AUTHOR’S NOTE: This meditation on reversed cards joins more than a dozen other unconventional approaches I’ve already examined in past essays, while revisiting some of my earlier observations. (See my two “compendiums” [compendia?] of earlier posts on the subject elsewhere in this blog.)

“Kid gloves” were made from the exceptionally supple hides of baby goats (“kids”) or lambs and were first worn in the 1800s for tasks requiring precise sensitivity of touch. (I always thought they were flaunted at soirees by the wealthy elite who were the only ones who could afford them, or favored by gentleman thieves like David Niven’s character in The Pink Panther who couldn’t tolerate ineptitude.) The “kid-glove treatment” became a metaphor for managing delicate situations that might come back to bite the wielder if not handled with extreme care. This applied particularly to the coddling of volatile individuals, and if you can imagine tarot cards as complex personalities with a random perverse streak (as in occasionally “having a bad day”), you’ll catch my drift.

I’ve written a number of essays in the past pointing out that the upside-down orientation of a card in a tarot reading does not substantially alter the card’s core meaning, it just affects the “rules of engagement” for dealing with its influence. My long-held opinion is that reversal changes the “mode of delivery” (more subtle or nuanced) and “angle of attack” (more veiled or oblique) by which we experience its energy, thus requiring us to adjust how we perceive and process it. Some readers consider reversal to show an internal or psychological emphasis (which is certainly one “mode” to consider), but I tend to treat it only as more elusive when attempting to ascribe significance to its presence.

Just when we think we know what a card means, it morphs into something else that is “alike but different” in understated ways. By pointing out unexpected dead-ends and detours in the normal route, reversal can send us down avenues of inquiry we might otherwise have missed, merely by demanding that we shift our point-of-view. As Rod Serling used to say when introducing his weekly TV series, “That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, the Twilight Zone.” (Think of the skewed perspective of the Hanged Man; in fact, I once described the phenomenon of reversal as “having a Hanged-Man moment.”)

Recently, while creating a spread I was struck by the idea that a reversed card could be advising us to approach its challenge in a more tactical or “softer” way rather than simply trying to pierce its ambiguities by sheer force of will. Before the reversal gets a chance to sneak up on us, we can ambush it with our foresight! Then we can confidently bend it to our needs without feeling like we’re playing the lottery or choosing from Forrest Gump’s “box of chocolates.” The last thing we want is the old Cracker Jacks slogan: “Every reversal has a surprise inside!” If we start from the premise that a reversed card isn’t going to deliver anything totally new, it’s just going to repackage it and make us think a little harder about how to unwrap it, we will never be at a loss for meaning. I like a little mystery in my readings anyway!