I also learned I had missed two additional cards, Treachery and Hope, and I will cover these further below. The PDF of the complete deck, with the two overlooked cards, appears at the very end of the lesson, after the exercises. 

The key difference between Madame Lenormand’s deck and Hooper’s deck is, the Lenormand deck predominantly features objects. Hooper’s deck predominantly features societal concepts, like prudence, charity, religion, ruin, friendship, and old maids. These 55 cards come very much from an eighteenth-century mindset, and they were designed to be a game-playing deck, but you can still get an effective reading out of them. At least, they may serve as a good ‘clarifier’ deck for those times when your reading with another deck has you stumped. These cards seem to lend themselves much better to answering questions of community or political importance, rather than personal questions, but your experience may be different.

Some divination-card decks don’t have a ‘reversed’ meaning to them; they are meant to be read right-side-up. These are not those. These cards do have a reversed meaning. The one card in this deck which tipped me off to this fact was the ‘Heart’ card in the deck—it clearly has two hearts, one on fire with love and being watched over by angels, while its opposite direction-heart has snakes coming out of it, and is watched over by devil-tail-tongued dogs. There is one card in this deck which doesn’t appear to have a reversed meaning, because it’s printed sideways, that card being Tragedy & Comedy, but all the rest will have an upright and reversed meaning. (Indeed, Tragedy & Comedy may have been the name this deck was known by to many).

As there was no guidebook or list of meanings for these cards, I have had to intuit their meanings, both upright and reversed, myself. As you will see, the reprint quality of these cards is poor. At times, I’ve had to use a magnifying glass to discern details in the cards. I encourage you to download and print-out the set of cards from the link at the end of this lesson, after the exercises, so you can follow along in the list of meanings below. A magnifying glass may help. You may find additional meanings as you use these cards. As always, let your own intuition and the specific question you’re presented with be your guide. Given their eighteenth-century world-view and mind-set, you may find some of these cards irritating or offensive. Try not to let that bother you. I have included a paperboard-box design I devised in order to house your deck of Hooper’s Cards, along with the game-rules, as best I have been able to discern them, should you want to play with this deck in the manner in which the publisher originally intended them to be used.

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