Leveraging Reversals
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Over the past few weeks I’ve offered a handful of spreads that include a fixed series of reversed cards in contradistinction to an equal number of upright cards. The idea is to identify an alternate path to the same objective that is less obvious in nature, symbolic of a detour into an unfamiliar byway or “road less traveled.” This is part of my ongoing effort to leverage reversals and make them do more work.
While following online conversations, I’ve recognized that many readers find the presence of reversed cards in a pull to be an annoying inconvenience and a baffling conundrum when they are attempting to craft a straightforward narrative. This perception is complicated by the fact that reversal was traditionally interpreted as meaning the exact opposite of the upright definition. Rather than wrestling with the difficulty, some choose to ignore it completely. I’ve always felt that this approach is an oversimplification and frequently comes nowhere near the truth of the matter due to missing some important signals.
The reading of reversals first arose with Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette) in the second half of the 18th Century and has persisted up to the present, although its use among seasoned diviners has become much more nuanced and oblique instead of diametrically opposite. Tarot teachers sometimes advise disregarding reversed orientation until the beginner becomes thoroughly versed in the upright expression. There is definitely merit in this recommendation, but I come down somewhere in the middle: you’ll never learn to bounce off the ropes if you refuse to climb into the ring.
I’m reminded of my daily treadmill exercise, in which I do what I call “wogging” (faster than a brisk walk but not quite a jog); this notion could be the ideal response to the caveat regarding reversals that you must “walk before you can run.” Properly executed, an interpretive “wog” could offer great benefit in advancing one’s appreciation of the cards by vaulting nimbly over anomalous “upside-down” implications with fluent resourcefulness that avoids stumbling over them. Just take them in stride with a touch of inspiration, imagination and ingenuity that acknowledges their indirect impact while still conveying the overall thrust of their undiluted influence. After all, like the proverbial leopard they can’t entirely change their spots, they merely blend into the background a little more deviously.
Conventional wisdom is that reversal represents a delay or blockage in delivery of a card’s energy, but I’m more inclined to see the effect as covert in a slightly skewed way. It can signify something that “sneaks up behind you” when you’re looking in the other direction, akin to blindly stepping off the curb in front of a runaway bus. Like the Hanged Man, they require adopting an altered perspective when contemplating the situation. In fact, one of my standard assumptions for a reversed card is that it’s “having a Hanged-Man moment.” The cautionary advice is typically to “watch your back” and “look both ways” when one shows up in a reading because appearances can be deceiving. A whole chain of randomly-drawn reversed cards might be seen as persistent inattention to the warning signs or a dissociative pattern of “avoidance behavior.”
I’ve written numerous essays on the subject of reversal that you can find under “Reversed Cards” in the sidebar “Categories” drop-down menu. My purpose here is to point out that, rather than merely being random occurrences that disrupt the flow of a narrative, they can be built into the structure of a spread such that they meet a specific objective, one that relies on their being intentionally introduced during the shuffle. This may be counterintuitive in terms of common practice but it will definitely expand their scope in ways that support my opinion that “you’re missing half the fun” if you don’t use them. They may not double the depth and range of the divinatory palette, but they can come close if taken seriously.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.org on February 6, 2025.
