A reversed card is one that comes out upside down relative to you. Some readers use them. Some deliberately keep the deck one way up. Both are defensible. What is not defensible is using them without having decided what they mean.

Decide once, in advance

If you read reversals, read them the same way every time. Deciding case by case whether a reversal is bad news or a softer version of the same news means the deck can never tell you anything you did not already want to hear.

Five ways to read one

• Blocked. The card’s energy is there and cannot get out. The Magician reversed still has the skill and cannot make it land.
• Turned inward. The meaning applies internally rather than externally, so a card about conflict becomes conflict with yourself.
• Not yet, or no longer. The stage the card describes has not arrived or has just passed. The gentlest reading, and often the most accurate on questions of timing.
• Too much or too little. The quality is out of proportion. Courage as recklessness. Caution as paralysis.
• Resisted. The card describes something the querent is refusing, which is a different thing from something that is not happening.

Why “the opposite” is a poor default

Reading a reversal as the plain reverse of the upright meaning wastes the card. You end up with readings where half the deck means no, and no information about why or how.

The five above all keep the card’s subject and change its condition. That is much closer to how situations actually behave.

The hard cards reversed

Reversals soften the worst cards more often than they sharpen them. A reversed Ten of Swords frequently reads as the ending being finally over rather than an ending twice as bad. Do not turn that into a rule, but do check it before you deliver something grim.

If you skip them entirely

Nothing is lost. Everything a reversal can express is available in the relationships between cards, which lesson 14 covered, and plenty of experienced readers dropped reversals for exactly that reason.