DownUnderNZer
True Blue and I think I need a refresher on the Grand Tableux!
Learning Lenormand by Katz & Goodwin
DownwardSpiral
Ok you enablers......I have this book on pre-order : )
WooMonkey
I also wish it was out sooner! I wonder if it will be available as an ebook? Other books by Marcus and Tali have had that option.
TaliTarot
Learning Lenormand Printed and Headed Your Way!
Hi All
I'm delighted to say that the "Learning Lenormand" book has now been received at Llewellyn from the printers and is entering distribution via Amazon, etc., as we speak! If you have pre-ordered, particularly in the US, you may be receiving your book a lot earlier than the May 8th publication date.
You can also check out the contents and a substantial preview on the Amazon "Look Inside" feature.
Thank you for your support and interest!
Tali x
Hi All
I'm delighted to say that the "Learning Lenormand" book has now been received at Llewellyn from the printers and is entering distribution via Amazon, etc., as we speak! If you have pre-ordered, particularly in the US, you may be receiving your book a lot earlier than the May 8th publication date.
You can also check out the contents and a substantial preview on the Amazon "Look Inside" feature.
Thank you for your support and interest!
Tali x
avalonian
I was absolutely delighted to find that there is now also a Kindle version which was pre-ordered as soon as I spotted it.
daphne
Lenormand English book? Yay!
TinySpark
Does anybody have this book already? I am looking forward to reading it, but a preview would be nice!
SixDegrees
Does anybody have this book already? I am looking forward to reading it, but a preview would be nice!
Mine actually arrived on Friday (I had it pre-ordered from Llewellyn). Now that I've spent a few days reading it over, I have to say that I don't really like it at all, unfortunately. There are a few nuggets and techniques I thought were useful (the Keyword Kaleidoscope method in particular), but overall I've found many other sources to be much more clarifying than this book. While the core meanings that the authors provide for the cards seem standard enough, their original interpretations of some (the Tower as "vision," for example, or the Clover as "identity") would likely confuse beginners. The authors go to great lengths in stressing the differences between Tarot and Lenormand, but they also appear to develop an intuitive and imaginative approach to the Lenormand that seems far more appropriate for Tarot. They are much more lenient with card meanings than most other sources I've encountered, perhaps because their target audience is largely made up of Tarot readers comfortable with such an approach (they say as much explicitly). Most problematically, some of the techniques and ideas scattered throughout the book are just plain confusing. Having read and pondered the section many times, I still cannot tell the difference between "saboteur" and "silhouette" cards. The same goes for the difference between a card's "extended" and "secret" meanings. Apparently, this second distinction is based on a method published in one of Katz's other books on Tarot, but it is not explained here.
Truthfully, I think that this book would have benefitted from a more careful editor. There is a good amount of information repeated throughout. I lost count of how many times the authors remind us that the deck features playing card inserts because the original publishers wanted to produce something that could be used for gaming or fortune-telling. While this fact may appear in many places because one cannot guarantee that readers will consume the chapters in order (or even in total), I found it annoying. There are also a number of layout problems. A joke about the "scary" nature of the Grand Tableau, for example, falls flat because the referenced image requires the reader to turn the page (and there is no real indication that the image is being referenced in the joke). Fonts, headers, and spacing seem off in a number of places.
In my opinion, some content is introduced without the proper context or development. In their discussion of the meanings of the Ship, the authors note that one might look at this card on five levels of meaning: literal, simple, symbolic, extended, and secret...a method that is not even formally introduced until 40 pages later! There is no indication in the discussion of the Ship that this is a typology which will be addressed later on; I was left scratching my head as to what it meant at the time. Even common methods not original to the book are sometimes introduced without a clear sense of how they actually influence or lend structure to a reading. The authors suggest that readers generate "near and far" meanings for each card, for example, but this exercise seems to be in favor of coming up with a set of personal interpretations rather than learning to recognize more/less important influences in a given tableau.
Perhaps the most confusing section in the entire book deals with the authors' distinction between Lenormand as simile and Tarot as metaphor under the heading "How Not to Learn Lenormand." After discussing why the word "is" can be deceptive, the authors suggest that tarot/metaphor tends to create a direct mapping of a situation (something IS something else), and that Lenormand...does not? I'm still not sure, especially since similes also frequently employ the word "is" in creating equivalence ("is like" or "is as"). If the authors simply wished to articulate that meanings/associations in Lenormand are less fixed, deep, or intense than they are in Tarot, I wish they would just said so. Instead, I became very confused later on when they would state things like "[the Tree] is all about tradition, lineage, and ancestor wisdom," which seems contradictory to their major warning about direct equivalence and the word "is."
There are other things I didn't like about the book (including endorsements of dubious systems like General Semantics and Neuro-Linguistic Programming), but the above are really my biggest problems. I'm sorry to be so negative in my review, especially because I know one of the authors has posted on this thread and will likely read these comments, but honestly I'd advise skipping this book completely. You can easily find most of the good stuff in here for free on the web, and it will probably be presented in a more accessible manner overall.
Of course, I could be completely alone in this opinion, and I'm very curious to hear what others think...
Lee
Thanks so much, SixDegrees, for your thoughtful comments. I'm looking for Lenormand teaching materials which are coherent and clear, and it looks like this may not fit the bill.
Ronia
No, you're not alone. A long time ago I said it was a mess and I stand by my words. Everything valuable on Lenormand is already available for free on the web. Everything. I don't really see the need of any books, honestly.
