The Three-Card Draw

Although they may prefer to deliver insights that offer a deeper psychological or metaphysical perspective, tarot readers who perform very brief readings at venues like psychic fairs must often resort to exceptionally small spreads to keep the queue moving along. I’ve done a few such events and quickly discovered that my favorite layout, the Celtic Cross, simply wouldn’t work without some major pruning (which I soon undertook). Most sitters don’t come for a philosophical dissertation anyway, they’re more interested in hearing about their forthcoming “situation.” Trying to give them the “soup-to-nuts” life-reading treatment will have them fidgeting in their chairs in no time. I can almost hear them fuming silently “Where’s the beef?”

I very seldom use it myself, but the three-card pull may be the ideal approach for the 10-minute reading. The most popular one is the left-to-right “Past/Present/Future” line that provides a short “thumbnail sketch” of “what was, what is and what will be” (unless a different course of action is charted). This is no doubt the tale that the majority of seekers expect to receive, and a few follow-up questions can even be squeezed into the allotted time. It is also the one that is most “on rails” of the common examples (that is, it follows a prescribed track from beginning to end), and almost certainly won’t fit every situation. If the querent asks a routine “situational development” question, by all means employ it.

The second most prevalent scenario, at least in my own experience, is the “action/reaction/resolution” reading. I use a triangular array rather than a line for this one so there can be some “cross-talk” between the positions. This is somewhat similar to the “Hegelian dialectic,” with its thesis, antithesis and synthesis elements, except that it begins with a projected “first step” rather than an abstract intellectual premise. I like this one for more open-ended “what-if?” inquiries.

The third one I’ve encountered in practice slightly resembles the Elemental Dignity model, which has a central (aka “principal”) card that is increased or decreased in potency according to the “friendly” or “unfriendly” influence of two neighboring “modifiers.” However, beyond EDs, the principal or most significant card doesn’t have to be in the middle of the line; there are two other ways to look at this. One is to identify the seemingly most powerful card in the spread (for example, a trump card among two minor cards) and treat that as the focal point regardless of its position in the spread; the other cards are then read as amplifying detail for the main theme. The second method is the one used in Lenormand reading: the first card at the left end of the line is viewed as the “noun” (or what the reading is about) and the two following cards become the “qualifiers” explaining how that will manifest (think “verbs, adjectives and adverbs”).

I tend to use the “Past/Present/Future” layout in most of these situations because it “gets out of the gate” faster than the others, with less preliminary discussion about what I’m doing. The others are more flexible but for that very reason they are less efficient. Still, none of them requires much effort to fashion into a useful narrative and all will be serviceable when time is tight. The three-card pull is typically the one I use for my personal “daily draw” because it can show at least a little “movement-over-time,” an advantage the single-card reading lacks.