The Threes

The Threes are the third card of each suit of the Minor Arcana. One is a seed and two is a meeting; three is what the meeting produces. So the Threes are cards of first growth: a plan beginning to work, a group forming, a feeling shared — or, in the harder suits, the first real consequence of what has been set in motion.

What the number means

Three is the number of a first result. Something now exists that did not before, though it is young and still growing. Most readers read a Three as early fruit rather than a finished harvest.

• The Three of Wands is enterprise under way: plans sent out, the first ships coming in, looking further ahead.
• The Three of Cups is celebration: friends raising their cups, a feeling shared in company.
• The Three of Swords is sorrow: the heart pierced, a painful truth understood. It is the one Three whose first fruit is hard.
• The Three of Pentacles is skilled work done together: the craftsman, the plans, a project that starts to show.

The pattern is the same in each — something that began now has a shape — but the suit decides whether that shape is a celebration, a venture, a piece of work or a heartbreak.

In the Golden Dawn

The Golden Dawn placed the Threes in Binah, Understanding, the third sephirah of the Tree of Life. Book T says the Threes "generally represent the realization of action" — "action definitely commenced for good or evil". It is the moment a plan stops being an idea.

Each Three takes the middle ten degrees (10°–20°) of the cardinal sign of its element, the second decan.

Crowley's Thoth deck calls them Virtue, Abundance, Sorrow and Works. Binah is also the sephirah of the great mother in Kabbalah, which is one reason writers see the Threes as cards of giving birth to something.

The Major Arcana of the same number

By number the Threes echo III, The Empress — fertility, abundance, things growing. Readers who add the digits of larger numbers also link them with XII, The Hanged Man, and XXI, The World. This is a modern numerological link rather than a Golden Dawn one; it is most useful when The Empress appears beside a Three and the theme of growth is doubled.

Several Threes in one spread

The traditions gave each count its own meaning:

• Waite: four Threes mean "progress", three "unity", two "calm". Reversed, four mean "great success", three "serenity", two "safety".
• The Golden Dawn's Book T: four Threes are "resolution and determination", three "deceit".

The lists do not agree, so many modern readers keep to the broad sense: several Threes suggest a time when matters are taking shape — projects getting going, groups and collaborations forming — and the work now is to tend what has started.

In a reading here

When a spread is interpreted here, two, three or four numbered cards of the same rank are picked out as a pattern and given Waite's meaning for that number and count. A pair is noted only in a spread of seven cards or fewer, where it is rarer and says more.

Related

• Numbered cards (pips)
• The Twos
• The Fours
• The Empress
• Three of Swords
• Tree of Life