A querent once asked a reader to clarify a card they had drawn upside down. The reader said it was reversed. The querent, who had been studying on their own, insisted it was a reverse. The distinction they were reaching for is real even if the terminology in English muddles it. The difference between reverse and reversed in tarot readings is this: a “reverse” is the practice of reading a card’s opposite meaning by overturning it deliberately, while “reversed” describes the physical orientation of a card that has fallen upside down during a spread. One is a choice. The other is an accident of gravity.
Reverse vs reversed in tarot: a reverse is a deliberate overturning of a card to read its opposite meaning; reversed is the physical upside-down orientation of a card in a spread. The two are often confused but serve different functions in practice.
The Quotable Definition
A reverse is an interpretive method: the reader actively turns a card face-down or inverts its meaning as a conscious act of divination. Reversed is a physical state: the card has landed upside down relative to the reader’s perspective, and the reader must decide whether to read it that way or turn it upright. The confusion is understandable. Both words share a root, and many modern decks print “reversed” on the card itself as a separate definition. But the practice of reading upside-down cards is older than the word assigned to it.
Where the Confusion Comes From
The trouble begins in the late 18th century. Jean-Baptiste Alliette, who published under the name Etteilla, was the first known cartomancer to assign explicit reversed meanings to the tarot. His 1789 deck, the first created specifically for divination, printed both upright and inverted interpretations on each card. Etteilla did not use the word “reversed” in the modern sense. He called the practice “renversé” in French, meaning “overturned” or “upside-down.” The physical card was simply that: a card that had been turned.
English translators inherited the French term and split it. “Reverse” became the noun for the act of reading against the card’s upright meaning. “Reversed” became the adjective for the card’s orientation. By the mid-19th century, English-language manuals by figures like Éliphas Lévi and later Arthur Edward Waite treated the two as interchangeable, which is how the blur began. Waite’s 1910 Pictorial Key to the Tarot refers to “reversed meanings” but never distinguishes how a card arrives at that state.
The result is a living confusion. A practitioner today may say “I read reversals” meaning they interpret upside-down cards, while another says “I never use reversed meanings” meaning they always read the card upright regardless of its orientation. Both are using the same vocabulary for different assumptions.
The History of Reading Against the Card
Etteilla’s innovation was not entirely original. Earlier sources, including some Renaissance divinatory texts on playing cards, describe reading cards that fall face-down or land in an unexpected position as carrying a blocked or opposing force. But Etteilla systemized it. His 1783 Manière de se servir des cartes appelées Tarots laid out specific inverted meanings for all 78 cards, a schema that influenced every major tarot tradition afterward.
The French occultist Papus, in his 1889 The Tarot of the Bohemians, argued that reversed meanings were not inversions but completions. He wrote that a card’s upright meaning represented the active, expressed aspect of its energy, while the reversed aspect showed the passive, latent, or internalized form. This is the source of the modern idea that reversed cards are not “bad” but merely “internal” or “blocked.”
A. E. Waite adopted a different approach. His 1910 Pictorial Key assigned reversed meanings to every Major and Minor Arcana card but described them as “contrary” or “perverted” expressions of the upright meaning. Waite’s language carried moral overtones that later readers rejected. By the 1970s, the feminist and psychological tarot revival led by figures like Mary K. Greer and Rachel Pollack reframed reversed cards as opportunities for shadow work rather than warnings. Greer’s 1984 Tarot for Your Self explicitly separated the physical “reversed” card from the interpretive choice of reading it as a “reverse.”
How the Distinction Works in Practice
A reader who uses reversed cards has a simple protocol: any card that falls upside down in the spread is read according to its reversed meaning. The orientation is fixed by the fall. The reader does not intervene.
A reader who uses reverse cards makes a different move. They may shuffle the deck with all cards upright, then deliberately invert certain cards as part of the layout, or they may read the spread’s internal logic to decide when a card’s meaning should be reversed even if it is physically upright. This is closer to Etteilla’s original method, which involved overturning cards face-down in a specific pattern and reading the resulting reversed or upright state as the encounter’s outcome.
There is a third position: the “no reversal” tradition. Many readers, especially those trained in the Waite-Smith or Thoth systems, choose to read every card as upright regardless of its orientation. They argue that the card’s position in the spread and the surrounding cards already provide enough nuance. In this approach, a physically reversed card is simply turned upright before reading. No interpretive weight is given to the orientation.
The Symbolism of the Overturned Card
The gesture of turning a card has its own meaning. In magical traditions, inversion is a technique for banishing or neutralizing. A talisman turned upside down loses its effective direction. A sigil reversed becomes its opposite. The same logic applies in cartomancy: to read a card as reversed is to treat it as the energy that was held back, turned inward, or expressed through its shadow.
This is why some readers insist that the physical accident of a reversed card matters. They argue that the deck is a living tool and that the fall of the card is not random. If a card lands upside down, the deck is pointing the reader toward the blocked or latent meaning. To ignore the orientation is to miss half the message.
Other readers push back. They say that the deck’s orientation depends entirely on how the shuffler holds the cards. A reader who cuts the deck and reassembles it at an angle may produce a statistically high number of reversals purely through mechanical habit. The “message” in that case is an artifact of hand position, not spirit. This debate is unresolved within the community and likely will remain so.
Reversed as Blocked Energy, Reverse as Conscious Choice
The practical difference matters most during a reading. When a card is physically reversed, its energy is incomplete, delayed, or inward. The Knight of Cups reversed does not offer romance; it offers the fear of romance or a romance that exists only in the querent’s mind. The Ten of Wands reversed is not the burden but the decision to put the burden down.
When a reader deliberately reverses a card as a technique, the meaning is different. The act is intentional. The card’s inverted meaning is chosen as a contrast or correction to the upright flow of the spread. Some readers use this technique to show the querent what is being blocked or what must be faced. Others use it as a divinatory trick: place the reversed card next to an upright card to see the shadow side of the upright meaning.
Common Misconceptions
The most persistent misconception is that a reversed card means the opposite of the upright card. It does not. The reversed meaning of the Three of Swords is not joy; it is recovery from pain, or the refusal to acknowledge pain, or pain that has been suppressed. The reversal operates on the same thematic ground as the upright card, not in binary opposition.
Another error: that reversed cards are always negative. The Empress reversed can mean creative block, but it can also mean a creative process that is happening internally, unseen by others. Neither is inherently bad. A creative block may be the necessary pause before a breakthrough.
A third: that a reader must use reversed meanings to be skilled. Many respected readers never use them. Rachel Pollack, whose writings on the Major Arcana are among the most cited of the late 20th century, used reversed meanings selectively and argued that the novice should first master upright readings before introducing orientation.
FAQ
Does every tarot deck come with reversed meanings? No. Many decks include both upright and reversed keywords in the guidebook, but the practice is not universal. Some decks, particularly oracle decks and decks designed for intuitive reading, omit reversed meanings entirely.
Can I read tarot without ever interpreting reversed cards? Yes. Many readers never read reversals and produce accurate readings. The choice is a matter of method, not correctness.
Why do some readers say reversed cards are “blocked” while others say they are “shadow”? The language reflects different traditions. “Blocked” comes from the psychological school, rooted in Mary K. Greer’s work. “Shadow” comes from the Jungian tradition, popularized by Sallie Nichols in Jung and Tarot (1980).
Do reversed cards mean the same thing in every deck? No. The reversed meaning is tied to the deck’s own symbolism. A card in the Thoth deck may invert differently than the same card in the Waite-Smith deck because the imagery and attributions differ.
Related Guides and Deeper Reading
The distinction between reverse and reversed is a small door into a larger room. For a full treatment of how direction works in spreads, see our tarot guide. To understand how Etteilla’s system shaped modern cartomancy, visit the glossary entry on Etteilla. And for those who want to practice reading both orientations with intention, our guide to reading reversed meanings walks through the interpretive logic for each Major Arcana card.
The cards do not care what you call it. The difference matters because the reader’s intention matters. Whether you choose to read the accident or the overturning, the question is always the same: what does this position say about the querent’s life, right now. The rest is vocabulary.