TWO Ways Of "Counting By 9s" In 52-Card "Grand Tableaus" Using Sibilla della Zingara or La Vera Sibilla

A reminder that you CAN use all 52 cards, Grand Tableau Style, if you have Sibilla decks!

(NB this is a topic I’ve written about previously, but that time was primarily in relation to the French Sibylle des Salons).

We know we can do “big” readings and layouts with 36-card decks like Lenormand and Kipper; we use Grand Tableaus, so usually either in the piquet game format (8 x 4 plus 4 cards at the bottom as with the Lenormand) or the 9 x 4 format as we see with the Bohemian and Kipper cards.

But what about our larger decks, our Sibillas, like the Italian Vera Sibilla or Sibilla della Zingara ? Or the French Sibylle des Salons or Indovina?Are there ways we can read “Grand Tableau”-style layouts that utilise ALL 52 cards with them?

There are!

Now, we’ve already covered the Six Main Themes spread, deriving from the French Sibylle decks, and which uses 18 of the cards to read the main themes, with the rest laid out in a grid from which you use a ‘counting’ method to identify the most important cards and give an overview.

You can check an example of that one from earlier this month using Italian Sibilla cards here. Just click on “Read Full Story” to look back at the whole thing.

Coming Up: "Six Main Themes" With The Vera Sibilla Italiana

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So What IS “Counting” In A Grid And Why Bother Using It?

Counting in a grid is one of several ways you can get an initial overview of the ‘story’ a large layout like a Grand Tableau is telling, as well as revealing “hidden” messages. It’s not an essential part of reading Grand Tableaus, but it’s quite fun to do, and as we’ve seen, was a classic method used as a matter of course by 19th century cartomancers and fortune tellers!

With a grid as large as 52 cards, it does help to kind of ‘ground’ the reading as well, before diving in to reading the tableau in more detail, which can frankly be a little overwhelming.

We’ll be looking at reading 52-Card Grand Tableaus in more depth over the next few days.

But let’s take a look at initial counting methods first, with TWO different of ways of doing that…