Tag: reversed tarot cards

More than it feels

TaoCraft Short Sip is Tarot for your day in the time it takes to sip from your coffee. Today: Strength from the major arcana and revisiting reversals

Hello and welcome to TaoCraft Short Sip: Tarot for your day in the time it take to sip from your coffee.

Today’s card is Strength from the major arcana, inverted.

This is another good chance to give my standard issue speech about inverted or reversed cards. Reversed cards are ones that turn over upside down relative to the person doing the reading.

The relative to the person doing the reading part is, to my thinking, much more important than the upside-down, reversed or inverted part. The card is perfectly fine as it lies. I don’t mean to go all Obi-wan on you, but the reversal is specific to a certain point of view. To the person across the table, the card is right side up. The card is the card, the only difference is how you look at it.

The tradition is to change the meaning of a card to its opposite when it turns up reversed. Usually that so-called opposite is really the darker, less socially popular, or negative side of the card.

As I see it, that flip flop in the meaning runs the risk of letting a certain toxic positivity leak into our readings. Right side up cards are a bit easier to read from a pure physiologic, visual standpoint. I don’t know about you, but I have an innate bias toward right side up cards, just as a matter of identifying what the heck you are looking at.

Depending on where you stand in the room, all cards are always right side up or upside down. All the cards are always everything and that is part of Tarot’s inherent value. Tarot has value in the way it opens our mind and our thinking to all the possibilities, even the hard to look at upside down ones.

All the cards are everything all of the time.

My favorite quote from the original 90s version of the movie The Craft is from the scene where the bookstore owner explains the nature of magic and spells to the protagonist Sarah “True magic is neither black or nor white – it is both because nature is both. Loving and cruel all at the same time … the only good or bad is in the heart of the witch. Life keeps a balance on its own.”

Connect that to the yin-yang symbol and Taoist philosophy and you know why I named this website and podcast what it is.

So if reversed cards don’t represent a thing and it’s opposite or some sort of positive vs negative duality, what do reversed cards tell us?

Sometimes, nothing.

I read reversed cards as meaning that there is something up with how the card’s meaning is being used or manifested in life. There is something blocked or turbulent or glitchy with the energy flow that the card and its position within a layout represents.

Author Scott Cunningham is known for saying “The feeling is the power” If you are feeling strong today great! Have at it!

If not, that’s fine. No one has the capacity to be perfect every moment, and we certainly don’t feel that way every moment.

The Strength card always has an element of trusting yourself. If you are feeling strong, then you have to trust it to use it. If you are not feeling strong, then you still have to trust yourself. It is a matter of trust that your inner strength is still there, still fully functioning.

Do the thing. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to enjoy it. You don’t have to act happy about it when you aren’t. You can, however still do what needs done because your strength is more than it feels.

Thank you for reading and listening!

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Thanks again and I’ll see you at the next sip!

Best Evidence of Gravity

“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.