clarifying cards & reversals

Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover:
-what clarifying cards are
-when they're helpful — and when they're not
-how to introduce this technique to your practice
-what reversals are
-different ways to read them
-tips for trying out reversals in your readings

Next Level Tarot & the 3am.tarot Conservatory both include additional resources for navigating confusing tarot readings.

Clarifying Cards with Tarot & Oracle by Isaac Cotec for HeroRise
Five Ways to Use Clarifying Cards by Christiana Gaudet
The Complete Book of Tarot Reversals by Mary K. Greer
How to Interpret Reversed Cards by Tina Gong for Labyrinths
Why I Don't Read Reversals by Rashunda Tramble

For more on Meg, check out 3amtarot.com, and order your copy of Finding the Fool through Bookshop.org or your favorite local bookstore.

Find episode transcripts and more over on the CARD TALK website.

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Chapters

• 0:12 Understanding Tarot Clarifying Cards and Reversals
• 11:35 Interpreting Reversals in Tarot Readings

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

My name is Meg Jones-Wall and you're listening to Card Talk, a mini podcast for tarot basics and evergreen insights. I'm glad you're here. Today we are going to be talking about two different techniques that you can use in your tarot readings clarifying cards and tarot card reversals. Now, before we dive into the episode itself, two things that I just want to emphasize here at the top of the episode. The first is that I'm not grouping these techniques together because you have to use them together. Okay, they're completely distinct, separate techniques and they were each completely optional to your practice. I'm grouping them together simply because I get asked about both of these things all the time and I just wanted to be able to cover them both efficiently in one episode. The other thing I want to say here is that, while these are both pretty popular techniques that again I get asked about all the time, I don't use either of them particularly often. Now, I'm not saying that to make you feel embarrassed for using them or for wanting to use them or for being curious about them. Look, if you feel drawn to clarifying cards, or you want to work with reversals, or you're just curious and want more information, or if you already use them and love them. All these things are great, no problems, live your life, do your thing. I just want to be honest with you, since these aren't areas of like really intense specialty or particular interest for me. So, in addition to what I'm sharing in this episode, which is just kind of some broad, high-level information, I'm also going to offer some different resources on each of these two techniques. So if you're looking for more support or information beyond what I share here, you've got some free resources and some books to check out of just some places to go next. Okay, let's get into it. I'm going to talk about clarifying cards first and then we'll talk about tarot reversals. So first, if you've never heard the phrase clarifying cards before and you're wondering what the hell I'm talking about, let me explain Generally.

Speaker 1: 2:00

A clarifying card refers to a tarot card or a practice of pulling cards After you've done a tarot reading. The cards might still be out. You're looking at the cards and it's generally a technique that's recommended when you find the reading confusing, whether it's a single card reading, a multi-card reading, whether using a spread or not. A clarifying card is an additional card that you pull as a way of trying to make sense of the reading that you are struggling with. Essentially, we're really asking the deck to help us understand either the reading as a whole or a specific card or cards within the reading. I know I basically say this every episode now, but remember, the tarot readings are conversations, so in this context, a clarifying card is kind of like saying wait, hang on, can you tell me more about this? Or could you say that a different way? I'm not sure I'm following right. If you've ever asked a teacher to explain a topic in a different way to help you understand, or you've ever asked someone like a boss or a friend or a coworker or a roommate or whatever, to be like, can you, can you say that? Again? I'm not following you. That's essentially what we're doing here, right? We're asking the cards to repeat themselves or to offer clarification, to give some more nuance, to help us understand what's going on.

Speaker 1: 3:12

The reason that this technique is so popular is because tarot reading can be really hard, frankly speaking. That's why it's a technique that can help offer some additional reassurance, encouragement, clarification or specificity when it comes to our readings. So why wouldn't we pull clarifying cards, right? Are there any reasons not to do this? Well, the simple answer is that it's really easy to get carried away with clarifying cards, which is why I rarely pull them myself and it's why, when I talk about them, I usually advise using a lot of caution and restraint. I think that this is a technique that is best used very sparingly because, in my experience, once we've done our tarot reading, if we've asked a good question and we know what we're talking about, the cards have usually already said what they need to say, and personally, I would rather try to find the root of my confusion in the cards and identify what's going on in the conversation I've already had, rather than layering in additional cards and potentially making the confusion even worse. I usually would prefer to just spend more time with the reading as is, rather than adding additional insights for a reading that's already thrown me off my game.

Speaker 1: 4:22

Let me just give you a quick example so that you know what I'm talking about, especially if you're skeptical. Let's say that I decide to do a simple two-card tarot reading using a two-card spread just stop and start, one card for stop and one card for start. Now, in the first position of stop, let's say that I pull the hermit, which is an archetype that I personally tend to associate with emergence, spirituality, wise leadership, self-discovery and preparing to move into a new cycle. But in the second position of start, let's say that I pulled the hanged one, which is an archetype that I tend to associate with stillness, shifts in perspective, surrendering to the moment and not trying to push forward against impossible forces. It might feel like both of these cards are kind of diving into the topic of drawing back, suggesting that I hit pause, slow down and retreat and see what happens next, which is trying to force something. So having one of these cards in a start position and one in a stop position might feel confusing. I might not understand what the distinction is and I might be frustrated with the reading.

Speaker 1: 5:21

Let's say I take my time. I really meditate with each card, I dig into each card, I do my best to look at some other potential definitions and go deeper in each card, but ultimately I decide that I want to pull a clarifying card and just ask what's the takeaway here? What's the most important message I need to hear right now from this reading? If I pulled the high priestess, it could indicate that I need to lean on my own inner wisdom and make a choice for myself rather than feeling dragged along by forces greater than me. I might feel that the cards are advising me to slow down with intention, rather than because I'm not sure of what to do next In this reading.

Speaker 1: 5:58

As a clarifier, the priestess might indicate that it's the quiet contemplation part that's the most important, rather than obsessing about movement or achievement or something. But if I pulled the moon as my clarifying card, which is a card that I associate with wildness and mystery and dreams and fears it's a nine card, just like the hermit I might feel even more lost than before, because the moon can be a really tricky card to interpret. And if I pulled it as a clarifying card for this reading, I personally might not feel like I'm getting new information, just a reflection of my own fear or confusion. Again, I don't say this to necessarily dissuade you from using this technique. Lots of people successfully and confidently use clarifying cards, so I do think that it can be a helpful technique at times. But I think it's really important to be realistic about what clarifying cards can accomplish, because I do think that if they're used kind of quickly and hastily, without a lot of intention or purpose, they can make confusing readings more confusing instead of adding the kind of clarity and support that people usually want when they pull a clarifying card.

Speaker 1: 7:04

Reading tarot often requires us to sit in discomfort for a few minutes, to sit in the confusion, to be willing to wade through the various messages and try to put them all together into a cohesive message or answer for ourselves. It is very normal to pull cards and want to immediately understand what the cards are trying to communicate, right? If a friend told us something and we didn't immediately understand it, we might be frustrated pretty quickly and so immediately kind of wanting or expecting resolution from a reading might feel normal to you. But I really want to encourage you to take the time to work through the cards that have already emerged before you start layering in a bunch more cards. I usually recommend trying some other techniques for navigating confusing readings before pulling clarifying cards. For me with a confusing reading, clarifying card is usually one of my last resorts. Now I believe I talked about some of this in my episode on navigating confusing tarot readings. But if you feel really overwhelmed or uncertain about a reading, adding more information is not necessarily going to help. Sometimes it can, but it's not necessarily just going to fix everything. But if you take your time and act with care.

Speaker 1: 8:17

Clarifying cards can help to bring a reading together. They can help you get focused on what the cards are most interested in, or they can offer some assurance that you're on the right track with the interpretation you're kind of running with. So let me give you a couple of questions that you can use to kind of consider and think through if you should pull a clarifying card around a particular reading or not. First ask yourself have you spent time with the reading already and done your absolute best to interpret the cards as you initially drew them? Have you looked carefully at your question and or at your tarot spread and have you considered if the question itself was clear and focused, as well as a question that the tarot is equipped to answer? Did you understand the spread? Did you understand the question? It can also be really helpful to look carefully at the reading and try to identify what aspect of the reading is specifically confusing to you, what you feel like you're missing. Is there a certain card that feels like it sticks out or contradicts other things? Is there a combination of cards that feel like they're opposites or don't make sense together, or is the entire reading just feel very confusing to you Before you dive into pulling a card.

Speaker 1: 9:20

I think it's worth considering if tarot is the best tool for providing clarity on your reading. It might feel counterintuitive to bring in another tool, but sometimes we just want to know we're on the right track with a particular interpretation. Sometimes we just want that little head nod of like yes, keep going. You can absolutely find correspondences for yes or no, or maybe with the tarot, but I don't really like to use the tarot for yes or no questions. So if you're just looking for assurance on your understanding of the cards, you might want to combine another tool. If you have a tool on hand that you're comfortable using, this is a great time to pull out Lenormand cards or use an Oracle deck, but it can also be a great use for a pendulum or a coin or a dice. These might be more helpful and more immediately gratifying, especially if all you're looking for is assurance. So be open-minded to additional tools when they might be appropriate.

Speaker 1: 10:09

If, after all of that, you decide that you want to move forward with pulling another card with pulling a clarifying card specifically, please consider what you're looking for and formulate a deliberate question for your clarifying card. I think this is where people often get confused with clarifiers. Just deciding to pull another card without being super clear about what the card is clarifying or what the card is offering can just make a messy situation even messier. So make sure you tell your deck where you're confused and what you're looking for. You can try asking one of the following questions Can you tell me more about this specific card and make sure you're clear with the deck which card you're looking for help with. You can ask can you help me understand the connection between these two cards and show them to specific cards that are in the reading? You know, if you're doing a multi-card reading, you can ask can you just give me a general theme for this reading? Can you help me understand what we're talking about here? And if it feels like you're missing something or like there's something else that you maybe didn't ask, something else that the cards want to talk about, you could ask either can you tell me something else I need to know about this situation or about this topic, or you can ask can you tell me what I might be missing in this reading, what I'm not seeing or what I'm not teasing out? Any of those questions can work well for clarifying cards, but you might also just want to try experimenting with some different ones of your own. Once you know what your question is and you've told the deck what it is, then you can pull your card.

Speaker 1: 11:35

Now some people like to leave their reading out the reading that they're asking for clarity on out on their reading surface, and reshuffle the deck specifically asking the cards for the, that additional card, that clarifying card, and being clear with the deck about what they're looking for. But personally, I tend to just leave everything as is and just draw the next card from the deck or pull a card from the middle or look at the card on the bottom and just ask for help understanding whatever aspect of the reading feels unclear. The last thing I'll say on clarifying cards, before we move on to reversals, is that once you have your clarifying card, remember what you asked, remember the specific question that that card is answering, and pay attention to how the card fits into the reading, how it's offering some extra stability, clarity, different direction, et cetera. Don't forget what you asked your clarifying card to clarify. Now let's shift a little bit and start talking about tarot reversals. Reversals are maybe the thing I get asked about the most, which I think is very funny because I have literally never used reversals in my practice, but I know it is a topic that people love to talk about and often have a ton of questions about. So I'm going to give you a really quick overview and I again just want to remind you I am including some helpful resources in the show notes If you're someone that's really into reversals or really wants to start integrating reversals into your practice.

Speaker 1: 12:53

But just to give you some high level information, when we talk about tarot reversals, what we're talking about is when a card comes out of your deck, when you draw it out of your deck in a reading in a reversed or upside down position rather than it's upright position. Now, if you don't understand what it means for a card to be upside down, I will try to clarify with my words, although you might just want to Google reversed cards, because maybe looking at the images is going to be the most helpful here. But in general, if you're working with a standard sized tarot deck, they usually have a fairly clear upright position and you can usually tell that by looking at the text, if the text reads the way you would normally read it when you're reading a book or looking at your phone. This is the orientation of the card itself. Now, there are absolutely decks especially if they're more style decks that are designed with like geometric patterns or abstract shapes or imagery that doesn't necessarily have like a clear sky and ground right, which can make that upright position sometimes a little bit harder to identify. And there are also decks that are square or round and might have their own rules for what a reversal actually means in those decks, right. But when we're talking about reversals, we're really talking about drawing a card in your reading specifically that emerges in the opposite orientation or a different orientation from its full classic upright position. Now I want to emphasize that because some decks really are easier to read reversals with than others, and so if you're interested in using reversals in your practice, that's just something to keep in mind. Some decks just make it a lot easier to identify if they're reversed or not. Now, the general philosophy of reading reversals is that if a card comes out of your deck in a reversed position during a reading, that that reversal might indicate an alternative or a different meaning than when the card comes forward in its usual upright position.

Speaker 1: 14:42

Now, people have very strong feelings about reversals, very strong opinions about reversals. Some people love them, never read without them. Some people feel that they add a ton of additional insight and nuance to readings, that they give the cards expanded ways to communicate meanings or potential for adding subtlety or depth far beyond the upright meetings. They feel that having reversals is essential to a good tarot reading. And other people feel that they are overly complicated or that they aren't necessary, that the deck itself covers everything that needs to be covered and that there's no need to add reversals or additional layers of meaning. The cards have all the tools at their disposal to communicate in whatever way they need to communicate, and reversals simply aren't necessary. And then there's a whole swath of people in the middle that are curious about the technique or want to know if they should or should not be reading reversals, or just don't understand why anyone would use them at all. So before I tell you what I think, there's no wrong answer here.

Speaker 1: 15:42

Okay, if you feel drawn to reversals, if you've read them in the past and you really love them, if you think that a tarot reading isn't a tarot reading without reversals, great, enjoy yourself, love it, do the reversals. And if you are not interested in reversals at all. If you find them overwhelming or unnecessary, if you think they're weird, if you don't know what to do with them, just ignore them. It's literally fine. I don't read reversals I never have because at the beginning of my practice I found them really overwhelming and at no point in my personal practice have I ever felt that it was necessary to begin adding them in. But I get readings from practitioners who do read with reversals all the time and I'm always really impressed with how they navigate that in their readings. It always challenges me to think differently about what the cards have to offer us and I get great readings. I'm very satisfied with my readings that do use reversals, which is all. Just to say you get to do what you want. It's your practice. So don't let anyone tell you that you're not a real tarot reader If you don't read reversals, and don't let anyone tell you that reading reversals means that you're like overly complicating your readings. You really get to do what you want here.

Speaker 1: 16:45

The question of how you interpret the reversals when they show up in your readings is also up to you, and there are a lot of different ways that people interpret reversals in their readings. Some put a lot of significance on reversals and others. Just kind of note that as like a little extra emphasis. So I'm going to share with you just a couple of ways that people interpret reversals. But again, please do some research if you're really interested in reversals, because this is just like the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this technique. The one that I think most people think of first, even if they don't actually use them in your readings, is that reversals are like the literal opposite meaning of the upright definition. It's a shadow definition or an inverted definition.

Speaker 1: 17:26

But I've also seen a lot of people use reversed cards to signify a blockage or a particular obstacle, even if that reversal is showing up in a spread, in a position that's like something positive. It might be talking about something that is tripping you up or indicating a challenge around that specific topic the card covers. You can also read and this is probably my favorite one you can read reversals just as an exclamation point or like underlining something. This is just a card to pay extra attention to. It doesn't necessarily impact or change the interpretation of the card. It's just a way of the deck indicating that this is an important card to the reading, that this is a particularly significant card in the reading. I also want to share that. If the language reversed feels confusing to you, if it feels sticky, if you don't like it, I want to share that. Someone in my discord a really lovely member of my discord server offered that they use the language of adjusted rather than reversed, and they really think about their reversals as just something that the card itself might suggest from the opposite direction that we usually consider it coming from. So I wanted to pass that on, because I know a number of people in the discord server found that a really helpful interpretation or alternative way of talking about these kinds of inverted cards.

Speaker 1: 18:40

Now, if you yourself are curious about using reversals and you want to try integrating reversals into your practice, here's how you do it. The key thing here is to do some ratings where you decide ahead of time that you're committed to reading any reversals during that particular session, and you also need to be clear with yourself, too about what the reversal means or how you're going to interpret it. Now, this is the most important thing. You have to decide this before you start pulling cards. You have to be consistent about when you're going to read reversals, when you're not going to read reversals and what significance you place on reversals. If you don't, if you just are kind of curious about it and a little, you know, inconsistent and kind of wishy-washy, it can be really easy to fall into the trap of only reading reversals when it's going to give you the kind of feedback that you're secretly hoping for. Right, we all go to the cards sometimes with questions where we're hoping the cards will tell us something that we want to hear. Right, we all do it.

Speaker 1: 19:38

And if you only ever read reversals when it changes the meaning of a card that you don't want to see or when it makes the reading more comfortable for you, this can be a really slippery slope. A lack of consistency in your practice and changing the rules halfway through a reading or changing the techniques that you're using halfway through a reading is a really easy way to start eroding the trust that you have in your cards and I don't want that to happen to you. So be consistent, be real with yourself about whether or not you want to try reversals, and you can try out different ways of understanding reversals to see what resonates. You can test out some of these different interpretations for reversals. But again, just be intentional about it and make the decisions about how you're going to use this technique before you start pulling the cards. Don't decide halfway through a reading you want to read reversals. I also just want to share that.

Speaker 1: 20:29

A lot of people go through phases with reversals. This is another thing we've been talking about in the Discord server. It's completely normal to maybe start with reversals, then decide you're not really feeling it and stop reading reversals for a little bit and then maybe come back to them. Your practice is allowed to change and evolve as you go. It is totally normal. So, even if you've been reading reversals happily for a while, if you decide you don't want to do it anymore, you want to take a break from reversals, that's completely fine. Again, just be honest with yourself and be consistent about when you're going to read reversals and when you're not. I know we covered a lot, but I have a little tip just to offer you if you're interested in adding clarifying cards to your practice but now I've made you nervous you can try this out without the stakes of a confusing tarot reading.

Speaker 1: 21:16

Pull a card at random out of your deck, not as a reading, but just to have a baseline starting place. Just pull a card out. Now I want you to think about some general meanings for that card and to consider a situation in which this card could serve as a confusing answer to a question or might just bring up some big feelings that you would want to be soothed. What is a hypothetical situation where this card could feel challenging and where you might be looking for some more information? Right, come up with that little situation for yourself.

Speaker 1: 21:44

Then, after you have a clear sense of what the card is about generally and an example in mind of when it might require some more support or when you might want more support from receiving that card, pull a second card out of your deck. This is a practice exercise, but I want you to consider how you would read that second card as a clarifier to the first in this hypothetical situation. Think about what it might offer, think about connections between the cards and think about how that clarifier would extend the conversation, would add some depth or layers of meaning or might clear something up. Now, if that feels fun, I want you to keep that first card out, but practice pulling additional cards one at a time and reading them as hypothetical single clarifying card. Think about how the overall meaning of your reading changes. Think about how that second card offers different clarity, how different clarifying cards change the way you would interpret that initial card and pay attention to how often it feels helpful to pull that other card versus how confusing it might feel to be pulling that second card. Pay attention to this. This can be a very low stakes exercise that can help give you a sense of what it feels like to pull a clarifier and maybe help you understand what your initial gut reaction is to pulling those clarifying cards.

Speaker 1: 23:00

I know we covered a lot today and this is a little bit longer than our usual episodes, so I just want to say thank you for hanging out with me today, and I'll be back soon with another episode of Card Talk. Card Talk is committed to staying ad freefree for everyone, which is possible thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. To pledge your monthly support or make a one-time donation, click the link in the show notes. You can also find episode transcripts, more about me and additional tarot resources through my website, 3amtarotcom. See you next time.