Reversed Cards As “Interrogatories”
While working on my Pink Floyd essay, I used reversed cards to portray the questions posed in the song’s lyrics as a way to distinguish them from the declarative statements made by the upright cards. “Can you feel me?” and “Would you touch me?” are two examples. This has me thinking that reversed cards might well be read in an interrogatory sense that is even more profound and purposeful than some of the other subtle nuances I squeeze out of them. So if we see a Knight moving toward the future, we might say “He will come” if the card is upright, but maybe “Will he come?” (as opposed to “He probably won’t come”) if it’s reversed, with the possibility that he won’t because he’s looking back on something that might make him change his mind. The reversal introduces uncertainty and second-guessing into what was a straightforward interpretation. I would look at the card behind the Knight (toward the past) to see what might be holding his attention. I don’t think the scenario will always be that simple, but it’s one more “spice” to add to my tarot cookbook.
I went back and looked at the personal list of reversed-card “qualities” that I put together a while ago ( https://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com/2017/08/06/the-significance-of-reversed-cards/) but didn’t find anything that would help recast the consequences of reversal from a statement of likely improbability to one of open-ended conjecture. Maybe the best way to treat reversal as an “interrogatory” is to preface the upright meaning with “What if . . . ?” That way the usual interpretation can be examined from a different angle, more as a “brainstorming” opportunity than as a predictable turn-around in the querent’s circumstances. This opens the door to numerous “shades of gray” as we pull all the traditional threads in a card’s core meaning and maybe a few that never occurred to us before.
In the Pink Floyd song “Hey, You” two verses end with the question “Would you touch me?” Rather than reversal suggesting “You obviously don’t want to touch me,” we might rethink it as “What if you touch me?” That opens a much broader range of possibilities for expanded interpretation since it encompasses the reactions of both parties to the “touch.” It’s no longer a “yes-or-no” proposition but a relative one, something the tarot excels at. It’s entirely possible that “What if . . . ?” isn’t the only way to nudge a reversed card down the interrogatory path. Although it’s a bit fanciful and not entirely thought-out yet, we could look at the other four of the “Five W’s” of creative writing and ask: “Why would you want to touch me?” or “Where (and “How”) do you want to touch me?” (I don’t think I’d take a client there) or “When do you want to touch me?” or, finally, “Who do you want to touch?” The context of the question and the card’s customary meaning would obviously change the verb in the interrogatory statement to something less suggestive in most cases.
Originally published at http://parsifalswheeldivination.wordpress.com on February 3, 2022.
