I think we're seeing an acceleration of things until they become gobblegook.
I was very interested to read this remark because I've been thinking it lately as well.
The thing that intrigues me is the apparent tendency we have to want to take something relatively simple and build it up into something like astrology, i.e. a vast esoteric system which takes years to learn and fills 300-page books.
It seems to me that Lenormand is relatively simple. 36 cards. Assign a concept or a few related concepts to each card. Then start combining the cards like words in a sentence. I honestly don't think it needs to get more complicated than that. But I guess no publisher would be interested in publishing that book -- it would only be about 30 pages long.
Yes, there is the GT, which looks complicated to beginners, but I'll bet that once one has internalized the meanings and grown accustomed to reading cards in lines, the GT would be a fairly simple process. When children learn to read, a children's book is like Mt. Everest, but years later, we can zip through that book in minutes.
When I wrote my book on reading with the TdM, Lo Scarabeo gave me a maximum word count. At first I was worried at how much I would have to leave out. But when I finished writing it, I realized that the limit they gave me was actually the perfect length. When published, it was 64 pages. My Marseilles method doesn't rely on Golden Dawn or other esotericism, and without it, it's just not that complicated an endeavor, and a 300-page book would simply (in my opinion) contain a lot of unnecessary filler.
Yes, someone could write a book about Lenormand and use each card as a jumping-off point to follow every imaginable cultural rabbit into its rabbit-hole. That kind of book may or may not be interesting, depending on the quality of the writing, but either way, would it really help us read the cards?
I do feel that the fact that this overcomplicating tendency is playing out in Lenormand now is really no reason to feel downtrodden or to give up. What other people do doesn't need to affect us. They can publish books, but nobody is forcing us to read them. It surely must be possible to find your own path through Lenormand without letting what other people do with it bring you down.
shadowdancer said:
This is the sadness I am feeling with Lenormand, and just hope in the future it is allowed to retain a sense of purity, and not become something it isn't.
I guess what I'm saying is that the sense of purity should come from within you (or me or anyone), and from finding our own ways to relate to the cards, rather than depending on finding it in the outside world.
The contemporary new age market values profit and getting the scoop much more than it does tradition or quality (see Katz and Goodwin's "Learning Lenormand" for strong proof of this fact). That being said, I'm not sure that we should grant tradition the exclusive ability to deem what is and is not properly called Lenormand. From what I know, the history of the deck is far from uniform.
