What do Tarot Reversals Mean?
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When you riffle shuffle cards or throw them face down over your table top and mix them about and put everything back in a neat little pile, you’re almost sure to get cards turned up and turned upside down. As you draw cards, either for one-card readings or to assemble them into a spread, you flip them over and you’ll get a mix of upright cards and reversed cards.
Now, the question is…
What do tarot cards in reverse mean? Do they even matter?
If you incorporate reversals into tarot readings (and many reader’s don’t, but more on that later…), this can mean a couple of things. I’m ranking these possibilities from the simplest to the most complex, just to make the concept of reversals a little easier to comprehend (fingers crossed).
They deserve your extra attention. Reversed cards are positioned in an out of the ordinary way, and are thus, “screaming” for you to notice them. They deserve a second glance, a pause for extra reflection, and maybe a loud ALL CAPS if you’re doing a written reading.
Their definition needs to be flipped over. Because the cards are upside down, you’ve got to interpret their intended meanings in an upside down manner too. Wait what?
Let me try to make this easier for you:
The Fool usually means someone who’s carefree and ready to take a risk. The Fool reversed means the opposite—someone who’s anxious and always takes extra precautions. Getting a reversed card means you get a tarot card definition and have it flipped 180-degrees over.
I find it a little problematic to take this technique and apply it across the board. If you’ve ever gone through a tarot guidebook, you’ll know that every tarot card has a multitude of meanings. So, when you pull a reversed card, how do you know exactly which tarot card definition to use and turn around? I honestly don’t know. LOL. And therein lies the problem.
I also find this a little tough to swallow because this means you don’t just have to know all 78 tarot card meanings and their corollaries,, you’ve also got to know their exact opposites and the exact opposites of their corollaries. Here’s the math: this means you have to learn a bare minimum of 156 tarot card meanings in one go. And if that makes your heart jump for joy, then more power to you :)
They take on their “shadow” meaning. The “light” side of a tarot card, as I understand it, is the bright, cheery, and optimistic side. The “shadow” side, on the other hand, is the dark, foreboding, and assumed “negative” definition.
On a “light” day, the High Priestess is highly intuitive and can read people and emotions very easily. On a “shadowy” day, her intuition is clouded, and it’s almost like static interferes with all the insights she claims to be pulling.
Again, I find this method of reading reversals slightly problematic, because who’s to say what light or what shadow is? I know that sounds super philosophical, but what’s shadowy to one person can be completely optimistic and positive to another. Blanket statements don’t always work.
You could choose to combine all three methods, or use just one, or use any two of them together. Tarot reading is a highly subjective, personal endeavor, so you’ve got to figure it out for yourself. You can start reading reversals one way.
So, the second question is…
Do I read tarot reversals?
If you haven’t figured it out yet, the answer is a loud and resounding no. I just find that it complicates things. Does this make me a more simplistic, less sophisticated tarot reader? Maybe. But I find that reversals interrupt my flow, and I’d rather deliver a smooth and seamless reading than keep stopping and starting because I want to seem technically more proficient.
Instead of using reversals, I use these three determining factors to figure out whether or not I read a card’s “upside down” meaning or not:
My intuition. Some cards just feel like they need more attention. When I have a lot of cards laid out in front of me, some just seem to pop more than others. I don’t need them to be physically reversed to get that feeling.
The context of the reading. Depending on the querent’s question, the context (or kuwento) surrounding the reading, I’ll figure out which meaning applies. When you read for someone, you don’t just lean on the dictionary meaning of the cards—you figure out what they mean in respect to the situation. It takes a lot of practice to figure this out so shuffle, shuffle, and shuffle away.
How open-ended I want the message to be. For readings, I don’t always stick to black and white, and say this card means this. Sometimes, I offer options. X could mean Y, but it can also mean Z. I can cover both light and shadow (and the entire spectrum between if I please).
If you’re just starting out on your tarot journey…
My advice is to stick to upright meanings until you’ve got them down pat. When you can review your tarot deck flash cards style and get it all in one go, then maybe you can play around with reversals and see if the technique works for you. If it doesn’t, know that that’s okay too :)