Three cards, on where you are

How to read three cards

Take each position on its own first, then look at the pair the second and third make. The useful question is rarely what a card means in general. It is what you thought of the moment you saw it there.

A spread is kept once it is drawn, so coming back to this page shows the same three. Drawing again is deliberate, because a spread you can reroll until it flatters you is not telling you anything.

How the draw works

All seventy-eight cards are in the deck: the twenty-two of the Major Arcana and the fifty-six of the Minor Arcana, which are four suits of fourteen cards each. Pressing Draw three shuffles the whole deck on your device and deals the top three, so the same card cannot turn up twice in one spread. Each of the three has a little over a one-in-four chance of landing reversed.

The cards arrive face down. Turn them one at a time or all at once, and the reading for each appears as it turns. The spread is stored in this browser so it is still there when you come back; it is not sent anywhere, and clearing the browser’s data for this site removes it.

The three positions

• Where you are: the shape of the thing as it stands. The card is read in its general sense.
• What is in the way: the part that keeps it stuck. Every card has its own line for this seat, so the same card reads differently here than it does in the first.
• What would help: not what happens next, but something that is available now.

A reversed card keeps the same reading. The site treats a reversal as the same idea meeting more resistance, not as its opposite, so it is worth noticing, but it does not turn the meaning upside down.

An example

Say the question is a job that has gone flat. The Magician lands in the first seat: the materials are already on the table, and the point is noticing them. The Four of Pentacles sits in the second, which reads as a stability nobody wants to be the one to break, in work, money and the ordinary week. The Lovers comes up third, and the line there is to choose, and let the other option actually go. Read the second and third together and the spread describes a settled arrangement kept going by not deciding, with a choice sitting next to it. It does not say which choice to make, and it does not say how anything turns out.

Why not past, present and future

Past, present and future is the three-card layout most people have met, and its first two seats are fine. The third asks the cards what is going to happen, and a shuffled deck has no way of knowing that. Putting what would help in its place keeps all three seats about now, where what the cards prompt can be checked against your own situation.

The tarot began as a card game in fifteenth-century Italy, and reading the cards for meaning came much later, in eighteenth-century France. The positions of any spread are a convention rather than a rule, and choosing ones that ask answerable questions is a choice any reader is free to make.

Other ways to use the deck

For a single card that stays the same all day, there is the card for today, which also lets you look through the whole deck. When a question needs more room, the Celtic cross lays out ten cards on the same principle: how a thing stands, not how it ends. Your tarot birth cards are worked out by adding up your birth date rather than drawn, so they never change.