Reversals — Do You Even Read Them?

Two Decks, Two Rules

Cartomancy — reading with an ordinary deck of playing cards — grew up among people who weren't buying a deck made for divination. They were using the same fifty-two cards used for cards games at the kitchen table, and a standard deck doesn't hand you an upside-down version of anything. The court cards are drawn to face the same way no matter which end is up. There was never a formal "reversed" meaning built into the tradition, because the deck itself never handed readers a reason to invent one. Instead, the old cartomancers built their meaning out of what surrounded a card — which cards it landed beside, which way a King or Queen's gaze seemed to fall, whether the cards around it agreed with each other or pulled apart.

Tarot took a different road. It didn't start as a divination tool either — it began in fifteenth-century Italy as a card game called Tarocchi, played by nobility, no fortune-telling attached. Divination came later, in the eighteenth century, once occultists and mystics started layering esoteric meaning onto the deck. And because tarot's images were painted with a clear up and down — a single figure standing, walking, reaching in one direction — flipping the card changed what the eye actually saw. That difference gave reversals somewhere to live that a symmetrical deck of playing cards never had.

Where Tarot's Reversals Came From

The earliest written reversal meanings anyone has been able to track down come from Etteilla's book from 1783 — one of the first occultists to put tarot to paper as a divination system in its own right. That timing lines up with the broader story: reversals arrived once tarot had already made the jump from parlor game to esoteric tool, part of the same French occult revival that gave the cards astrological correspondences, numerology, and eventually the Golden Dawn's more formal elemental dignity systems. It isn't an ancient, unbroken thread reaching back to the fifteenth century. It's a layer that got added once the deck started being asked to do something it wasn't originally built for.

None of that makes reversals fake or lesser. It just means the two practices I work in were never playing by the same rulebook, and it's worth knowing which rulebook you picked up before you decide a reversed card has nothing to say.

Four Ways Readers Handle a Reversal

If you do work with reversals, there isn't one universal rule for what "upside down" means — different readers lean on different lenses. A few of the most common:

Know Your Cards Before You Read the Picture

Here's the part I say plainly at my table, and I'll say it just as plainly here: if you're looking at a pretty picture and telling yourself a story about what you see, you are not reading tarot. You're reading a picture book. There's nothing wrong with the imagery — it was painted to open a door into the meaning, not to replace it. But turn that same card upside down, and if a picture story was all you had, the door you were leaning on disappears. Reversals will find that out about you fast.

Intuition absolutely has a seat at this table. I use mine every single reading. But it comes in after the cards have already said what they came to say — not instead of it, and not before it. Learn what the card means. Then let your gut add whatever it wants to add on top. Skip straight to the picture, upright or reversed, and you've skipped the reading altogether.

Whether the deck in your hands is a worn set of ordinary playing cards or a full seventy-eight card tarot spread, the order holds the same: know what's actually being said before you decide what you feel about it. The reversal was never the problem. Going straight to the picture, upright or otherwise, is.