DOUBLE LINE OF FIVE WITH LENORMAND

[EDITED VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION]

Hi everyone! Welcome back to the channel. Thank you as always for tuning 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 practice. So welcome to a new tutorial.

Today we are going to look at a simple line of five as well as a double line of five. This is a very practical layout. The line of five is my favorite of all of the lines between the one, three, five, and seven. I like the line of five the most. And some people read even numbers of cards, and if you like to do that, that is totally fine. My personal preference is to focus on an odd number of cards because I like the central card.

So in this tutorial, I want to look at the line of five first, how you can read it in different ways. And then we're going to look at a double line of five and also how you can read it in different ways.

LINE OF FIVE

So I've got Titania’s deck. We are going to lay out a line of five and use an example to illustrate.

So here we go, laying out these five cards. Okay, so here is a line of five. And we've got, as you can see, five cards, we have two on one side and two on the right-hand side, and we have a central card in the middle.

A line of five is a lovely layout or simple line for a quick answer, and also for quite a bit of focus. Of course, the longer the lines, the more detail, but also it becomes trickier to put the whole thing together. So I find that when it comes to the simple lines, the line of five does a really good job of balancing the two and that is being short and focused and also offering some detail.

So with a simple line of five like this, and in fact, any line, the typical thing to do is to read from left to right and to string the cards together. We typically do it by pairs and then we add to the pair or we string the next pair.

So for example, we would read the Key and Road. And then the Road and Scythe. And then the Scythe and Letter, and then the Letter and Woman.

Oftentimes doing this does a really good job of putting the story together. It is not often that you need to combine the cards into one whole. And combining the cards into one whole is often done at the level of the pair or the triplet.

Beyond that, it becomes really tricky to merge all of the cards into one meaning and instead what ends up happening is that we string the cards like beads of a necklace as they say and like words of a sentence.

So in this example, we have the opening of a path that comes through. It involves changes and it involves news with a woman or communication with a woman.

Now, the Scythe being the central card, I think, has quite a lot of weight on a reading. I like to focus on the central card. I think it offers focus and some kind of weight. And it also often offers the theme or the key takeaway or the key event that is at hand in the context that we're asking about.

So the Scythe is very much a card of separation and partings. We see it after the Road and we see it before the Letter. So it seems that there is a ‘declaration of independence’. It points to this idea of separation of making changes.

The Letter with the Woman can refer to contact that we reach out to the Woman or perhaps we receive news from this person. It can go both ways. This is going to depend on the specifics of your situation or the person that you're reading for. But that is pretty straightforward.

The way we would read the cards is by stringing them one after the other into pairs into triplets and beyond to come up with an idea of what's going on or a story about what's going on and then focusing that story for the question that we are asking. And we can focus on the central card for support for help for perhaps a focus or a key takeaway.

Now, another way we can combine the cards in a line like this one, and in fact, in any line, is to go from the outside cards to the inside ones or vice versa. So we would read the Key and Woman as a pair and in this case it suggests that there is inside or support or a green light that comes from this person.

And we can also read the outside cards as a pair, so the Key and Scythe and the Woman and Letter. So we can get a lot of different insights by looking at the cards in different ways.

And in fact, in any line, it is also possible to go from the outside cards to the inside ones or vice versa. So we would read the Key and Woman as a pair, and in this case it suggests that there is inside or support or a green light that comes from this person. We can then read the next two cards, the Letter and the Scythe. In this case, the Letter points to news of parting, news of travel, or perhaps news that is coming or being sent.

This really aligns with what we read with combining the cards from left to right. Often, the cards that we read on the outside, the outer cards, and the inner cards, when we pair them together, most of the time, they confirm what we already read in the line when we strung the cards and pairs and beyond. But sometimes there are cards in outer pairs or inner pairs that can add some insight to what we are reading and give us additional ideas. It depends on the cards.

So these are additional techniques that you can use with a simple line.

You can also parse the line in different ways. And by parsing, we mean grouping the cards in different ways. The different groups can suggest different things or suggest different areas of a reading.

A very common way to parse any line is through a past, present, future. So you would have a past card, a present card, or several cards, and a future card. In the case of a five-card line, we can parse the cards in different ways.

We could do one card for the past, three cards for the present, and one card for the future. This is not the common way to do it, because we don't need that much information about the present. Instead, we need more about the future. We could also do two cards for the past, one card for the present, and two cards for the future. That is also an option.

We can also do a different approach altogether. You might not want this kind of symmetry. You might do one card for the past. You might do two cards for the present and two cards for the future. It is really up to you how you parse the cards when it comes to a past, present, future. You just want to plan this ahead of time.

So decide before you do your line, how you are going to parse the line, and then apply the technique. You don't want to do it after you draw the cards, because it could bias your interpretation.

So a past-present-future is a very common way of dividing a line. This aligns with the idea of earlier to later.

Ryan Edwards, the author of the Maybe Lenormand, which I reviewed, has a really nice daily reading with the five-card line. He proposes two cards for earlier in the day, like the morning part of the day, and three cards for the later parts of the day. I believe it's two cards earlier and three cards later, not the other way around. So as a daily reading, it's kind of fun to see what happens early in the day and later on in the day.

In general, the earlier parts of a Tableau layout or a line, the cards on the left, tend to point to the earlier aspects of a story, and the cards towards the right tend to align with the later parts of the story. This just follows this logic that we tend to read from left to right. But it doesn't always have to apply.

And the past, present, future, or the technique of reading the earlier versus the later parts of a line or a Tableau, doesn’t have to be used for every reading. If you're asking about something that is entirely in the future, it is not always the case that the earlier cards are about the past. The whole spread can be about the future because your question is focused on something happening in the future.

So again, the kinds of techniques that you want to use in a line are thing you need to think about before you do the reading to decide which ones you're going to apply for the reading. And then once you've dealt out the cards, you apply them.

But you don't decide after you've dealt out the cards, because it could bias your interpretation. So that is for a simple line of five. Let's now move on to a double line of five.

DOUBLE LINE OF FIVE

A double line of five is simply two lines of five. I'm just going to push this first line up and we are going to draw another set of five cards underneath it.

So here is a double line of five. As you can see, that's quite a few cards. That is a big jump from a simple line of five. We have 10 cards here, and obviously there's going to be a lot more to read.

We're going to read both lines, the top line and the bottom line, and we can read them in the same ways using the range of techniques that I talked about with the line of five, we can also apply it to the second line.

On top of the individual rows, you can see that we have five columns that we can read. We can read each of these as pairs, so we'd have the Key and Book, the Road and Heart, Scythe and Garden, Letter and Whip, as well as the Woman and Clouds.

This is adding a lot more insights and a lot more information to the reading from these additional five cards. So when we're doing this, we might have a focus on the middle cards because they are central in each of their lines.

And so when we read them as a pair, they could have a central focus. In this case, the Scythe and Garden really add to what we saw earlier, the idea of parting and separation, this can be moving away from a certain environment.

So that could be the focus for the reading and the cards around it can give us additional insights, like we read in the individual line of five. Something else that we can read in a double line of five are the corner cards. So the Key and Clouds would be one pair of corner cards and the Book and Woman would be another pair of corner cards.

Now, in this case, because we just have two lines, if we combine the corner cards along the same side, it would just be one of the columns. But if we had more lines between them, the corner cards at the top and bottom of the same side can actually add additional insight, but not in a double line. So how you pair the corner cards in a bigger Tableau, you have flexibility.

You could do them at the diagonal, like I typically do them. You can also do them top and bottom and you can do all four. All the combinations. So the corner cards, they tend to create a context. They tend to box the reading. They give an outer boundary to the reading. And so you might find additional insights into your answer with these cards by looking at the corner cards.

Something else that jumps out is the diagonals in a double line of five, not just the columns and the corner cards. Diagonals can be good for additional detail. This is one more thing that I can add to this.

You will find that all of these details tend to confirm what you read in the main lines, the main lines here being the two rows, and then additional insights from the columns. The diagonals tend to add confirmation and not so much inside.

Again, it depends on the cards. Sometimes you can dig out some new insights from the diagonals and the corner cards. In the same way that we read from left to right in a simple line, we do the same thing with a Tableau, a double line, or a triple line, and the bigger spreads. So these cards can be the earlier parts of a reading, or a situation, and these cards are tending towards the later parts of the reading.

So here are the different lines and structures you can read in a double line of five. Although the rows tell much of the story, you can decide which lines and structures you focus on for the reading.

• Rows
• Columns
• Diagonals
• Corner cards
• Focus on the central cards

And as with the line of five, if you're doing a past present future or you're doing earlier and later in the day, like Ryan Edwards’ approach, you can also apply these techniques with a double line of five. It's the same idea as with a line of five. You just have two lines instead of one.

So for past, present and future, you could do this one as the past, and this one has the future and everything here as the present, which tends to be a bit of an overkill. It's not necessary. We could read these as the past.

These two as the present and these four as the future, that is also an option. And like we said, if you want to parse them differently, that is totally flexible. Without having a symmetrical line down the middle, it might also work for you. So you might do this as the past, these four as the present, and these four as the future. Or any other way you would like to parse them.

And with this morning/afternoon/evening setup that Ryan Edwards uses for his daily reading using a line of five, you could also apply it here as well. You might do these cards as the earlier parts and these cards as the later on.

Ten cards for a daily reading is a bit much. You might do such a reading for something like a week, possibly even a month. And that should be pretty interesting. It should be fun to do a weekly reading with ten cards.

Another way I like to use the double line of five (and yes, this applies to the line of five as well) is to parse the cards as a relationship spread. So there would be four cards that point to person one, and these four cards that point to person two.

And in between, you can suggest any number of things here. It can be some advice to the person getting the reading, asking about the relationship, it can also be something that happens between the two of them. So I think that parsing the cards in this way is quite helpful.

Yes, you could do it with a single line, like here, this would be person one, person two, and something happening between them or some advice to take away. But again, when we have a double line, we have more insight, more information, which is richer for something like a relationship question.

Another way we can use this parsing is in an options or choices spread. So you would have choice one, and this is choice two. And you could get some insights from either one, decide which choice is better. And of course, both of them can be good, but then you look at the details of the cards and you get insights. And in between here, it can be some advice and some additional takeaways for you to consider as you make this choice.

Now, when we have the cards parsed like this, notice that we have a little square. So there's also quite a bit to read in here. We have the two lines (that would be for choice one or person one). So we would have the two lines, the two columns, and we can also pair them diagonally.

And we would do the same here. The two rows for person two or choice two, second row, column one, column two, and then the diagonals. So this is also a way we can use a double line of five.

So the different ways we can use a double line of five include:

• Earlier vs. later
• Past present future
• Relationships
• Choices

As you can see, a double line of five is really a Tableau-style layout. And what is a Tableau-style layout? It's a layout where we can read rows and columns and diagonals, and what happens in a Tableau style layout is that a single card is used in different lines.

It is not like a tarot reading or an Oracle reading where one card is dedicated to one position of the spread (like a past, present, future outcome), but instead here, a single card is read over and over as part of different lines and columns. I encourage you to use it to start building your ability to do lines, repairs, triplets, and to string cards together.

With a double line of five, as with a double line of three, you begin to apply these Tableau style interpretation techniques where you find different ways of connecting the cards.

And often the way this is done is by geometric connections, geometric relationships. So they tend to be straight lines, rows and columns and diagonals and corners and things like that. And you can be creative.

You might want to read the knights, for example. The knight is an L shape away from a card. This follows the chess move for the knight.

So this would be the Scythe knights to the Book or the scythe knight to the clouds. The Woman knights to the Garden, the Whip knights to the Road. And so on. So there are all sorts of connections that you can make with geometric relationships between the cards in a Tableau-style layout.

Again, these techniques tend to confirm what we already read in the main lines, but you can always look into them to get some more insight. And I find that an example that I like to use with these additional ‘secrets’ that we can use to get more insights out of a Tableau-style layout is when a card is not really clear.

For example, for the Letter, if we wanted to know what the Letter was about, we can knight it to the Heart, and this could actually suggest a love letter or some good news.

If we knight the Book to the Scythe, it can mean a revelation and things like that. You see, so when you get stuck with any one card, you're not sure what it's referring to or what is the character of that card. You could try knighting it or connecting it with other cards using geometric patterns so that you pick up some ‘secrets’.

But again, the main storylines are going to come through the main rows and the columns and the corner cards often help to set the stage for your reading and the central cards tend to focus on a specific area.

So experiment with the line of five and the double line of five. These are a step beyond the regular three-card reading that many of us get stuck on. It really helps to build your combination skills and it really helps you to start putting a reading together through these different connections that you can make with the cards. And this is what Tableau-style layout is about.

So let me know how you've enjoyed this tutorial. Let me know how you've enjoyed the spread. And let me know if you already use it or if you will. As always, I look forward to your comments.

Until next time, do check out the many links that I have for you in the description box and explore the many resources that I have on the website. Thank you so much for tuning in and until next time, take very good care of yourself.

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