Tag: how to read reversed tarot cards

“And then, for fun, he pretended that he was climbing down the wall. He did it almost instantly in his mind, convinced himself against the best evidence of gravity.” – Ender’s Game by Orsen Scott Card

I read Ender’s Game several years ago. It reminded me of the movie version of Heinlien’s Starship Troopers, but with a completely unnecessary, gratuitous final chapter. The final chapter blew it in my opinion, but like everyone else, my favorite parts where the zero gravity games and Ender’s first person descriptions of spatial orientation in that environment.

Apply that thinking to Tarot.

When Ender was floating around in zero gravity, did it change him as a person when his feet pointed in a different direction? Does the meaning of card change if you sit facing north instead of south? The Earth moves roughly what? 20 miles per second around the sun. If a card’s position in physical space really made that much difference in a card’s meaning, the meaning would change second by second wouldn’t it?

Maybe it does, but that’s for another day.

If a client is sitting directly across from me, every card that is upright from my point of view is reversed from theirs, and vice versa. A sideways card to both of us would be perfectly upright to someone sitting to the side. Early in the book, as he first travels from Earth to space, Ender realized that the names of surfaces and their function is determined by gravity. Gravity is what made any given flat surface the name of floor vs wall or ceiling. Gravity is what defined the subjective experience of down vs up or sideways. The same applies to a Tarot layout. Before you can consider reversals, you have to have some defining anchor point, some relative reference point (yeah, that kind of relative, as in Einstein’s theory of Relativity.)

The obvious reference point is the person doing the reading. But even when you have that clear definition of what a reversal IS, does really MEAN anything? Classically, a card reversal changes the meaning of the card somehow.

We’ve come to a time in human technology and civilization where we can (an in my opinion should) think larger. It’s time to take Tarot big picture. An obscenely rich guy just went to space on a lark yesterday. It’s time to connect Tarot and intuition to energy rather than physicality, to a cosmic perspective rather than an earth-bound surface one.

Even without considering upright vs reversed card position, there are lots of meanings and keywords bundled into any given card. It takes practiced intuition to draw out the right meaning for the moment and the message.

Your own good internal intuition is the way to understand reversals the same as any other meaning for a card. Reversals don’t change the meaning, they enhance it.

The reversal is about the energy flow around the card, not the card meaning itself. All the good/bad, positive/negative, advising/cautioning aspects of a card’s meaning should be considered normally, regardless of upright vs reversed presentation. In this case, think of the energy flow like water flow. In an upright card, the flow is like a river, generally moving in one direction. The flow might be fast or slow, deep or shallow. Sometime, in some places, under some conditions, the flow swirls in circles, even flows backwards or sideways. Usually that happens when large rocks or bridge pilings that block the natural flow. Reversed Tarot cards hint at a block in the natural flow. Reversed Tarot cards hint at swirls, blockage and back flow connected to all of a card’s potential meanings.

The reversal of a card in a readings isn’t a definite reversal from good to bad. It could just as easily be a reversal from bad to good. Stagnation could be sweeping into a new lane of progress. A reversed card is a hint to look at energy flow and larger context.

It isn’t about the rote direction of your feet. It is about the best evidence of gravity.