WHY is the term "reversed" used for thes

"Reversed" just means the card landed upside down — rotated 180° from the standard orientation. Upright = as printed; reversed = flipped.

Why almost everyone uses it:

1. It's an old convention, not a deck feature. The 78-card tarot wasn't designed with reversals; they're an interpretive layer added by 19th–20th century occultists (notably the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and A. E. Waite's 1910 Rider–Waite-Smith deck). Once those systems became the dominant Western lineage, the convention stuck.

1. It doubles the reading without doubling the deck. A single card can carry an upright *or* reversed meaning, so 78 cards do the work of 156 states. Practically, when you shuffle and lay cards, some naturally come out upside down — readers had to decide whether to ignore that or read it. Most chose to read it.

1. It functions as modulation, not opposition. The mainstream reading (per the cards themselves in the standard deck) is: reversed ≠ "the opposite." It's usually *blocked, internalized, delayed, excessive, or shadowed* — a softer shade of the upright meaning. Some schools (notably the French Marseille tradition, and many modern intuitive readers) reject reversals entirely and read everything upright, because each card already contains its own shadow.

So "reversed" is widespread because the Golden Dawn–derived lineage is widespread, not because the cards demand it.

Want the same one explained in Chinese, or a quick comparison of how Marseille, Thoth, and RWS handle reversals differently?