AUGMENTING LENORMAND CARDS

Hi everyone, welcome back to the channel. Thank you as always for tuning back in. If you're new here, welcome, I'm Layla, the Lenormand Reader, and I am one of the few people who focuses almost exclusively on the Lenormand deck.

In today's tutorial, I want to talk about the technique that is commonly known as augmenting. Augmenting is the idea of adding one or sometimes two cards to a card within a layout in order to clarify that card.

I have seen this mostly in the Tarot and so in this tutorial I want to talk about how we can apply it in Lenormand, and if there are ways around not using it, but still achieve the same clarifying purpose with Lenormand.

AUGMENTING IN A TAROT LAYOUT

So let's start with a simple Tarot layout. I'm going to draw three cards with the Tarot. And then we're going to look at what it means to clarify the card.

So suppose we get these three cards: the Hierophant, the Tower in the middle, and the Page of Wands.

So suppose we are looking at doing things a little bit differently. I think with the Tower coming after the Hierophant, there can be a change of the status quo. You know, the Hierophant is pretty conservative, really sticks with the law, but the Tower really shakes things up. It shakes things up, and the Page of Wands is ready for an adventure. So looking at these cards, it sounds like we need to change the status quo a little bit and do things a little bit differently.

Now, suppose we want a clarifying card for the Tower because we are wondering, what is it that needs to change? So we could draw an additional card on top of the Tower, like so. And that would be the clarifying card.

Now, I would read the Star reversed to suggest that perhaps there are some goals that we might need to change or give up on. Perhaps some things we had been pursuing are no longer fitting with the bigger picture of our life or our goals.

And so there can be changes in this regard. That is just an example. Of course, the way we interpret the cards is going to depend on the question at hand. The idea here is that we add a clarifying card on top of a card that we're not sure how to interpret or what it means.

Generally, I've seen one clarifying card. I have also seen two. The idea here is that the clarifying card is not part of the original layout.

And so we would pick it out, draw it after the fact, after we have done the layout, because after we've taken out the cards, we feel that we need more insight. So we draw the clarifying card on top of it.

AUGMENTING WITH LENORMAND: AUGMENTED LINE OF FIVE

Now, do we do this with Lenormand? So let's go ahead and draw a line with Lenormand and see how we would do this. So I've got my own deck here. Let's draw a line of five. So here is our line of five.

And perhaps we feel that we need to clarify one of the cards. I'm going to suggest the Clouds.

So in this line, we are actually getting a similar suggestion of what we saw with the Tarot. There is this idea of shaking things up. We have the Stork and the Whip. We need to find solutions here, perhaps breaking out of a certain thought pattern, thanks to the Key and Sun.

And with these answers, clarity, and insight, we're able to break away and possibly make some aggressive changes. So a bit like what we saw with the Tarot cards, there seems to be in this line, the suggestion of making changes. So I suggest that perhaps the Clouds could be clarified.

So in this sense, we would do just something similar. I'm just going to pick a card from inside the deck. Oh, how interesting. We got this Star in the Tarot reading as well. We do not have reverse cards in Lenormand. We do not need them. We read them in combinations.

The Star with the Clouds here can put into question some of our hopes, some of our ambitions, quite like what we saw with the Tarot. And in fact, the Star with Lenormand and the Star with the Tarot are actually similar cards.

So like we saw, we are drawing a clarifying card on top of the Star. Now, I want to tell you that if we are going to draw clarifying cards with our cards in a Lenormand reading, I feel that a good layout to do this is with a single line.

A single line of whatever number of cards, whether it's three, four, five, or beyond, I feel that the simple lines are the lines where it makes the most sense to clarify with a card in case you need them. And I'm going to explain this in a bit and I'm going to tell you why I think with other kinds of layouts, clarifying cards are not necessary. But in this case, we might draw a clarifying card on top of the card that we feel needs more insights.

Now, the way I augment lines in Lenormand is by including the augmentation in the layout. And the way I do this is by augmenting lines of three, five, or seven. And you might have seen this in the forecasts because I use an augmented line of five pretty often when I do the weekly reading.

So what I do is I take a line of five. And I augment it. And I augment it as part of the layout. So I include these additional cards as part of the layout. I don't wait after I have drawn the line of five to add the cards. I just include them.

Adding these two cards here, especially on top and bottom of the central card, helps us get more insights and more clarifying insights into the simple line. And the way we do this is by first, adding more insights, so instead of just having the row, we also have the column.

But it doesn't stop there. We can combine the cards with the inner diamond as well as the outer diamond. So having these additional structures and combinations as part of the line helps us get those additional insights that we might need if we just drew a line of five.

And here the difference is that we don't do it after the fact. We don't decide after we have drawn a line of five, we just decide that this is going to be what we draw from the get-go - a layout that I call an augmented line of five.

You could do it in an augmented line of three. That would be a simple cross. And you could also do it as an extended line of seven. I usually go for seven. I think seven is good enough.

So with these additional cards on the top and the bottom, we have additional insights into every single one of the cards in the line of five here in the central row. We have them above the central card. We have them in diagonal with the next two cards, and we have them in diagonal with the outer cards.

So that really covers all of the augmentations, the clarifications that we would need for any of the cards in the central line. Does that make sense? So for my part, I do it as part of the layout. I don't wait until after I have drawn the line of five.

And the reason this is sort of special within our model is because we do read the cards in combinations. We weave them in all sorts of different ways. In rows and columns and diagonals, and we even do things like reading corner cards.

Even when cards are not adjacent to each other, as long as there's some kind of interesting geometric connection between the cards, we might want to combine them.

So this was an augmented line of five and as part of the layout, the need for clarification is already fulfilled by adding a card above and below the central card. Now, let me tell you why with Tableau style layouts, we do not need to clarify cards. So I'm going to go ahead and do a medium sized Tableau and we'll get into this.

AUGMENTING WITH LENORMAND: MEDIUM TABLEAU

Okay, so here is a three by five, as in three rows of five cards each, and this is what I call an extended portrait. So the portrait is the 9-card spread, and then this extended portrait has two additional columns of three cards each.

So do we need to augment cards in a Tableau-style layout? And the answer is no, I don't think so. And I don't.

The reason is because we can connect the cards with other cards in a regular, orderly, geometric way, and these connections give us insights about the card that we're after, in the same way that we would draw a clarifying card on top of a card in a layout.

So let's take an example. Suppose we want to clarify what the Coffin is about. Now, in and of itself, the Coffin is a card of endings. It can also be a card of waiting and of things being on hold.

One way we can connect the cards and get more insights about them is not just reading what is directly next to the cards in the diagonals, the rows, the columns, but we could also find the knights of the card, and this can give us additional insights.

I've talked about the knights previously. The knights are the L-shaped card that is away from the card that we're after. And that would be three steps and two or two steps and three. This comes from chess, where the knight moves in this L-shaped form. So the cards that knight to the Coffin, in this case, are the corners of the three by five. They are the Clowns, the Bird, the Man, and the Fox.

And looking at these combinations, Coffin and Clouds, Coffin and Bird, Coffin and Fox, there seems to be a communication issue, right? There isn't much communication. On top of this, we have the Man, which highlights the relationship with whom there is this issue.

Now, the central card in the three by five, obviously, is going knight in these ways. And these are very interesting connections. And they're probably central connections because we have the Coffin at the center and these cards at the corner.

So we can not only read the corner cards, but we can include in them the central card. So in a three by five, this is quite an interesting geometric connection to look at. But the knights don't just apply to the central and key positions of the card. We can use them and apply them for any other cards.

So suppose we want to look at the Whip. What are the cards that knight to the Whip? In this case, we have the Flowers and the Snake. So we would connect the Whip and Snake and the Whip and Flowers in order to get an idea of what is going on with the Whip. And the knights also form an arrow. So when we look at the triplet, we can also get additional insights into what the Whip is about.

So when we look at the knights, the corners, and we can also look at the mirrors, which are the cards that are at the very farthest along the same line, then we can get additional insights into any card that we feel needs clarification.

And so this is how in a Tableau-style layout, we do not need to add more cards on top of the existing cards in order to clarify them. Because through different geometric connections, we can get more insights, more clues into what a specific card is about. And you can decide beforehand which connections you want to use in your reading.

And keep in mind that this is in addition to the many interesting suggestions we're going to get from looking at the rows, the columns, and the different diagonals that a card is part of. So really, just looking at the lines, the regular lines, rows, columns, and diagonals. There is already plenty to read around a specific card. But we still have techniques like the knights and the mirrors that we can use to get more clues about a card, assuming we are stuck.

So doing this is very particular to Lenormand layouts. And this is really part of what makes Lenormand special. I mean, the idea of reading cards in combinations and how it produces Tableau-style layouts really opens Pandora's box and opens so many possibilities of the things we can do with the cards. And honestly, I feel we are never stuck.

Even if the cards are mute or it's not clear what they're saying, we can always start to dig into all of the different combinations and the lines and other insights we can get from all of these amazing geometric connections to get moving with the cards and to get lots of insights from them.

So these are my thoughts in terms of how to augment with linear cards.

To recap, I feel that augmenting applies best when we have a single linear line. And again, I feel that with the augmented line of three, five, or seven, that I like to do, these two additional cards on top and bottom of the central card give us all of the clarifications we need because we can combine them with every other card in the central line.

And when it comes to Tableau-style layouts, like the portrait or the extended line of five and the Grand Tableau, then we do not need to clarify the cards and augment them by adding more cards. In all cases with a grand Tableau we can't, because we would have used all 36 cards.

And we don't need to because we can combine the cards in these interesting geometric connections. Be it through the knights, the corners, the mirrors. And that is in addition to the many lines, rows, columns, and diagonals that we can read the cards in. So let me know how you like these ideas. Let me know if and how you augment the cards in your practice. If it's something you do only with tarot or you also do with Lenormand and how you sort of do it and why you do it.

I would really be interested in your thoughts, your feedback, and the specifics of your practice. So I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial. As always, I look forward to your comments. Until next time, thank you for watching and take very good care of yourself.

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