The Three-Card Reading: Omelet or Scrambled Eggs?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: At its best, preparation of a breakfast omelet is a carefully-planned affair: wisely-chosen ingredients (usually involving eggs, cheese and various fillings — herbs, vegetables, mushrooms, meats, etc) introduced in just the right order at just the right time. Scrambled eggs, on the other hand — although they may include the same components or anything else we find in the refrigerator that hasn’t gone bad — are . . . well, a scramble.
It’s common in the online tarot community for novice readers to bemoan the fact that their three-card spreads seldom jell in any meaningful way, and they are at a complete loss over how to interpret them. I sympathize with these neophytes because I like to say that such situations are where we as professional seers really earn our commission. As I try to help them understand the answer they’ve received, some of the examples they present have given even this seasoned diviner momentary pause because the cards all seem to be speaking a different language.
Three cards, even if they aren’t wildly dissimilar, can fail to provide enough substance to support a cohesive narrative for anything beyond the most basic instance, and the level of intuitive inspiration (aka “subjective guesswork”) required to bridge the gaps between their seemingly divergent aims and make them flow effortlessly is frequently beyond the reach of the beginner. Quite often the series will irrationally present the filling before the cheese and the cheese before the eggs, inviting a scramble rather than producing an orderly progression of egg, cheese and “adders” (supplements, not snakes). It’s worth noting that the five-card line doesn’t suffer as much from this inadequacy because it will typically have several cards that make sense in combination, suggesting a way forward in the matter.
But all is not lost. One effective way to deal with this is to use an alternate approach to the line reading that doesn’t move from left-to-right but instead focuses on a single dominant (or most topically relevant) card and treats the others as modifiers to the main theme. Thus, rather than a weak chain with broken or deformed links, we have a distinct “pyramid” with a pinnacle and a pair of buttresses (although the apex might be skewed to one side with the modifiers instead forming a “cantilever,” that’s of little consequence to the overall structure). Those familiar with Lenormand reading will recognize this “noun-and-qualifier” technique.
Let’s get a little fanciful with this and suppose that we’re doing a love reading and receive a prominent Water card in the draw. Bingo! Here we have the fundamental “egg” or binder that, along with the “cheese” provided by other inherently sympathetic cards, enfolds the rest of the ingredients; we might then figuratively “saute” those incidental adders so they blend more harmoniously with the foundation layer since there is still a chance they will be too “raw” to contribute without causing interpretive “heartburn.” (I don’t know about you, but I find uncooked mushrooms, onions and peppers in an omelet hard to digest.) The way to do this is through deliberation or, as tarot author James Rickleff once said, letting them “simmer in your consciousness” until they make sense. In my own experience, there is no tangle of cards that can’t be unraveled with enough contemplation and an intuitive leap or two.
This is an imaginative way of proposing that the three-card line can be read from more than one perspective, a subject I’ve addressed in greater detail in the following linked essay:
https://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com/2022/10/23/the-three-card-draw/
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on July 13, 2024.
