“A Coffin,” very near to the person, means, without any doubt, dangerous diseases, death, or total loss of fortune; more distant from the person, the card is less dangerous.
“The Nosegay” means much happiness in every respect.
“The Scythe” indicates great danger, which will only be avoided if lucky cards surround him.
“The Rod” means quarrels in the family, domestic afflictions, want of peace among married persons, fever, and protracted illness.
“The Birds” mean hardship to be overcome, but of short duration; distant from the person, they mean the accomplishment of a pleasant journey.
These are descriptions of a few of the picture-cards with which Mlle. Lenormand tells fortunes still, although she has gone to the land of certainty, and has herself found out if her symbols and emblems, and her combinations, really did draw aside the curtain of the future with invisible strings. We advise all our readers to possess themselves of her “Fortune-telling Cards” if they wish to become amateur sibyls.
The cup of tea, and the mysterious wanderings of the grounds around the cup, so long the favorite medium of the sibyl, seems to be an English superstition. It fits itself to the old crone domesticity of the Anglo-Saxon humble home, rather than to the more out-of-door romance of the Spaniards and the Italians; and yet the most out-of-door people in the world—the gypsies—use it as a means of discerning the future.
The cup should be filled with a weak infusion of tea—grounds and all—and then carefully turning the cup toward one, the tea should be carefully turned out, waving the cup so skillfully that the tea-leaves are dispersed over the surface of the cup. Happy the maid who can turn out the tea without spilling the leaves. If one drop of tea is left in the cup it will mean—a tear.
These grounds, or tea-leaves, have been used from the earliest days as the alphabet of the Parcæ. Before Chinese tea was brought to England the old fortune-tellers made some sort of a brew out of powdered herbs, which left their mark on the cup. We can understand how that sinuous serpent who has had so much to do with our destiny, as a synonym of evil, can be pictured or “visualized” by such a process; but where the sibyl finds the light-haired young man crossing a river, where she finds gold and where trouble, we must leave to the interpreters.
That most interesting of sibyls, “Norna of the Fitful Head,” used molten lead as a means of interpreting the unseen, and that can be done by our modern soothsayers.