“Before I sink
Into the big sleep
I want to hear
I want to hear
The scream of the butterfly”
– from “When the Music’s Over” by Jim Morrison of The Doors

AUTHOR’S NOTE: We can only guess whether Jim Morrison achieved his goal before he sank into his final “one-way” encounter with drugs, alcohol and heart failure (but given his surreal mindset, I can envision Mothra stalking him on his way down). The quote strikes me as a perfect metaphor to use when wrestling with the overlooked negative aspects of a typically positive tarot card should the need arise in a reading. The Sun is an easy call: sunburn, anyone? It can also mean being unable to hide from scrutiny when we would really love to escape notice. But benign cards like the Empress or the Star can be more difficult to sort out with this in mind.

Conventional wisdom (to which I don’t fully subscribe) is that any card in its upright condition contains a range of both “good” and “bad” meanings, and the latter can be deduced from the context of the question or topic without resorting to the practice of reversal. Personally, although I understand the reasoning, I don’t want to work that hard when reversal provides a convenient visual shortcut that lets me get right to the point. (To be honest, I don’t consider the occurrence of reversed cards to be particularly profound except to the extent that the influence can be oblique and therefore ambiguous, but I almost always use them for the extra information even when I’m not looking for a “smoking gun.”)

A card “is what it is” regardless of orientation, so how we receive and process its energy is more important than how it presents itself. (In other words, any misapprehension of the truth resides in us, not in the evidence offered by the cards.) However, the distinction may be relevant when a querent is involved in a situation that appears to be benevolent or no worse than innocuous to an external observer but “smells fishy” to the individual, who detects a vague “reversed-Page-of-Cups” whiff of unpleasantness. The reader’s task is to figure out what an otherwise favorable upright card is trying to say “out of the other side of its mouth.”

I’m not advocating that we torment any of the cheerful “butterflies” in our decks just to hear them scream (my Chrysalis Tarot is running away screaming right now), but we can certainly prod them to make them give up their deepest, darkest secrets, particularly if our sitter is convinced something isn’t right but we can’t quickly pin down the source from a brief look at the cards pulled.

Diligently rooting around beneath the surface of a positive upright card in a sensitive position (such as the “crossing card” in a Celtic Cross spread) can aid in clarifying the uncertainty, but this may require excessive time and effort when reversal instantly “puts an exclamation point” on any less-encouraging testimony that I simply can’t ignore. It lets me pick up the scent a little farther back up the trail than I would otherwise have reached without its insights. It’s also a matter of applying all the tools in my interpretive toolbox to a problematic reading, and reversal seems like the right one for the job more often than not.)