Product Description

TAR0T REVERSALS reveals everything you need to know for reading the most maligned and misunderstood part of a spread - the reversed cards. These interpretations offer inner support, positive advice, and descriptions of the learning opportunities available, yet with a twist that is uniquely their own. Enhance and deepen the quality of your consultations as you experiment with the eleven different methods of reading reversed cards.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32387 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Amazon.com
How do you read reversed tarot cards, the ones that appear upside down in a spread? In The Complete Book of Tarot Reversals, author Mary K. Greer addresses this commonly ignored or misunderstood situation. The most common wisdom about reversed cards is that they indicate resistance or problem areas. In fact, some readers simply abort a reading if too many cards show up as reversals, assuming that the person is too unreceptive, depressed, or dishonest to work with the reading. "Receiving too many reversals can make you feel like you have been dealt a 'losing hand,'" writes Greer, "but hopefully, this book will help turn that around." In fact, Greer claims that reversals offer a portal to the more mystical and esoteric influences in our lives. They "provide an opportunity to reach below logic and lead us into the realm of potentials and underlying causes where everything is connected and Magic happens." Greer (Tarot for Your Self), a seasoned reader and tarot teacher, suggests 12 possible reasons for a reversal. For instance, it could indicate a blocked or resistant situation or it could be due to the questioner getting ready to break through the condition pictured. Greer then offers interpretations of all 78 tarot cards (both reversed and upright), while giving more lengthy coverage to the fascinating twist of reversals. --Gail Hudson

About the Author
Mary Greer is an author and teacher specializing in methods of self-exploration and transformation. A Grandmaster of the American Tarot Association, she is a member of numerous Tarot organizations, and is featured at Tarot conferences and symposia in the United States and abroad. Mary also has a wide following in the women's and pagan communities for her work in women's spirituality and magic. A Priestess-Hierophant in the Fellowship of Isis, she is the founder of the Iseum of Isis Aurea.Mary has studied and practiced Tarot and astrology for over 34 years. Her teaching experience includes eleven years at New College of California, as well as at many workshops, conferences, and classes. She is the founder and director of the learning center T.A.R.O.T. (Tools and Rites of Transformation).Her books include Tarot for Your Self: A Workbook for Personal Transformation (1984); Tarot Constellations: Patterns of Personal Destiny (1987); Tarot Mirrors: Reflections of Personal Meaning (1988); The Essence of Magic: Tarot, Ritual, and Aromatherapy (1993); Women of the Golden Dawn: Rebels and Priestesses (1995); and Aromatherapy: Healing for the Body and Soul (1998), with Kathi Keville.

Excerpted from Complete Book Of Tarot Reversals by Mary Greer. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction

About This Book

This book contains meanings for reversals based on many different theories and traditions. The intent is to give you a background in both "traditional" Tarot meanings and modern approaches to generating such meanings based on principles and analogies drawn from numbers, elements, and pictures. The interpretations are meant to stimulate your own intuitive ideas. As you try them out, note which approach works best for you. This will depend, in part, on your own world-view, style of reading, purpose in doing the reading, and kind of question asked.

If your intent is purely to tell fortunes and predict the future you may find the interpretations labeled "Traditional," with their specific referents, sufficient. There is little ambiguity here except in how the meanings relate to other cards, a skill that comes from observation, intuition, and experience. But if you are examining personal motivations, clarifying goals and desires, or seeking new options, then you will probably find the modern approaches to reversals more pertinent.

Traditional interpretations for reversals usually include illness. This makes sense because reversals suggest that an adjustment needs to be made, and stress is the body's response to adjustment and change. Doctors now believe that all illness originates in stress. The greater the stress reaction the more potential there is for harmful effects from it. Stress picks on the weakest link in the chain of the body. Reversals merely point to the major "weak links" at the moment. Dean Shrock acknowledges in Doctor's Orders: Go Fishing that "the most common approach to health care historically over time and across cultures, is shamanism." In shamanism, "sickness is thought to be a positive messenger that says you need to rebalance spiritually." 1

This book includes a shamanic and magical perspective for each reversal. Tarot is an excellent feedback mechanism for receiving the messages before imbalances can manifest either physically or in stressful actions and interactions. It can also pinpoint a source of energy imbalance that has already manifested so that you can work to free it from underlying patterns of criticism, anger, resentment, guilt, and fear.

Health Wise References to health and illness in this book are in no way to be taken as medical prognostication. Do not predict illness or give medical advice in a reading, whether for yourself or others, unless you are qualified to do so. Advise all querents to see a qualified medical practitioner if they are concerned about their health.

All references appearing here to health and physical conditions are purely metaphoric. They indicate analogous psychic tendencies and thought patterns that may precipitate the kinds of stress that, when unrelieved over long periods of time, can result in illness. At no time is it suggested that a particular person has any physical condition mentioned herein. For instance a "brainstorm" can indicate a fresh idea, or the misfiring of neurons in the cerebral cortex. Metaphorically the term represents a continuum of possibility.

A Personal Story I began this book with the intention of rectifying the "erroneous" idea that reversed cards represent an opposite, often negative aspect of the upright meaning of a card. While confronting and dealing with problems is essential, in my readings I emphasize clarifying goals and the conscious creation of what you want in your life. Problems, then, represent energy that is constrained and can be liberated. In doing so we access their hidden wisdom and potentials. What I did not fully realize, but should have, was that, like a dirty pipe when the water is first turned on, all kinds of stuff must come up before the line runs clear.

As with everyone who has written a Tarot book, taught or studied a card-a-week, or created a deck, you find uncanny synchronicities between your life and the cards. Frieda Harris worked on the Thoth deck during World War II. While painting the card named "Victory" (Six of Wands), there was a major Allied victory, and during the painting of "Defeat" (Five of Swords), there was a major Allied defeat. Harris felt that the cards and the events were connected, although common sense said it was absurd. And so, I too experienced each reversal in my own life.

The following are only a few personal examples of what happens when you enter the underworld of psyche or soul. Reversals are certainly not evil, but they sometimes represent adversity: the kind that teaches us what we are capable of, the kind that teaches us what really counts and what is truly important, the kind that tests our moral fiber and character. By struggling with reversals we learn to respond with integrity and a determination not to turn away from the teachings of each circumstance.

Before I mention some of the situations I encountered I want to note that I have been blessed in my life with almost no prior personal injuries or experience with family illness, and I nearly always meet my deadlines.

My first delays occurred when it took more than a month to get delivery on a new computer. I had the same tenant for three years, yet as I began writing, starting with the reversed Court Cards I went through four tenants in four months. Throughout the Swords I dealt with a crisis in an organization that involved alleged deception. The Ace of Pentacles Rx corresponded with a badly sprained ankle that occurred four days before a Tarot tour of Italy.2 With the Ten of Pentacles Rx the bank lost two checks that were intended to pay my house taxes.

As I wrote about the High Priestess Rx I was reading a biography of Christiana Morgan, whose paintings of her inner visions (begun under analysis with Carl Jung) became the basis of a four-year seminar taught by Jung. The biographer regularly described Morgan in...(Continues)