Tarot Glossary
Cartomancy
Cartomancy is the practice of reading cards for insight or divination, using any deck at all. Tarot is one branch of it; reading with a standard 52-card playing deck, with Lenormand, or with oracle decks are others. The word names the method, drawing cards and interpreting them, rather than any particular set of cards.
Cartomancy and tarot are not synonyms
Every tarot reading is cartomancy; most cartomancy is not tarot. The distinction matters because the traditions have genuinely different structures and reward different reading habits. Using "cartomancy" as a fancier word for tarot loses the only thing the term is actually useful for: naming what the card systems have in common, so you can see clearly where they diverge.
Playing-card cartomancy
A standard 52-card deck is read through a set of correspondences that map neatly onto tarot's suits: hearts to Cups (emotion), clubs to Wands (energy and work), spades to Swords (conflict and thought), diamonds to Pentacles (money and the material). Numbers carry the same progression Ace through Ten, and the Jack, Queen, and King stand in for the court. What is missing is the Major Arcana, so a playing-card reading tends to stay at the level of everyday circumstance rather than reaching for archetypal themes.
Lenormand
Lenormand uses 36 cards with plainly literal images (a ring, a letter, a coffin, a fox) and is read very differently from tarot. Cards are interpreted almost exclusively in combination, in pairs or lines, and the tradition is much more direct about naming concrete events and people. A Lenormand reading typically produces sentences; a tarot reading typically produces a description of a situation. Readers who work in both usually keep the methods strictly separate.
Cartomancy in practice
- If you own a deck of playing cards, you can practise the suit-and-number half of tarot without owning a tarot deck at all.
- Do not mix systems inside one reading. A Lenormand method applied to tarot cards produces confident-sounding nonsense.
- When a source says "cartomancy", check which deck it means: the meanings will not carry across.
- Reading the Minor Arcana through suit and number is essentially playing-card cartomancy, which is why that skill transfers both directions.
The common misreading
Often said: Cartomancy is an older or more authentic form of tarot reading.
More accurately: Cartomancy is the broader category, not an ancestor, the word covers tarot along with every other card-reading tradition, and different branches emerged at different times for different reasons. Divinatory use of playing cards and of tarot both took hold in Europe around the eighteenth century, well after tarot decks themselves appeared as a card game in fifteenth-century Italy. Neither branch is the origin of the other.
Cartomancy: frequently asked questions
What is cartomancy?
Cartomancy is reading cards for insight or divination, whatever the deck. It covers tarot, standard 52-card playing decks, Lenormand, and oracle cards. The term describes the practice, randomising a meaningful set of cards and interpreting the result, rather than naming a specific deck or tradition.
Is tarot a form of cartomancy?
Yes. Tarot is the best-known branch of cartomancy, but it is one branch among several. Every tarot reading is cartomancy; a great deal of cartomancy (playing cards, Lenormand, oracle decks) is not tarot.
Can you read tarot with playing cards?
You can read the equivalent of the Minor Arcana, using the standard correspondences: hearts for Cups, clubs for Wands, spades for Swords, diamonds for Pentacles, with Jack, Queen, and King as the court. What a 52-card deck cannot give you is the 22 Major Arcana, so readings stay closer to everyday circumstance.
What is the difference between Lenormand and tarot?
Lenormand has 36 cards with literal imagery, read almost entirely in combination and phrased as concrete statements about events and people. Tarot has 78 cards with symbolic imagery, read card by card as well as in combination, and describes situations more than outcomes. They are separate systems, and the methods do not transfer.
Put it to use
The vocabulary is only worth much once you are reading with it.