What Tarot Reversals Actually Change in a Reading

Somebody asks about reversals in almost every beginner class I have taught, usually with a slightly guilty tone, as though not using them were a shortcut. It is not. Plenty of readers who have worked for decades never turn a card the other way up, and their readings are not thinner for it.

What follows is what actually changes when you use them, what changes when you drop them, and how to decide without pretending there is a correct answer.

Where reversals came from

Reversed meanings are younger than the cards. Early tarot was played as a game, and the divinatory tradition that grew around it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries added the practice of reading upside down cards differently. It caught on because it doubled the vocabulary of a fixed deck without printing anything new.

That origin matters for one practical reason. Nothing in the images themselves demands to be read reversed, so there is no authority to appeal to. Different schools handle it differently and all of them have long histories.

The four common approaches

Most readers use one of these, and mixing them mid session is where confusion starts.

The opposite approach is the one beginners meet first and the one that causes most trouble. Reverse the Ten of Swords and you get relief, which is fine. Reverse the Tower and you get a disaster that fails to arrive, which is a genuinely useful reading. Reverse the Three of Cups and you are supposed to produce the opposite of friendship, which usually comes out as a vague statement about isolation that nobody can check.

Blocked is the one I use, because it keeps the card's meaning intact and changes only its motion. A blocked Three of Cups is a friendship you have stopped putting time into. That is specific, and the person sitting across from you can tell you within a second whether it fits.

What you lose by dropping them

Honestly, less than the anxiety suggests.

A seventy eight card deck read upright already carries the full emotional range. The Swords suit handles difficulty. The Devil, the Tower, the Ten of Swords and the Five of Pentacles do not need to be inverted to say something hard. If your readings feel relentlessly positive without reversals, the problem is not the deck, it is that you are softening cards you do not want to deliver.

What you do lose is resolution. With reversals you can distinguish between a difficulty arriving and a difficulty being avoided. Without them, that distinction has to come from the position in the spread or from the cards around it, which means the spread has to do more work.

What you lose by using them

Consistency, mostly. A reader using reversals has to hold a doubled vocabulary steady across a whole session, under time pressure, while also listening to a person. That is genuinely harder, and the usual failure is drift: opposite for one card, blocked for the next, whichever produces a sentence that sounds good.

The second cost is mechanical. If you never shuffle in a way that inverts cards, you will draw almost no reversals, then read significance into the ones you do get. Riffle shuffling produces very few. Overhand produces almost none. If you want reversals in your readings, you have to spread the cards face down and turn a portion around on purpose, which is a physical habit you either build or do not.

How to decide

Try both, but not at the same time, and keep a record. Read upright only for a month, then with reversals for a month, and use the four field method in our guide to a ten minute reading journal to mark which readings landed and which stayed vague.

Two months is enough to see something. Most people find that one of the two produces more entries in the landed column, and that answer is personal rather than universal.

The question is not which method is correct. It is which one you can hold steady for an hour without drifting.

If somebody reads for you

Ask which approach they use before the session, not during it. A reader who has thought about it will answer in one sentence. A reader who cannot answer is probably drifting between all four, which means the reversals in your reading are decoration rather than information.

That question sits nicely alongside the other ones worth asking, which are collected in the piece on what to ask before you pay. More on layouts and card meanings is filed under tarot.