← Encyclopedia of Tarot · lesson 107/121
Reversed cards
A reversed card is one that comes up upside down in a spread. Because the cards are shuffled, some will naturally turn round, and many readers give those cards a different shade of meaning from the upright one. Others never read reversals at all. Both are long-standing practices, and neither is more correct.
Where the idea comes from
Reversed meanings were part of the fortune-telling tradition by the late eighteenth century, and Waite gives a reversed reading for every card in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. His reversed lists are often brief and sometimes surprising: the reversed Death, for example, is "inertia, sleep, lethargy", not something worse. The Golden Dawn, by contrast, read without reversals and judged a card's strength from its neighbours instead — see elemental dignities.
Ways to read a reversal
Readers who use reversals tend to choose from a handful of approaches, and many mix them according to the card and the question:
- Blocked — the card's energy is present but held back, delayed or not yet able to flow.
- Inward — the theme is happening inside the querent rather than in events: private, unspoken or still forming.
- Excess or lack — too much of the card's quality, or too little: courage becomes recklessness, caution becomes fear.
- Easing — for a hard card, the reversal can show the difficulty lifting or being worked through. The reversed Ten of Swords is often read as recovery beginning.
- Opposite — the older, simpler reading: the reverse of the upright meaning.
None of these makes a reversed card "bad". An upside-down card is better thought of as asking a question — what is in the way, what is hidden, what is out of balance — than as a warning.
Choosing not to use them
Many readers leave every card upright. They argue that the seventy-eight upright cards already cover the full range of human experience, both light and dark, and that the surrounding cards and the position show which side of a card is in play. This is a matter of method, not of skill. A reader and a querent may simply decide whether reversals will be part of their readings — and, if so, how often they should turn up.
In a reading
A spread with many reversals is often read as a situation where much is held back, unresolved or still internal; a single reversal among upright cards draws attention to the one place where things are not moving freely. If a querent wonders why a card appeared reversed, the reader will usually explain which of the approaches above they are using.