Rana George - The Essential Lenormand: Your Guide to Precise & Practical Fortunetelling

Rana George was born in Beirut, Lebanon. For more than two centuries, the maternal side of her family has had an unbroken line of powerful and well-known psychics, seers, and mediums. Her spiritual quest has led her to many teachers who have helped her hone and nurture her clairvoyant (seeing), clairaudient (hearing), clairsentient (feeling), and claircognizant (intuition) talents.

Ranas Lenormand journey spans three decades. From an early age she showed signs of clairaudience and clairvoyance, and she began using her inherent abilities and a pack of Lenormand cards to give readings to friends, family, and neighbors. The little oracle of thirty -six cards was one of only five items she brought with her when her family was forced to flee the tragedy of war and immigrate to America in early 1988.

With her mothers guidance and the loving help of her family, Rana has worked as a psychic, a medium, a teacher, a mentor, a fortuneteller, and a card reader, giving counsel to clients for a span of thirty years. She has been consulted on the design of several Lenormand decks and has published many articles on cartomancy. A respected presence in the modern divination community, Rana has led multiple Lenormand workshops and study groups, and she was a main presenter at multiple tarot conferences. She teaches a Lenormand podcast series, a free seminar for all levels of readers. Ranas lifelong vocation is to inspire, guide, and help by putting the cards in peoples hands and helping them find the power to shuffle them well and deal them wisely.

Now living in Texas, Rana enjoys spending quality time with her husband and three boys while continuing to study and teach internationally. For more information, please visit Rana George.com.

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

The Essential Lenormand: Your Guide to Precise & Practical Fortunetelling 2014 by Rana George.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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First e-book edition 2014

E-book ISBN: 9780738739717

Book design and edit by Rebecca Zins

Cover illustration by Ginger Kelly Studio

Interior floral ornament from 922 Decorative Vector Ornaments 2009 Dover Publications

Interior skeleton key by Ginger Kelly Studio

Lenormand Oracle cards used by permission of Lo Scarabeo

Permission has been obtained for all examples, and all names have been changed to protect privacy.

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Llewellyn Publications does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

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Llewellyn Publications

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.llewellyn.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half-asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

Kahlil Gibran

Contents

Beginning with Lenormand

A Closer Look at the Thirty-Six Cards

Reading Techniques and Spreads

Introduction

For centuries, the study of divination was the domain of an elite rank of occultists; confronted with doubts and questions, the need for answers drew humanity to the mysterious and fascinating world of divination. This has been in practice from the beginning of humankind and continues to flourish today as printing and communication have made esoteric subjects more accessible to those with the curiosity and willingness to explore them. Divination takes many formsfrom astrology to numerology to sortilege to I Chingbut cartomancy has become one of the cornerstones of modern divination.

This book examines my personal journey with the Lenormand deck, a small pack of thirty -six cards used as a divinatory tool since the late 1800s in the salons and streets of Europe. This deck has made its imprint on history and helped shape my life. Reading, divining, and working with clairvoyance and other forms of esoteric study have been in my family for generations. We have records reaching back to the Victorian era, when the occult represented a normal form of studies included under religious mysticism. My ancestors delved into all forms of the occult and were well known and respected for their art. As far back as I can remember, I have always been able to predict events and see things that no one else could. The paranormal is normal in my family.

This book is a how to for an incredible tool and system that I have used for over thirty years. Lenormand has been in my life for as long as I can recall; for as long as I can remember, I have been the fortuneteller in my area. Growing up in a nation torn by civil war was no easy feat, especially with people calling me a witch and crazy. The funny thing is that those same people always came to me when they needed to know answers, and Lenormand has always been my main tool.

I have packed The Essential Lenormand with practical methods, approaches, and advice to help guide your own exploration of the Lenormand system. This book will give you the ability to navigate Lenormands intricacies. I will take you through traditional meanings and methods, along with many new insights and techniques acquired through my thirty years of practice. Not only will you discover the individual card meanings, but you will comprehend how they intermingle and interact with each other to produce clear answers. Of course, proficiency will be attained by repetition, time, practice, and experience.

My goal in this book is to teach and explain by using real-life cases. All the examples here come from real readings along with personal stories, although Ive changed the names to protect my clients privacy.

Divining and Symbols

We are all born fortunetellers, whether we know it or not. We make predictions all the time, from forecasting the weather to the outcome of a game or a movie ending. Divining with cards is as old as their first printing. Cartomancy arose from the novelty of cards, and their use in fortunetelling falls under the reading of symbols. We are surrounded with symbols in our daily life, and every small icon gets identified with a product, an act, a feeling, a person, etc. Using symbols to glimpse the future has been around since the early humans, who have gone from reading sand or the entrails of animals to tea leaves to scrying in water to reading cards. Humans instinctively read pictures and symbols; we cannot look at a picture or a symbol without complex associations. Unconscious thoughts and feelings get triggered by a picture or a symbol. Symbols surround us in our daily life; opening our eyes to those signs triggers our intuition and exercises our ability to read them and use these connections and synchronicities to affect and change our daily decision making.