Two things are commonly said about reversed cards, and both are wrong. The first is that a reversal means the opposite of the upright card. The second is that a reversal means something bad.
A reversal is the same card under different conditions. The subject does not change — a card about beginnings is about beginnings either way up. What changes is how it is arriving, and there are only a few ways that usefully goes.
Four readings that work
When a card comes up reversed, one of these four is almost always the right frame. Choosing between them is the skill.
Turned inward. The card is describing something happening internally rather than in the world. Upright, it is a thing you are doing; reversed, a thing you are feeling or thinking about doing. This is the most common and the most benign reading, and it changes advice completely: a card that upright says act, reversed frequently says you are already acting, in your head, and have not moved.
Blocked or resisted. The card's subject is present and is not getting through. Something is in the way, and often it is you. Reversed cards of this kind are the ones that sting, because the obstruction is usually a preference you have not admitted to.
In excess, or in deficit. The card taken too far, or not far enough. The same reversal covers both, and the way to tell is to ask which one you would recognise. Too much caution and too little are both the same card upside down; you know which is yours.
Not yet, or no longer. A timing reading. The card's subject is either arriving and not here, or finishing and not gone. This is the least dramatic of the four and it explains a great many reversals that otherwise look like nothing.
How to choose between them
Three things narrow it down quickly.
The position. A reversal in a position about your own attitude is nearly always inward or resisted. A reversal in a position about external influences is usually excess, deficit or timing — you cannot be internally blocking someone else's behaviour.
The neighbours. If the cards around it are moving, a reversal is likely blocked. If they are still, it is likely inward.
Whether it stings. This is not a rigorous test and it is a reliable one. If a reading of a reversal makes you want to argue, it is worth taking seriously.
What it does not mean
It is not the opposite. The opposite of a card about trust is not a card about distrust; it is a different card entirely, and it is in the deck somewhere. A reversal narrows and complicates, it does not invert.
It is not a warning. Some reversals are uncomfortable. So are plenty of upright cards, and some of the most difficult images in the deck do their worst work the right way up. Orientation is not a quality rating.
It is not more accurate. Reversals do not add information the deck otherwise lacked. They add a dimension, which is useful when you can read it and noise when you cannot.
How many to expect
In a deck shuffled honestly, roughly a third of cards land reversed. Readings on this site are composed with a reversal rate near that, which means a ten-card spread with three or four reversals is entirely ordinary and says nothing in itself.
What does say something is a spread well away from that. Seven reversals in ten is a statement about the whole reading rather than about seven separate cards, and so is none at all. Both are called out here as an observation about the shape of the spread, alongside the card-by-card text, because the proportion is the finding rather than any individual card.
Whether to use them
This is a real choice, and there is no correct answer.
Reasons to use them. They roughly double the deck's vocabulary. They stop a spread from being uniformly encouraging, which makes it more useful. And they force the harder question of how a card is arriving, not just what it is.
Reasons not to. A beginner reading with reversals is trying to learn 156 meanings instead of 78, and it slows everything down. In a three-card spread a single reversal can dominate a reading out of proportion. And there is an honest practical point: whether a card comes up reversed depends on how thoroughly the deck was shuffled and whether it was ever cut, which is a mechanical detail to hang a third of your meaning on.
A reasonable rule: leave reversals off until each of the 78 cards means something specific to you upright, then turn them on. On this site reversals can be switched off entirely, and a reading without them is a complete reading rather than a reduced one.
Reading them in practice
Read the card upright first, always. Establish what it is about, then apply the reversal as a modifier. Reading it as a reversal from the start produces a vague sense of negativity attached to nothing in particular, which is where most bad reversal readings come from.
Then say which of the four you are using, out loud or on paper. Inward, blocked, excess or deficit, timing. Naming it stops the reversal being a general shadow over the reading and makes it a specific claim — one that can turn out to be wrong, which is the only kind worth making.
Every card in the deck has its reversed reading set out alongside its upright one, written separately rather than derived by negation. Reading the two next to each other for a card you know well is the fastest way to see what a reversal is actually doing.
