Ksenia Elisseeva - Bruno Osimo, traduzioni, semiotica della ...

It is evident that as a rule the majority of cards have a single meaning.
Only in particular cases do some cards acquire special meanings or nuances,
and here context begins to play an essential role.
Cartomancy proceeds in the following manner. Pairs of cards are drawn
consecutively from the deck until the card appears that is the basis for the
fortune-telling and constitutes the person's card. The card paired to it is “next to”
and “close to” the person. The person's card (1) is placed in the center, the rest
of the cards are gathered into the deck again and reshuffled, and then the cards
are laid down. We shall omit the details of laying out the cards as essentially
unimportant and shall describe only the result of the distribution. Two cards (2,
3), and then four more (4-7), are placed on the person's card; they are what the
person has “on his heart”. The other cards are arranged in eight groups around
the center in the following way:
22
20, 21
24
23
27
25, 26
2, 3
1
16, 17 18, 19
4, 5, 6, 7
8, 9
10
12
11
13, 14
15
Nine cards obviously remain outside the distribution; they are discarded
and do not take part in the fortune-telling. Cards 8-15 describe the person's past
(“what was”), cards 16-19 describe the present (“what is”), and cards 20-27
describe the future (“what will be”).
14