AUTHOR’S NOTE: An otherwise mean-spirited rant in an r/tarot sub-reddit thread posed the perfectly legitimate question “Since when did reading reversals become controversial????” One of the more thoughtful contributors to the conversation had the following to say, and it aligns quite well with my own long-standing defense of the practice.

“In my opinion, the issue is partially what you described, but more than anything that there is a very strong current of anti-intellectualism in our community and learning to read reversals requires time, practice and actual study.

This anti-intellectualism also can’t be called out without being piled on even when it’s flagrant, like people who ignore historical science in favor of fantasies about tarot’s origins, for example.

And this is a bit of a trend. When tarot existed on forums and mailing lists ages ago, the engagement was smaller but more serious. As tarot became ultra-popular around the time the pandemic hit, the number of people reading increased overnight. And since, online, everyone has to be an expert, it was decided that feelings must reign supreme and books are to be thrown out the window.”

I responded with: “I think you’ve put your finger on it: anti-intellectualism, as in ‘I don’t need no stinkin’ books.’ I’ve covered much the same ground in my own essays in support of reading reversals, but without the irritable tone” (which only serves to weaken the argument).

Part of the problem is the unthinking objection of the mystical crowd to anything that is unfashionable (such as the blasphemous opinion that intuition is not the “Holy Grail” of tarot-reading, knowledge and experience are, or skepticism about their unquestioning belief in the benevolent intentions of “spirit guides”), and another part is the instant-gratification mindset that devalues formal learning, which is typically seen as tedious and outdated. The strident “piling-on” mentioned above is intended to school the miscreants, and the opinion of the “reversal debunkers” in the online tarot community is just as intransigent as that of the OP who delivered the disgruntled broadside described in my opening note.

There is a lemming-like “follow-the-leader” vibe to the overheated atmosphere of subjective auto-suggestion (aka “intuition”) that permeates almost everything beginners are taught to revere by self-styled “influencers,” both in social-media discourse and in recent tarot literature, and I find it heavy-handed. The reading of reversed cards first appeared in the writing of Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette) in the 18^th Century, and it has been part of tarot ever since. It is only in the present era that it has been reduced to a superfluity that can be safely ignored in favor of purely intuitive, free-association-driven speculation that caters to the psychological and spiritual inclinations of the current generation of populist diviners.

I use them because they increase the range of my observations. I shuffle to intentionally introduce them and I treat then as part of the “big picture” of tarot interpretation. There is almost nothing negative about them in my own estimation (unless it is already present in the card’s upright meaning), they merely offer another “flavor” of the standard definition, and as supplemental notation they add a great deal of inflection and depth to my divination without being intended to force a paradigm-shift. But then I’m a pragmatist (sometimes even a “fortune-teller”) when I read the cards and not an impressionable wanderer in the realm of psycho-spiritual conjecture, so I have little patience for the zealous pontificating of tarot’s nouveau-elite (and, I’m quite sure, they for mine).

The conventional wisdom is that all cards contain both positive and negative meanings depending on the context of the reading (e.g. “too much Sun will give you sunburn”). I’ve now written over two dozen essays on the subject of reversal, and I’ve come around to the opinion that it doesn’t alter the core meaning of a card, just changes its mode of delivery and angle of attack. It’s more about nuance than the upright expression in that it can blindside you when you’re not looking.

I’ve had frequent discussions with the misinformed purists among Thoth users who are ignorant of the fact that reversals and elemental dignities serve two different purposes: EDs alter the potency of the “principal” (or middle) card of a triplet, making it stronger or weaker, while reversal leaves its potency intact but redirects delivery of the energy in atypical ways. Their argument is that neither the Golden Dawn’s Liber T nor Crowley’s Book of Thoth mentions reversal (in fact, Crowley makes one passing reference to it), but as the saying goes, “lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.” Thus, I use reversals with the Thoth deck in addition to EDs since I like to take advantage of “every tool in the toolbox” in my analysis.

However, I never employ them with the Tarot de Marseille, the playing cards or the Lenormand system, which don’t lend themselves to the technique. With most other desks, they can bring subtleties to the surface that might otherwise be invisible without a great deal of tiresome sifting through the general definitions for hints of obscure significance that is applicable to the context of the reading. I don’t know about you, but I hate to work that hard at something that could be staring me in the face. While I agree that an upright card includes every possible meaning within its scope, reversal gives me a shortcut that takes me to the one I should be paying attention to without having to dig for it.

Another contributor to the thread mentioned that “Upright cards have the benefit of being well defined by their allegories. Once you throw that out the window, you don’t have that security anymore.” My reply was “Regarding the allegories, I personally welcome the opportunity to ‘turn them inside-out’ and intentionally forego the security.” To expand on this answer, I pointed to my numerous essays on reversed trump cards (the Magician, the Empress, Strength, the Hanged Man, and especially the Tower), in which the allegories are central to the theme of their upright expression, and in their deconstructed or “exploded” rendering are also key to understanding the complementary interpretation afforded by reversal. This exemplifies the philosophical approach I’ve brought to reversal for the last fifteen years.

I suppose the subject of reversed cards is controversial to the extent that there is no consensus and, if we read between the lines, it seems to bring out the innate combativeness in those who claim that they do or don’t need them. I often sense a very subtle attitude of smug superiority on both sides of the argument. Although I’ve been using them since 1972, it took me years to arrive at a comfortable reckoning with the limited ways I currently apply them that I believe – with no arrogance intended – is eminently rational. A couple of aphorisms I like to drop on naysayers is “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” by dismissing reversals out-of-hand, and “You’re missing half the fun” if you do so.

All of which I’ve argued many times before, so ’nuff said for now.