AUTHOR’S NOTE: This post is a condensation of a couple of my previous essays on the subject of the Lenormand “line” spread of varying lengths. If the five-card or seven-card line presents a whole sentence with subject, verb, object and qualifiers (adjectives and adverbs), and the nine-card, 3×3 array furnishes an entire paragraph, the three-card sequence could be considered a sentence fragment or “phrase” in which some of the grammatical structure is subsumed under fewer cards.

Generally speaking, a three-card Lenormand reading doesn’t offer enough “meat on the bone” for me to sink my analytical teeth into. The gap between two adjacent but radically different cards must be filled with intuitive guesswork: What is going on between them that isn’t visible via their normal interpretation? The product of this conjecture is frequently unconvincing, but I will attempt to offer a few constructive suggestions.

When reading the tarot, the imagination (gussied up as “intuition”) can go into overdrive, extracting hints and sometimes whole flights of fancy from an impressionistic take on a few details in the imagery. Lenormand does not offer the same degree of flexibility and nuance in assessing card combinations, since its meanings are not as open-ended or nearly as susceptible to blending using free-association from visual clues, nor are they as psychologically adaptable. About all one can do is “shade” one card with the influence of its neighbors when reading them in pairs or triplets, with the focus card imparting chromatic “tone” and the other cards supplying harmony or counterpoint to create a “chord.”

The focus card serves as the subject or “noun” of the sentence with the rest of the cards acting as modifiers. Common practice has been to establish the first card at the left end of the line as the subject of the reading, followed by descriptive adjectives and adverbs that bulk out the interpretation. But the middle card or the right-hand card is sometimes used, one acting as a “hinge” or turning-point in the narrative that creates a “before and after” dynamic and the other as the “end of the matter” with the previous cards providing developmental accents. Once we decide on which card in a combination is the “subject” and which are the modifiers, we can craft simple phrases that convey the essence of the story as we understand it. My personal preference is the “modifier-noun-modifier” model because it lends maximum flexibility to the perspective, allowing weight to be placed “fore-or-aft” as the occasion warrants.

Latin languages make this choice more straightforward; the French don’t say “le rouge livre,” they say “le livre rouge,” placing the noun before the adjective and thereby putting the essentials ahead of the incidentals. This is eminently sensible compared to English, but it should be kept as simple as possible. To use one of Caitlin Matthews’ examples, I want to see “the red book,” but not necessarily “the red book with the leather binding and the gilt letters on the spine.” It reminds me of one of the old grammar-school reading tropes so many of us “of a certain age” in the United States learned when we were very young: “See Spot run.” It never said “See Spot with the red collar and the brown patch on his face run across the newly-mowed lawn while Dick, Jane and Sally chase him and the sun shines in the sky.” Although the illustration does impart all of this detail, echoing it in the text would have added nothing to the learning experience and would have been information overload for a first-grader.

In this way, the “noun” becomes the “What” – or subject – of the reading (or in some cases the “Who”) while the modifiers act as adverbs (“How” or in what way) and adjectives (“Why” or to what degree). Generally, an adverb elaborates on the performance of an action by describing the “how, why, where or when” of its completion as well as its intensity, while an adjective provides insight on the quality of the event, which may shed light on the reasons for its occurrence and the extent of its applicability. For example, we could say “His speech is rapid” (adjective modifying the noun “speech”) or “He speaks rapidly” (adverb modifying the verb “speaks”). We could assume that the “verb” is subsumed under the focus card, which gives it a dual purpose: “What is this reading about and what is its developmental potential?” The “object” of the sentence could similarly be allotted to the card on the right as showing not only the “pull” of future considerations but also “where” the subject will land when the dust settles and the form it will take.

Staying with the supposition that cards to the left-of-center convey past influences while those to the right represent future conditions, and tying that premise to the Lenormand idea that cards to the left of the “focus” card denote a fading emphasis while those to the right describe one that is growing in importance, we might establish that, in a three-card array, the left-hand card is dedicated to maintaining the status quo – in short, a “no change is good change” attitude – while the right-hand one wants to take the matter to another level. We could invoke the idea of “arriving” and “departing” energies by supposing that the card that is “coming in” from the left is “digging in its heels” and demanding attention, while the one that is “moving out” to the right is stepping away from present obligations in search of a new focus. The card in the middle, acting as a “hinge” in the flow of events, is left to juggle these competing priorities and come up with a plan. For planning purposes, there is “lessons-learned” potential in the “past” scenario and “multiple-solution” fluidity in the “future” outlook.