Three of swords

Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 05 Oct 2004, and now archived in the Forum Library.

firelite	05 Oct 2004
I´ve been thinking a lot about the three of swords card lately - clearly it associates with Binah, where something is taking form, but with intellect too. My interpretation of the card - especially as I don´t use traditional decks - my favourite is Gill - would be... that the Three of Swords is a card of traveling towards *intellectual* rebirth. At the situation of the Three of Swords, old ideas and concepts have been re-evaluated and abandoned. The self is traveling towards the new point of view - the new throne - but has not yet found it. This renders the self to feel helpless. There *is* an abstract idea of what the new standpoint could be. One could say that it is seen in the horizon. But it has not yet become reckognizable, which causes the self to feel that there is no way to reach it. Passivity and the feeling of rootlessness occur. This results in sorrow, melancholy; possibly even despair, though the fact that this has more to do with intellect than emotion tends to keep the emotions less fierce. If a querent is in a Three of Swords phase of life, a good piece of advice would be to urge her to strive towards the goal, even though she does not yet know what it is; to study, to get rid of the passivity. Get rid of the passivity and process will occur - possibly slowly, though. What do you think?

Eco74	05 Oct 2004
This is a great take on the Three of Swords. The pain normally indicated in the card can well be explained by the pain of letting go of old ideas, or the pain in realising that what one thought before was all wrong and having to let go of old patterns in order to fully take in this new mental growth. It is a "breaking of the stalemate" aswell if one follows the numerical path going from the two (opposing ideas), to the three (the mental quickening or awakening) to the four (the rest and solidifying of the new mental realisation. Passivity is absolutely one of the ways of holding on to the old ways so letting go of it, and actively moving towards what broke the stalemate sounds like very good advice.

sarahbellum	06 Oct 2004
My take on this card is that it represents ruminating over the past and being afraid of letting one's heart open to the new. Those swords are skewering the heart and pinning it in one place. It is a Swords card rather than a Cups card because of the rumination aspect--wishing things were the same as they used to be, or not wanting to think about the future. My latest thing is to NOT try to match up the cards with other symbol systems, whatever they may be--astrology, Kabbalah, etc. Each of them stands alone, each of them is valuable. I have yet to find any one-to-one matchups between the various systems. But I like it that way--it's like being bilingual (or tri- or quatri- or whatever.) The problem I have with trying to do one-to-one correspondences with other systems is that I unconsciously start trying to "squish" the card's meaning a bit to fit the other paradigm. I have lately been feeling like this is unfair to both systems.

The Three of swords thread was originally posted on 05 Oct 2004 in the Using Tarot Cards board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Using Tarot Cards, or read more archived threads.