Sees All Knows All: Reading Reversals
© Rose Wilcox
One of the hardest things for me to learn was how to read reversals. Even when I go the hang of the basic meaning of a card, reading its "opposite" in the layout didn't always make sense to me. The book I used when I was reading supplied a reversed meaning for the card. The meanings given tended to be negative and self-contradictory.
Reading without Reversals
I found out that I could read without reversals if I needed to. It is perfectly all right to read all the cards as if they were upright. I feel as a reader, that I need to specify to myself that is my intention before I shuffle. I ignore reversals often when I first read a new deck.
Why Read Reversals At All Then?
When I first switched from Mother peace (round cards) from the Rider Waite deck I trained on, reversals were even more puzzling. At that time, the early 80s, the only book available for the cards did not specify meanings for all the reversals. I had already been stifled as a reader by the meanings in the first book I used, so I began to experiment with my own intuitive methods of reading reversals. This experimentation really helped me grow as a reader.
All though you can read very well without reversals, at some point, you may want to grow as a reader. Not only will reading reversals enhance your understanding of the cards and layouts; it can also add nuances of meaning and shades of understanding to your interpretation. In this way, you can help your querent, whether you read for others or for yourself, even more.
The Way to Tune in
For me, some cards are can be read as opposite in meaning when reversed. For instance, the Fool usually betokens faith and new beginnings. Reversed, I would tend to read it as doubt. However, as far as "new beginnings" goes, the opposite of "new beginnings" could be endings. Or it could refer to things started that just don't quite get off the ground. So some meanings might have two possible interpretations in terms of their opposites.
How I would interpret the reversed Fool would depend on the other cards surrounding it. In most layouts, you can tell a "story". If the card is in the past, and there are other cards betoking loss or endings, for instance, it is plain that the querent experienced doubt and loss of faith due to those endings. If the cards surrounding it were more hopeful, maybe the querent just didn't get started.
