much sense - that people would have cut out the numbered pictures from a biribisso woodcut print and used them as cards.

http://www.lautapeliopas.fi/peliarvostelut/biribi/

Originally Posted by IheartTarot

Very interesting that it is on a 6x6 board like the Game of Hope Lenormand prototype.

This example seems to be a combination of the Game of the Goose (which traditionally has 63 positions) and Biribissi. It has a Key!

Originally Posted by Teheuti

You can download a version of the game with instructions (for children - non-gambling) that explain that you print two copies of the game sheet, then cut out the images from one of the copies (into little cards). You then select a set of images on the main game board (in gambling you would put your betting chips on them) and individual cards would be drawn to see who would win. Earlier games featured a leather bag from which were drawn objects (beans?) painted with the image numbers and thus the winning pictures would be determined.

http://www.findthatfile.com/search-7...-board.pdf.htm

It's a cross between Roulette and Bingo, probably closest to Mexican Lotería.

Originally Posted by IheartTarot

This information from Wikipedia (by Michael Hurst) might help explain the reasoning behind the Lenormand/Biribissi images:

"Dummett suggests that the creation of Tarot was much simpler than usually imagined.

'They wanted to design a new kind of pack with an additional set of twenty-one picture cards that would play a special, indeed a quite new, role in the game; so they selected for those cards a number of subjects, most of them entirely familiar, that would naturally come to the mind of someone at a fifteenth-century Italian court. It is rather a random selection... But of course, in a pack of cards what is essential is that each card may be instantly identified; so one does not want a large number of rather similar figures, especially before it occurred to anyone to put numerals on the trump cards for ease of identification. Certainly most of the subjects on the Tarot trumps are completely standard ones in mediaeval and Renaissance art; there seems no need of any special hypothesis to explain them.'

... The approach suggested by Dummett is precisely what Renaissance game creators did repeatedly in devising board games and pastimes. Biribissi type board games and Il nobile et piacevole gioco, intitolato Il passatempo are specific examples of Italian games of the Renaissance which used image collections like that suggested by Dummett."

Originally Posted by Teheuti

Isn't amazing how the information has been out there for a while and we simply overlook it? Definitely I see a relationship between Biribissi and the Lenormand cards - less so with the Tarot in that the motifs seem to be 'larger,' - more complex and philosophical. They were definitely part of the Italian culture of the 14th and early 15th century. Lenormand speaks of everyday objects and creatures - our relations on this planet, while the Tarot speaks to morality and mortality - our place in the cosmos.

[Teheuti]

Originally Posted by IheartTarot

In this blog post I mention similarities in images between the Petit Lenormand deck and the Biribissi gambling game:
I am taking the liberty of copying some related posts here from the Antique Lenormand thread that was moved to the Oracle Decks section:

Thanks for doing this IheartTarot.
I've downloaded over a dozen examples of the game from the net, among which can be found several that contain at least half or more of the Lenormand images in a single board. I would venture to say that among all the boards, that most of the images could be found.

I have quite a few other cartomancy decks and most start adding scenes rather than the simple images that are found on the Petit Lenormand. When we put this together with the similarity found in images described in tea leaf reading that contain the standard meanings for those images, then we start to build a sense of what a folk tradition utilizing Biribissi "cards" (cut from woodcut sheets) might have been like.

[IheartTarot]

The Russian Gypsy Fortune Telling Cards have images corresponding with those in the Lenormand deck plus some from the Mexican Loteria deck that are not in the Lenormand deck (Crayfish, Demons/Devil, Rooster) plus others, 50 cards in total. The author says of the origins of the cards:

The cards are derived from the Gypsy aspect of Russian folklore, and are a blend of animal, natural, and Christian symbols. The cards originated in the southwestern part of Russia where the Gypsies lived.

I think these decks are all cousins.

[IheartTarot]

Originally Posted by Huck

The German Lenormand deck origin has been described by DDD "Wicked Pack of Cards" at p. 141.
It developed as "Spiel der Hoffnung" (Game of Hope) and it was a race game (made with cards, which were composed to a playing board in the mid of the table), , produced by G.P.J. Bieling in Nuremberg in Germany.
I looked it up and found an announcement of the year 1799 in a book made by the publisher G.P.J. Bieling. The book itself has humorous aspects and nothing to do with the game, the author writes with pseudonym.

http://books.google.de/books?id=kU9C...ung%22&f=false

Bieling was just a publisher, it's not naturally given, that he was the author. The printing house existed since 1760.

Thanks to Huck for posting the above information in the Antique Lenormand thread. If you scroll up a bit on the page linked you can see the name of the author of Das Spiel der Hoffnung (shown as Hechtels JK who I have established to be Johann Kaspar Hechtel). Hechtel was born in Nuremberg on 1 May 1771 and died in a smallpox epidemic at the age of 28 on 20 Dec 1799. He was the owner of a brass factory in Nuremberg. I have found two biographies for him here and here that I am busy translating and will post on my blog. There is only reallly one book that he is famous for writing (still in print! but very difficult to read the oldfashioned script), you can scroll through it here.

[IheartTarot]

I stumbled upon an example of the popular "Bilder-Lotto" (Picture Bingo) on a 7x7 board that was published in Nuremberg c1840 (in the same place as The Game of Hope was published c1800). To see some images, click on this link:

Neuestes Bilder-Lotto: Gestochener Bilderbogen ("No 193") mit Darstellung von 49 Spielmarken (je ca. 4,2 : 3,7 cm). Blattgröße 42 : 31 cm. Nürnberg, (Friedrich) Nap. Campe, ca. 1840.

Hübscher Bilderbogen mit 49 Motiven (sieben Reihen mit je 7 Abb.) für das beliebte "Bilder-Lotto". Die Motive sollten, koloriert, ausgeschnitten und auf kleine Pappkärtchen geklebt, als Spielmarken dienen. Unter den Darstellungen ist jeweils ein Gewinn- bzw. Verlustwert angegeben. Dargestellt sind in bunter Mischung u.a. eine Dampflokomotive, eine "Montgolfière", ein "Zahnreisser", Wilhelm Tell, Soldaten, ein Raubüberfall, eine Gärtnerin vor Gewächshaus usw. - Mit geglätteter Faltstelle quer zum Blatt, sonst sehr gut erhalten.

These boards are still manufactured as children's educational toys in Germany today (as Bilder-Lotto or Picture Bingo) and are very similar to Mexican Lotería. You can view some examples for sale on amazon.

This places the Biribissi game concept much closer in time and place to the Game of Hope.