AUTHOR’S NOTE: While debating the subject of reversed cards in an r/tarot sub-reddit thread, I arrived at what I consider to be my final position on the subject.

I didn’t realize how sharply divided the community is on whether or not the reading of upside-down cards in a tarot spread is necessary. The skeptics like to say “a-card-is-a-card-is-a-card,” and the direction in which a figure or feature points makes absolutely no difference to its interpretation. Orientation is purely accidental and neither adds to nor subtracts from a card’s established meaning. But these are often the same people who “free-associate” intuitively from the images, letting the visual content inspire their observations, and I don’t know how they can reconcile the two attitudes when improvising in such a pictorial way. Can they simply “unsee” reversal if they allowed it to appear in the first place?

Mystics believe that if reversed orientation can happen, it has significance; I count myself in that group even though I’m only “half-mystical.” Tarot de Marseille author Yoav Ben-Dov once wrote that “everything is a sign” (although the TdM pips don’t readily submit to reversals, so he probably didn’t go that far). I’m enough of a “magical thinker” to believe that serendipity counts. However, in my own practice I sometimes say that I don’t pay any further attention to the pictures on the cards in a spread once I’ve identified them and just go with my internalized knowledge of their meaning, so I guess I have some reconciling of my own to do.

After a good deal of back-and-forth in the thread, I finally acknowledged that each card encompasses all relevant meanings within its scope, both positive and negative, so if we believe that reversed cards are somehow different, we can extract the same judgment from a card’s upright posture with a little (or a lot) more contemplation. Another member offered a very succinct appraisal of the situation:

“If you don’t use reversals, then you do need to regard the full array of each card’s meanings, positive, negative, and neutral. It will often be further indicated by spread positions, question, situation, etc.”

But in a large spread like the ten-card Celtic Cross, this is a lot of detail to process even for those readers with many years of divination experience. We first have to decide from the scope of the question whether there is likely to be anything unusual to look for in a card’s symbolism; then we have to include this consideration in our attempt to relate that card to the rest in accordance with the defined spread positions and the context of the reading.

These “fishing expeditions” increase the effort and can make interpretation much more burdensome. One such thankless pursuit is keyword hair-splitting to the degree required to segregate the less obvious implications. When applied in this scenario, reversal is a type of shortcut that can put a card’s hidden significance right under the reader’s nose.

As I see it, there are four separate “flavors” associated with a card’s upright and reversed condition; the first subset delivers the main message and the second one provides similar advice accompanied by “supplemental notation.”

1.a: An upright card’s standard meaning “straight-up,” whether positive or negative, with no mention of subtleties (i.e. the Sun is always wonderful and the Tower is always ominous).

1.b: An upright card’s more context-specific inferences that have to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis (i.e the Sun can give you sunburn and the Tower can represent a liberating episode).

2.a: A reversed card’s altered trajectory that can bring the standard meaning in “under the radar” for good or ill according to its nature (i.e. the reversed Sun can shine light in all the dark corners and reveal issues that would have been better left undisclosed, while the reversed Tower can indicate a “soft landing” in which the falling people will land on their feet).

2.b: A reversed card’s oblique emphasis that would not normally enter the matter in a forthright way and must be surmised (i.e. the reversed Sun is setting and will leave only shadows behind, and the reversed Tower can be reclaimed and turned into “distressed” brick for upscale boutique architecture). Sorry about that last one, I got carried away.

In the upright instances, the card’s archetypes and allegories are intact and operate as expected, while in the reversed cases they have been redirected or “turned on their head” and must be approached from a different angle. When a card is reversed, I can instantly see what that portends without having to comb through the myriad possibilities to find just the right off-normal nuance to apply to the situation.

The upside is efficiency and, once we recognize that the message is not undone but only “massaged” by reversal, there is no real downside unless the reader is someone for whom an inverted image is psychologically distressing (they do exist). Plus, it nearly doubles the available opportunities for evocative word-smithing with little need for the mental contortions that I called “pretzel logic” in a 2019 essay.