AUTHOR’S NOTE: It may be disingenuous to claim “maverick” status when my approach to the Thoth tarot is at least 95% aligned with the content of its companion volume, The Book of Thoth, and the Golden Dawn’s Liber T tarot curriculum on which it is largely based. But I do have reservations about a couple of the prohibitions and alterations insisted upon by its modern users.

The first, and perhaps least defensible, of these caveats is the assumption that the Thoth deck is not intended to be read with reversed cards, the premise being that Elemental Dignities in their “ill-dignified” mode of expression eliminate the need. I’ve looked into this thoroughly and have reached the conclusions that the two serve entirely different purposes, and that both the Book of Thoth and Liber T are silent on the subject (although Aleister Crowley does refer to the presence of “reversed” orientation at one point in his text). The fact of that silence (if it wasn’t merely an oversight since Etteilla – one of MacGregor Mather’s chief influences – had created the concept of reversal over a century earlier) is offered by naysayers as further proof that they are not to be considered important, but my opinion is that a technique not specifically proscribed by the governing authority is permitted by default. Besides, I’ve been using it to good effect since 1972 when I picked it up from Eden Gray’s The Tarot Revealed.

Elemental Dignity alters the potency of the “principal” card that sits between two “modifiers” according to how “friendly” or “unfriendly” the latter are to one another. Reversal, on the other hand, leaves that potency mostly intact and only changes the seeker’s experience of the energy as a function of how oblique or cryptic its emphasis is, and therefore how it is received and processed. In an earlier post (linked below in its entirety), I made the following observations:

“Reversal . . . can change the ‘angle of attack’ or ‘mode of delivery’ for a card’s influence, mainly skewing its arrival while leaving its potency untouched and its core meaning largely intact. The experience of the card’s energy may be more oblique than direct, thus it is the querent’s reaction to the reversal that undergoes change according to how the effects are received; their thrust may come in under the radar but their fundamental principles are still operative and should not be downplayed. Think of coffee with cream and sugar or tea with honey and lemon; the flavor profile is substantially altered but it is still recognizable, and the delivery of the caffeine may be masked but its presence is still felt. (In an alternate universe, Mary Poppins might have said ‘A spoonful of mystery makes the message go down.’) The implication is that reversal can add necessary subtlety and nuance to the querent’s response because more direct engagement would not be productive even if it is achievable. It would be like trying push a string or squeeze a handful of water.”

The other area where I depart from Thoth devotees who buy into Crowley’s religion of Thelema is in the changes he made to the placement of the Emperor and the Star in the procession of Major Arcana. While I understand its astrological implications, I find his argument for this innovation to be a bit specious and thus see no reason to contort my traditional viewpoint to agree with the mystical suppositions derived from the psychic “dictation” of the Book of the Law in Cairo in 1904, which I’m suspicious was only Crowley’s “magickal mind” talking to itself.

I do concur with his restoration of the classical sequence that has Justice (the Thoth’s “Adjustment”) as the eighth trump and Strength (the Thoth’s “Lust”) in the eleventh position, but I leave the concurrent swap of the Qabalistic attributions for the Emperor (as Aries) and the Star (as Aquarius) out of the equation as being of no practical value. I have no real problem with his bases for renaming a few of the trumps, but again it isn’t critical to use of the cards in divination so I’m indifferent to the metaphysics behind it. Occult philosophy doesn’t always add meaningful substance to the narrative of a routine reading so I tend to hold it at arm’s length and invoke it only sparingly in my public practice since, while it may stimulate my storyteller’s imagination, it will only confuse my clients.

Reversed Cards and the Golden Dawn