Is there any rhyme or reason to the Petit Lenormand?

The Petit Lenormand is a deck of 36 cards used for divination. Each card has an image (much simpler and more straightforward than those of the Tarot) such as a dog, a book, a tree, etc., and each is associated with a number, from 1 to 36, and with a playing card from the 36-card piquet deck. (Modern piquet uses a 32-card deck, but in the 16th century it was played with 36 cards -- standard French-suited playing cards with ranks 2 through 5 removed. The modern piquet deck removes the sixes as well.) Here's an example of what the cards look like.

And here is a table of the Petit Lenormand cards according to rank and suit. The parenthetical signs after some of the card titles indicate which cards are generally considered to be positive or negative; those without signs are neutral.

How on earth was this arrangement arrived at? I've spent some time trying to winkle out hidden patterns, but so far as I have been able to determine, the combinations of number, playing card, and image are truly random. The only pattern evident is that positive and negative cards are not randomly distributed. There are no negative Spades or Hearts and no positive Clubs; Diamonds is the only suit to contain both positive and negative cards.

The pairing of the images with playing cards appears to be unrelated to the traditional meanings of those cards in cartomancy. For example, the Ace of Spades (traditionally "death") is paired with the Woman, while the Coffin is paired with the Nine of Diamonds (traditionally "profit"). The Queen of Spades, universally considered a card of ill omen, is given a positive meaning. Spades in general are considered an unlucky suit, but the Petit Lenormand associates Spades only with positive and neutral images. Black suits are traditionally masculine and red suits feminine, but the Man and Woman cards in the Petit Lenormand reverse that association.

Nor, if the playing cards are set to one side, does there seem to be any pattern in the numbering of the images. If the cards are listed in order from 1 to 36, no overall pattern is evident. Man and Woman are together, as are Sun and Moon, but that's about it. Traditional meanings of the numbers themselves also seem to have been ignored. For example, even numbers are traditionally considered feminine, and the number 28 particularly so because of its association with the moon and the menstrual cycle -- but 28 is assigned to the Man. The unlucky number 13 is given a positive meaning.

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The Petit Lenormand is inherently less interesting than the Major Aracana of the Tarot because its symbols are so simple. This is true even where there is overlap between the two decks. Where the Moon card of the Tarot is an enigmatic scene featuring towers, dogs, a pool of water, and a crayfish, its Petit Lenormand counterpart is just the moon (and an Eight of Hearts). On the other hand, the Petit Lenormand images are considerably more interesting than the (pre-Waite, non-scenic) Tarot pips -- a rather unpromising symbol set consisting of one sword, two swords, three swords, four swords, five swords, etc.

To me, a big part of the interest of such a system as the Petit Lenormand is that it represents a sort of ontology of life. Implicit in its intended use as a fortune-telling system is that any significant life event or situation can be represented by one of the cards or a combination of them. It's interesting to see what kinds of symbols are selected for such an attempted "alphabet of life." (Another such system would be the Alethiometer symbols of Philip Pullman's novels -- also a set of 36 simple images, with considerable overlap with the Petit Lenormand.)