A Quiet Study of Reversals in Tarot
1. The moment it appears
You shuffle. You cut. You spread the cards across the cloth with that small, deliberate ceremony every reader develops in their own time — the breath before, the silent question held in the chest, the hands moving as if they knew something the mind has not yet been told. And then — there it is. A card lying face up, but with its head where its feet should be. The figure is inverted, the world tilted, the meaning suddenly slippery. What do you do? This little turn of cardboard has divided thoughtful readers for more than two hundred years. Some of the most serious students of Tarot treat reversals as a sacred second dimension of the reading, a voice whispering beneath the first. Others — equally serious, equally devoted — refuse to read them at all, and shuffle in ways that ensure no card ever lands upside down. Both camps love the cards. Both produce readings that leave the querent quietly breathless. So who, my dear, is right? Before we can answer, we have to look backward — because, as in so many matters of the soul, the present argument is older than we imagine.
2. A small history: Etteilla, the first to invert the world
To find the origin of the reversed card, we must walk back to 18th-century Paris, where a wig-maker turned cartomancer named Jean-Baptiste Alliette — known to the curious of his day as Etteilla — was inventing the trade of professional tarot reading. He is, by most accounts, the first person to publish divinatory meanings for the cards, the first to lay them out in what we now call a spread, and the first to assign each one a second meaning: the one it carries when it appears inverted. Before Etteilla, the upside-down card was simply a card to be corrected. After him, it became a teacher. This is no small detail. The very idea that a card speaks differently when reversed is the moment Tarot stops being a parlor amusement and becomes an oracle of nuance. Etteilla planted the notion that the deck itself has weight, gravity, an orientation — that which way the symbol stands matters as much as which symbol appears. Tarot historians, including the careful scholarship gathered at Tarot Heritage, credit him as the first reader to treat the reversed card as its own thing, deserving its own listening. But here is the question that has followed us from his time to ours, and that still divides serious readers today: when a card lands upside down on your cloth, is that the deck telling you something — or is it the simple physics of a shuffle?
3. The case against: the shuffling argument
This is where the skeptics — and they are not fools, my dear, far from it — make their stand. A card flips during a shuffle for ordinary, unspiritual reasons. A slippery finger. A clumsy bridge. The cards on the bottom of the cut turning quietly as you replace them on top. If you shuffle in a way that produces many reversals, you will get many reversals; if you shuffle in a way that produces none, you will get none. The “message” of the reversed card, the skeptic argues, is really the message of your technique. Writers like the author behind Incandescent Tarot have spelled this out plainly. She puts the deck away from reversals not because she doubts the cards, but because she believes the reversal is a mechanical artifact, not a spiritual signal, and that treating accidents as oracles dilutes the integrity of the reading. The blog Davidson Yeager lists five quiet, sensible reasons for setting reversals aside. The Angelorum blog argues, in the same gentle key, that seventy-eight cards are already seventy-eight worlds — why insist on a hundred and fifty-six? You will find the same conversation in the wider community. Online forums such as the long-running Tarot Forum host threads — earnest, patient, sometimes hundreds of replies long — where experienced readers explain why they have arrived at the practice of reading only upright. They are not lazy. They are not skipping the hard work. They are, in their own way, defending the cards from a kind of noise. And here is the part skeptics rarely get credit for: their position is not laziness. It is its own form of devotion. To refuse to read a reversed card is to insist that the cards in their upright form are already rich enough — that seventy-eight doors are quite enough for any house. Still. If you ARE going to open the second set of doors, you should know what is waiting behind them.
4. Pollack’s elegant definition
If you read only one author on reversals, let it be Rachel Pollack. In Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, her great two-part study of the deck, she offers what is probably the most graceful working definition we have: “A reversed card indicates that the qualities of that card have become blocked, distorted or channelled in another direction.” Read that twice, dear one. Blocked. Distorted. Channelled in another direction. Three little verbs that contain almost everything you will ever need. A reversed Fool is not the opposite of the upright Fool. He is the Fool whose spring has been frozen, or whose leap has gone wild and reckless, or whose innocence has turned in on itself as caution. The energy of the card is still there. It is simply not flowing the way the picture promises. Pollack illustrates this with the Fool himself: a failure to follow your instincts on the one hand — fear, over-planning, deference to others — and reckless wildness on the other. They appear to contradict each other. They do not. Both, she shows, originate in the same weakness: a failure to act from inside. This is a graceful framework precisely because it refuses to lie to you. The reversed card is not “bad.” It is honest. It says: something here is not moving the way it would prefer to move. And the moment you ask why, the reading becomes a conversation rather than a sentence. Pollack’s idea, however, is only one of many. The next teacher we meet was not content with three verbs. She gave us twelve.
5. Twelve doors and a wheel of phases: Greer and Bunning
Mary K. Greer’s The Complete Book of Tarot Reversals is the kind of book you should not so much read as live with — keep it on the table beside your deck for a few months and let it teach you slowly. Greer catalogs twelve distinct ways a reversed card may be speaking. She calls them, in her quiet, scholarly way: blocked or resisted; projected; delayed, difficult, or unavailable; inner and unconscious; “no” or “not”; broken through, overturned, refused; lacking; excessive; misused or misdirected; reconsidered, reviewed, renewed. What Greer is really doing here is freeing you. She is saying: the upsidedown card is not a single mood. It is a direction of inquiry. When the Tower appears reversed, she does not hand you a single sentence — she hands you twelve possible doorways into the same room, and asks you to try them one by one until you feel the click. Joan Bunning, in Learning Tarot Reversals, softens this further. She speaks of energy phases: a reversed card may simply be the same card in an early or late phase of its cycle. The Lovers reversed may not mean love has gone wrong. It may mean love is just arriving, or has already passed through the room and left a scent behind. The card has not changed its essential nature. Only its position in time has shifted. This is where reversals become beautiful. They do not give you less information than upright cards. They give you temporal information, emotional information, interior information. They tell you where in the cycle of a thing you happen to be standing. And yet — and this is important, my dear — even this beautiful set of tools can be misused. There is a trap waiting at the very heart of reversalreading, and the older the book in your lap, the deeper the trap tends to be.
6. The doom-and-gloom trap, and how the modern teachers escape it
Open many older Tarot books and the reversed meanings read like a small litany of disasters. Betrayal. Deception. Manipulation. Loss. Reversal of fortune. Even Arthur Edward Waite’s beloved Pictorial Key to the Tarot, the 1909 work that gave us the deck most of us now hold in our hands, often gives the reversed meaning as a darkened, suspicious cousin of the upright. Read his page on the Magician reversed, or the Lovers reversed, and you will feel the breath of the old fortune-tellers — half warning, half scolding. This is one reason many readers refuse reversals: they cannot bear to import this old air of doom into a reading meant to help someone. The modern teachers have set themselves quietly against this tradition. Brigit Esselmont at Biddy Tarot is the clearest example. “Breathing new life into reversals,” she writes, means using them “in positive and empowering ways.” A reversed card, in her hands, is not a curse and not a punishment. It is, at most, a tap on the shoulder: here is energy that is internal rather than external, latent rather than active, waiting rather than arriving. Benebell Wen, in her gentle and balanced way, makes an even subtler point on her blog. She suggests that whether you read reversals at all may depend on your mental disposition — the left-brained reader may find them clarifying, the right-brained reader may find them interfering with intuition. There is no failure either way. The same deck, she insists, will speak to both readers if both readers listen well. The Tarot, you see, is generous enough to be read in many voices. It accommodates Pollack’s poetry, Greer’s taxonomy, Bunning’s cycles, Esselmont’s optimism, Wen’s pragmatism, and the skeptic’s refusal. All of these readers are, in their own ways, telling you the truth. But none of them, in the end, can hand you the one thing that matters most. That gift belongs only to you.
7. Your own practice
What, then, do you do when that little card lands inverted on your cloth? I will tell you, dear reader, what I have come to believe after listening carefully to all of these voices. A reversed card is an invitation, not a verdict. It says: slow down here. Something in this image wants to be read differently. Sometimes the energy is blocked. Sometimes it is internal. Sometimes it is just beginning, sometimes it has already passed. And sometimes — yes, sometimes — it simply flipped during your shuffle, and the message lies elsewhere on the cloth. Your task is not to memorize one hundred and fifty-six meanings instead of seventy-eight. Your task is to develop the small, private courage to ask the card what it is doing upside down. To sit with it. To let Pollack’s three verbs, or Greer’s twelve doors, or Bunning’s phases run quietly through your mind until one of them feels warm, the way the right word always does. And if, after honest trial, you find that reversals interfere with the music of your readings — put them away. Shuffle so they cannot appear. There is no shame in this, and no spiritual failure. The most respected voices in the field disagree about reversals precisely because the cards themselves are gracious enough to be read either way. The Tarot, like life, will always offer you more than you can comfortably hold. The art is in choosing what to listen to. That is the whole secret, my dear. Begin where you are. Listen carefully. Let the card that lands upside down be a friend who happens to be standing on her hands today, looking at the world from an angle you had not yet considered. She has, you may find, quite a lot to say.