3 Card Draw-How do you read them?

Whenever I ask my cards a question, I usually draw three cards to answer but Ive never been sure how to read them. Is it a past-present-future? Do all three tell a story? Someone mentioned the middle card is the querent's feelings.

I know I should use my intuition, and I usually see them all telling me a story, but I need a little help figuring out out to read my answers.

How do you read a three card draw?

It's your reading, so you put the intention out before you draw the cards. If you want to read them as past/present/future, then say that's how you're going to read them. Or you could read them as a story starting with the first card and ending with the last one. You could see them as 3 facts about the situation or 3 pieces of advice.

Some of the ways of interpreting 3 cards can be found over in Tarot Spreads at Collecting Your Best, Brightest, Most Exciting Three Card Spreads!

Floats with what I'm doing, really. Sometimes it's "past/present/future" sometimes it's "what's the situation?/What do you need to know?/Advice" sometimes it's "situation/action/outcome" Whatever works, really.

If i simply pull 3 cards then i interpret them in corellation to each other but if ask past present future then i get cards for this scheme. It depends on how u are used to juggle with your cards and how to interpret them. The cards are answering to your questions and they get in the positions u put them.
Lets say i pull 6 cards in line, i interpret them from left to right and sometimes in mirror as on the lenormand. Sometimes i look at the middle card and get a general idea for the issue and what revolves around that card. And at times i ask clarifiers and base cards when i need more details.
Play with your cards but dont forget to give them "orders"- u want to know the future then ask cards for the future and u will receive it because the cards are listening to you.


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Thank you, rwcarter, cbiz83, and Puffette! You all read them differently according to how you decide to see their position, and have basically told me that I do the same and my intuition. Because I do read them as a story, perhaps it's my job to then mediate and see what kind of advice each card is telling me or what it represents. This is why asking the right, specific and detailed question is important!

Sometimes I read the central card as the main statement, modified by the flanking cards, but there is no hard and fast rule.

I like drawing three cards without predetermined positions especially when the querent has no particular topic. Such readings can be very revealing and fascinating, but they also tend to be more challenging than doing spreads with labeled positions. You need to be rather intuitive to sort things out, as a rule. Not recommended so much for beginners, but generally a good exercise, to be sure.

elle_muse said:

Whenever I ask my cards a question, I usually draw three cards to answer but Ive never been sure how to read them. Is it a past-present-future?

Click to expand...

It is if you are using the past-present-future spread. It isn't if you are using other three-card spreads.

One of my faves is this: 1) What are you running away from? 2) What are you running towards? 3) Why are you running?

Another frequent one is body-mind-soul (it has a four-card variation: body-mind-heart-soul).

Another one I use sometimes is turning the three cards into a single sentence.

One of our members turned many of the three-card spreads into a booklet ... I forget how you go about getting it, now.

My readings have for years been almost exclusively 3-card RWS with no Rx and no set positions, revealed from left to right. The Tarot works best for me when given this structure, remaining as open to interpretation as possible.

If positions are somehow/intuitively suggested as the cards are flipped over, which sometimes happens, then I'll go with that... But depending on the question, it may just as easily be a timeline/linear "story" or an overall "picture". The cards occasionally reverse or reconstruct a question, too, if something else apparently needs attention.

I don't know until I see (and feel) it happen.