Reversed Cards: To Read or Not to Read

There's a real, ongoing disagreement among tarot readers about whether reversed cards should be read at all — not what a reversal means once you decide to read it (covered in our separate guide on that), but whether the whole practice is worth adopting in the first place. Both sides have genuinely reasonable arguments, and plenty of experienced readers land on different answers.

The case for reading reversals is mostly about range. With reversals included, the deck's 78 cards effectively produce 156 distinct readings rather than 78, adding real nuance that a purely upright-only practice loses — a blocked, delayed, or internalized version of a card's meaning is often exactly what a specific situation calls for, and reading only upright meanings can flatten that distinction. Readers who favor this approach generally argue that skipping reversals discards useful information a proper shuffle already encodes into the draw.

The case against reading reversals leans on simplicity and historical practice. A card's upright meaning is broad enough, this camp argues, to already cover its fuller range through context, position, and the surrounding cards, without needing a separate reversed layer to convey nuance. There's also a genuine historical point worth knowing: reversed meanings as a formalized practice were largely developed and popularized by later 19th- and 20th-century tarot writers, particularly those working within occult traditions like the Golden Dawn, rather than being a fixed feature of tarot's earliest centuries as a card game. Readers favoring an upright-only approach sometimes cite this history directly, treating reversed readings as a genuinely useful but non-essential later addition rather than an original, indispensable part of the system.

If you do want to read reversals, getting genuine 50/50 odds matters, and it's a real practical issue worth addressing directly. A simple riffle shuffle or repeated cutting preserves each card's existing orientation through the whole process, meaning a deck that started mostly upright can stay mostly upright no matter how many times you cut it — see our shuffling guide for the specific mixing techniques (overhand shuffling with genuine end-over-end rotation, or a face-down spread-and-mix) that actually produce an even reversed/upright split.

Decks with an asymmetric or clearly directional back design create a separate, practical wrinkle: a card's orientation becomes visible from the back while shuffling, which can unconsciously bias a reader toward noticing and subtly avoiding (or favoring) certain reversals before the card is even turned over. If your deck's back design isn't symmetric, one common workaround is to deliberately reverse roughly half the deck by hand before shuffling, rather than relying on the shuffle itself to introduce reversals from a uniformly-oriented starting stack.

Neither choice is the 'more correct' or 'more advanced' one — reading only upright and reading both orientations are both legitimate, widely practiced approaches, and it's entirely normal to start with one and switch to the other as your own reading style develops. Many readers begin upright-only specifically because it's simpler to learn 78 meanings before adding a second layer on top, then add reversals later once the upright meanings feel genuinely familiar. If you do eventually add reversals, our reversed-meanings guide is the natural next stop for how to actually interpret them once you've settled the question this guide covers: whether to read them at all.

A genuine middle-ground practice exists too, worth knowing even if it's less commonly discussed than the two main camps: some readers read reversals only for the Major Arcana, treating those 22 cards' extra nuance as worth the added complexity given their outsized symbolic weight, while reading all 56 Minor Arcana cards upright-only, on the reasoning that the Minors' situational, day-to-day meanings already carry enough range without an added layer. It's a genuinely workable compromise for a reader who wants some reversed nuance without doubling the full 78-card learning curve all at once, and it's no less legitimate than either of the two more commonly discussed positions.

Whatever you decide, it's worth naming your own choice explicitly to anyone you read for, rather than leaving it ambiguous — telling a querent up front whether you read reversals at all sets honest expectations for the session and avoids any confusion if a card that would traditionally carry a very different reversed meaning happens to land upside down but gets read upright anyway.

It's worth revisiting this decision periodically rather than treating it as settled forever the first time you make it. A reader who started upright-only specifically to keep things simple while learning the base 78 meanings often finds, months later, that the upright meanings feel genuinely automatic and that adding reversed nuance no longer feels like an added burden but a welcome deepening of the practice. Equally, a reader who started reading every reversal might later decide the added complexity isn't earning its keep for their own reading style, and simplify back down. Neither direction is a step backward — both are simply the practice maturing into whatever actually serves that individual reader best.