Where the divinatory meanings of the twos in a playing card deck are all about polarity, the threes are all about plurality. What started as a singular relationship is multiplied again and again, into a dynamic web of interaction where nothing can be perfectly isolated from anything else. The threes are about bounty, about plenty. They take the energies of their respective suits and multiply them into overflowing.
Three of Diamonds: The Bounty of Power – “Beneficence”
I strongly associate this card with the planet Jupiter. Like all diamonds, the Three is about wealth and resources. But these are not resources carefully and prudently husbanded. Nor are they resources foolishly squandered. The Three of Diamonds is about celebrating the resources we have at our disposal, and passing that good fortune along. It is a card of charity and grace, joyously expressed from a place of security. Think harvest festival, not bank vault.
When we interpret this card in terms of material wealth, it often looks like charitable giving; bestowing some of your wealth to worthy causes because you can afford to do so. With information, it can be freely sharing your good news with the world. With social power, it can look like acting as a social hub: making connections and introductions between interesting new people who would not otherwise have met.
The imagery Hutcheson associates with the Three of Diamonds is a gift or a fountain. Both of these make sense to me. A gift, because it is a selfless use of your resources to delight someone else. A fountain because it enriches the space it is in. Building a fountain trades singular wealth for beauty and cultural significance that the public can benefit from. Sometimes fountains are ostentatious, and even that ostentation has value. Patronage of the arts falls firmly under this card.
Three of Clubs: The Bounty of Labor – “Obstacles”
The Three of Clubs again multiplies the effects of its suit, but rather than multiplying wealth it multiplies work. I don’t see this as a negative card, necessarily, but it is a hard one. There is a truism that if a worthwhile task were easy, everyone would be doing it. The Three of Clubs embodies this idea. It’s a card about the grind.
The obstacles described by the Three of Clubs aren’t strokes of ill luck, they are necessary hardships that must be navigated to achieve anything worthwhile. One road may be smooth, and another stony. The Three of Clubs is about taking the stony path and smoothing it, flattening it, and paving it to create a road that will endure for generations. The outcome is worthwhile, but there is a lot of back-breaking labor that must be put in to realize that end.
Hutcheson associates this card with imagery of stone walls. I think this can be apt, so long as we don’t think of the stone walls themselves as the obstacles, but as the outcomes. A city may be surrounded by stone walls a thousand years old, but those walls are the end result of thousands of hours of planning, architecting, construction, and maintenance. This is a card that tells you anything worthwhile is achieved in sweat.
Three of Hearts: The Bounty of Intimacy – “Friendship”
I’ve associated the keyword “friendship” with the Three of Hearts, but that’s sort of a shallow reading of the card. This is a card of deep and intimate social support networks. That can take the form of friends, family, or lovers. In any case, the throughline is that these networks are both wide and resilient. You have a community of people who are willing to come together to support you in the event of hard times. People who you care about, and who care about you in turn. There is such a bounty of love in your life that it cannot be contained.
The imagery that Hutcheson associates with this card is a wish granted, or a full cup. Both of those are a little abstract, but come into clearer focus when we think of this as being a card of both plenty and relationships. You are not lacking in friends. When it comes to meaningful connections, “thy cup runneth over.”
Three of Spades: The Bounty of Strife – “Battle”
Where the Two of Spades was about technical, precise, carefully directed violence, the Three sees that structure dissolve. The Three of Spades is about violence in its most brutal and chaotic form. It is no longer a game won by the most skilled, but by the most aggressive. It’s not about technique, but about stamina.
Despite Hollywood depictions to the contrary, most lethal fights are over in seconds. Success on the battlefield is not about winning a particular engagement, but about being able to put down opponents with ruthless efficiency again and again long past the point of exhaustion.1
Hutcheson also associates the Three of Spades with “setbacks,” which I think is fair. But they’re not minor setbacks. This card embodies the kind of setbacks that upend the paradigm entirely, and plunge us into a violent struggle for our very survival.
This post is part of a series on playing card cartomancy. You can find the next post here.
- For folks interested in European martial history, there’s a really interesting rabbit hole to go down around the distinction between dueling and battlefield weapons. Weapons intended for facing a single opponent in controlled circumstances (smallsword, rapier, longsword, etc.) evolved to be long, thrust oriented, and develop highly technical fencing systems. In contrast, battlefield weapons tended to be heavier, more capable at cutting (and thus controlling arcs of space), and to be used with less finesse. ↩︎
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