Even though this site is astrology centered, I can’t help myself but to write also about tarot a little.

From my intense preoccupation with it in the last 3 weeks or so, an issue has come up – something that preoccupies every tarot reader, beginner and even experienced, and that’s the subject of reversals.

Tarot readers can be divided in 2 major camps: those who read reversals and those who don’t. Reversals means when the tarot card comes up in a drawing upside down. Almost every book dealing with the meaning of the tarot cards gives 2 interpretations: upright and reversed.

Usually the meaning of the reversal is the opposite of the upright meaning, and usually a negative one. But there are also additional ways to interpret reversals, like a block to the manifestation of the upright meaning, or an internalized experience versus an external manifestation.

The thing is that some say that it’s a redundancy. The main meaning of the card is all that is needed, and given that there are 78 cards in the tarot deck, it’s more than enough to cover the varied human experience. The negative aspects of the meaning of the card can be taken into account together with the positive in the interpretation of the regular upright drawing, and there’s no need to divide the human experience into black and white, because it’s not, it’s much more nuanced and contains both positive and negative aspect side by side.

Those who like the doubling of the card interpretations from 78 to 156 meanings claim that it does make it richer and more nuanced. They are able to extract from the reversals things that are not present to them in the upright position of the cards.

It all comes down to personal preference, which is maybe even a reflection of the cognitive style of the reader. Those who don’t like reversals claim that their appearance in the spreads create a block to the intuitive flow of the reading and doesn’t add anything of substance, while those who use reversals claim that they enrich and give a twist in addition to the regular upright meaning, so it seems that they don’t have a flow problem with the reversals like the first group does.

And it’s not an experience and knowledge thing – there are readers who were using reversals for years and one day decided to drop them as they discovered that their interpretations are better off without them after all. Personally, after doing readings with reversals and without them, I seem to fall in the camp that experiences this kind of stoppage to the intuitive flow of the reading, and the reversals create a kind of analysis-paralysis that at the end doesn’t add much to the quality, richness and accuracy of the whole reading. But maybe I’ll change my mind later.