Euphemisms in Lenormand
A Snake situation
Is that good or bad?
I’m looking at the card of the Snake in the Lenormand pack. ‘It’s dangerous,’ most of the literature and oral transmissions on the Lenormand will instruct. Yet according to specific contexts, the Snake’s dangerous nature can extend to significations that pertain to the notions of ‘seduction’ or ‘cleverness.’ Essentially both of these can be very dangerous.
We teach generally that what makes the difference between one type of danger and another is context. The thing to remember, however, and something that I like to insist on, is that context is not a holier cow than literalism or symbolism. Why? Because context is never uninformed. There’s always something that informs context, a particular premise or a predicament. Just as there’s bias in the symbol, there is bias in context.
Often context is informed by euphemisms. Let me give an example: I read the cards quite frequently for people who date. As the cards are open windows towards vistas that you don’t always see or consider, daters find them useful especially when it comes to saving time. No one wants to waste their time with a potential partner who may turn out to be useless or downright dangerous.
The premise for dating is often described by words that lend themselves to excitement and anticipation, such as ‘encounter,’ ‘the meeting of two souls,’ and ‘discovery.’ Imagine discovering that the other you encounter is the one… No one wants to imagine the horror scenario, when these words describe nothing short of an invasion, contamination, or oppression. ‘Let’s go on a date… I mean, a conquest.’
Some argue that because what we’re dealing with is not science, but rather, the interpretative arts, it’s hard to be precise when describing a situation just by looking at the cards, and then give counsel in accordance.
But the truth of the matter is that if you possess linguistic competence, the type that’s self-aware and able to deconstruct the system it functions within, you can get far just by looking at how images fall in between the cracks of language.
I often think of the diviner as being competent in the same way a computational linguistics scientist is, one who is able to code, decode, and analyse data. I’m actually quite amused that in programming we use ‘snake’ words, such as Python and Anaconda.
Something is always trailing your translation of the cards into the language you use to describe what you see. Knowing precisely when the Snake is dangerous, seductive, or neither, the latter simply because it’s anchored in euphemism, can give you quite the image to think about, especially when you need to hit the nail on its head, or eat the lizard’s tail.
A snake reading
Once a dater who sought my counsel got these cards: the Clouds, the Ring, and the Snake. I said the following:
This bond will only work to your advantage if you’re willing to perform the job of ensnaring yourself so that a myriad of things can come down on you like fog, like an invisible virus that spreads. Think about what type of snake you are: are you a cobra, an anaconda, a python, or something else? What is your strategy of dealing with clouds? If you don’t have one, then drop the dream of the everlasting thing, least it should turn into a WTF situation, with you poisoning your own air.
I think you can all imagine the person at the other end of this delivery. When the tentative and hesitant question was also posed, ‘so, the Snake is no good, then, is it?’ I understood the power of the euphemism when it gets positive discrimination through hope. The Snake is never good in popular consciousness, yet when it is hoped for, we can find just the words to express it. Most want to be the seducers, not the seduced, the poisoners, not the poisoned.
When the Lenormand jargon is at its worst in its reductiveness, all the cards can be about sex, just as all the bad cards can be talked about in a good way. I wonder when the turn to diplomacy occurred among diviners. When I grew up in Romania, no fortuneteller I ever met used euphemisms. We would reserve this language for politicians or the ones invested in pleasing the crowds. But things are simple, really. A Snake is a snake no matter the context, yet depending on what the context is, the Snake can acquire either a downsized or an upgraded proportion. It’s up to give it a color of our preference. A pink Snake can never be too bad, a silver Ring never too pretentious, and a white marshmallow of a cloud never too menacing.
The point is that we always work with and against the monolith of language. If myths exist, they are called words, double-forked tongues, and religious fictions.
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Cards: Lenormand fou pas mal by John Guidry, 2018, in my private collection.
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All 370 pages of words…
My Lenormand book in the Read like the Devil trilogy kept getting bigger and bigger to the point when I was questioning myself. But I like to think that it’s all good, even if the most verbose of the three volumes.
