Much excellent material has been written on the three-card spread, which is a favorite of many tarot readers. In the "fortune telling" school of reading, the three cards are usually past, present, and future. Many prefer body, mind, and spirit. This is the triplet that forms the basis of my own use of the spread.
In a triplet, there are always two opposing forces and a third that mediates them, or arises from them. In the three-card spread, I prefer to see the body and spirit as the dual pair, and the mind as the mediator. The body and spirit cards pick up many of the associations of yin and yang (see the previous installment on the two-card spread). The body is the unconscious, the root, the background, the past, the unacknowledged, the dark. The spirit is the conscious urge, the driving force, the impulse to change, the vision, the future. Both of these cards thus represent very primal things: the irresistable force (spirit) and the immovable object (body).
The new element in the spread is the middle card, the mind, the mediator. This represents the mental concepts and strategies we are using (or might use) to bridge the gap between body and spirit. This is the point from which we can exercise control over the situation. Our thoughts and strategies are generally more flexible than either the subconscious roots of the problem or the unrestrained exuberance of the spirit. Thus, I often think of the cards in the spread as problem, analysis, and goal.
As with other spreads, this one can be an "understanding" spread or an "inspiration" spread, which affects the interpretation of the cards. In either case, the first card (body/problem) represents the physical or unconscious roots of the situation. In an understanding spread, the analysis and goal cards reveal or clarify how we are responding to the problem. The mind/analysis card shows our conscious, verbal appraisal of the situation or the way of thinking we are using to address it. The spirit/goal card shows what we are really seeking, the flying hopes, the driving motivation. In an inspiration spread, these become the suggested method and expectation that might be tried to approach the problem in a fresh way.
This is a good point to talk about past and future in my style of tarot reading. I don't use the cards for fortune telling. I don't believe they have any special capacity to reveal what will happen to me tomorrow or next month. My approach is psychological, not predictive. But it is interesting to stop and think about time as a psychological phenomenon, rather than a physical one. Psychologically, the past is simply experience that has been absorbed and processed and lives inside us. Those experiences become what Jung called the personal unconscious. So the body/problem card is indeed the "past", for it represents all the experience we have internalized. That experience can then take on a life of its known, living in the darkness below our conscious attention, moving us in ways we do not fully understand. The first card, then, challenges us to bring some of those past influences back up into the light of consciousness, where we can look at their effects and re-evaluate their role in our lives.
In psychological terms, the future is experience that is anticipated. It is thus a construct of our imagination, our expectations, our hopes, and our fears. From these varied human capacities we create stories of what the future may be like, what might happen next. Although the future itself is powerless to affect us, this "psychological future", the stories we weave, can be powerful indeed, as influential as the psychological past. The human mind is made to take these stories very seriously, and to act on them as though they were true. But sometimes that can become a trap, if those stories are not serving us and well and we do not recognize that they are of our own making. The spirit/goal card depicts some aspect of the psychological future, and puts it "on the table" so that we can see its influence and perhaps reshape it.
The psychological present is consciousness itself, the thoughts we think, the experiences that are fresh, impinging on our awareness. In our conscious thinking, we have control, we have the opportunity to analyze and sythesize, to separate and connect. This is the very nexus of the experience of life. If an experience doesn't pass through this mental "clearing house", then it can hardly be said to exist at all. The mind/analysis card, as the psychological present, is a window on the conscious nexus, either its contents (what is on our mind at the moment), or its workings (the way we are thinking).
Whether the objective of the three-card spread is understanding or inspiration, it functions by bringing entities from the unconscious past, the anticipated future, and the processing mechanism itself into the conscious present, where we can rework them before returning them to their natural domains. This is a very "active" way of using the tarot. Interpreting the cards and saying, "x is in my past and y is in my future" has little value except as a preliminary to reprocessing both x and y and modifying the roles they play in your thought and life. The spread sets up "currents" that bring distant parts of the psyche into conscious view. This is why I often say that I "work with the cards" rather than "read the cards".
After continued practice with three-card spreads, I find I don't really verbalize the meanings of the different positions much any more. Past, body, problem, unconscious, roots, and so on, are just labels that point into a certain territory of the mind. Once you know the path in, the signposts become superfluous.
Often, as with the two card spread, additional insights can be gained by linking the three cards together in a story of some sort. The past/present/future labels are often especially useful in that context. Another possibility, based on my image of events from the psychological past and psychological future being processed in the nexus of consciousness, is to imagine the figures on the body and spirit cards coming into the scene depicted on the mind card, and imagining how all three might be transformed by the contact.
The three-card spread is the simplest one that makes use of the concept of a mediator, a center, a motionless point in the landscape of consciousness, from which the surroundings can be surveyed. This is a very valuable concept, one that I make frequent use of in other spreads. It corresponds to Tiphareth on the Tree of Life, and to Vishnu, the Sustainer of the Hindu trinity. The three-card spread is an excellent way to become comfortable using this mediator/sustatiner concept.
If one masters the three-card spread, one has all the essential resources and skills needed to read the cards productively. More elaborate spreads simply represent more elaborate structures for organizing life experience; they do not involve any profoundly different ways of using or understanding the cards. In fact, because the human mind cannot deal with large multiplicities well, one usually reads a larger spread by considering the cards singly, in pairs, or as triplets. Future installments will explain how I use these larger spreads.
It was easy to relate these cards separately to important aspects of my life. In my youth, I was a great overachiever, getting the best scholarships, advancing to ever greater heights of learning and success. The ace of staves drew me back into a recollection of those times, and the sense of freedom, promise, and fruitfulness I felt then. The nine of coins represents a situation familiar to many adults in midlife, a concern with material security for self and family, manifested in numerous compromises between career, home, hobbies, and so on. The five of coins is also a common motif: worry that the future may bring hard times, a loss of security or financial disaster.
In one of those uncanny surprises that the cards often deliver, the spread seemed to pull itself into a perfectly designed little scene. The suit of coins in the Renaissance Tarot is illustrated with scenes from the myth of Persephone, daughter of the agricultural goddess Demeter, who is abducted by Hades, god of the underworld. The five shows the point in the story when Demeter is lamenting the loss of her daughter, and the earth enters a perpetual winter in sympathy. She stands by a barren tree. The nine depicts the penultimate scene in the story: Hades and Demeter agree to share Persephone. Hades, accompanied by the barren tree of winter, tugs at her from the right side of the card, and Demeter, with a bough in full summer leaf, pulls from the left. The uncanny beauty of it is the way the "summer of Demeter" is amplified in the ace of wands, and the "winter of Hades" is amplified in the five of coins. One can almost see the body and spirit cards as the forces that tug at Persephone in the center.
On the left is past glory, the eagerness of youth in full leaf; on the right is the fear of failure and loss, like a shroud over the future. They meet in the conscious nexus, which seeks a compromise, a stable equilibrium between the two very different psychological forces at work. It's also interesting to note that in the story, the five comes before the nine, but their order is reversed here. This is a clue, perhaps, to see the mind/present card as a response to the spirit/future card, which indeed often makes sense psychologically.
In a "fortune telling" style of reading, this might be a discouraging reading. After all, the cards "predict" "loss" in the "future". But from a psychological standpoint, this spread is strangely satisfying. It is clear that my conscious mind (nine of coins) is doing exactly what it needs to be doing, keeping the summery memory of the past and the wintry worries about the future in dialog and negotiation. It is really striking how the center card seems to be "aware" of what is going on both to the right and to the left. Had it seemed to be "disconnected" from one or both of the other cards, the spread would have represented a challenge to re-examine all three elements and find a way to harmonize them.
As it was, the reading had a beautiful kind of tranquility to it, a self-contained little world in which the memory of summer birth and the anticipation of winter death stand counterpoised, mediated by the conscious mind and its reservoir of understanding.
Next installment: Tree-of-Life Spreads
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Copyright © 1998 Tom Tadfor Little