Do I really need/have to use reversals?

Short answer: no — reversals are a convention you adopt, not a requirement. A card reads fine upright only.

Why they exist at all: the picture has a natural direction (the figure faces, hands, motion). Turning it upside-down was read as "that energy has no outlet" — blocked, overdone, turned inward, delayed, or inverted. That's it. It's a second layer of reading on top of the same 78 cards, not a separate deck.

The three common ways people handle it:

• Always upright. The classic position. Every card means what it means; the image's own gestures carry the tension. Cleanest for beginners.
• Reversals allowed, read lightly. A reversed card is a note that the energy is tangled or inward, not a flipped verdict on the upright meaning. This deck's own skeleton reads reversals as blocked / excessive / internalized / delayed / inverted.
• Reversals off for certain subjects. Many readers ignore orientation on yes-no or "should I" questions, where the position matters more than the picture.

What happens mechanically here: by default a card lands upright or reversed with even odds — 50/50 — and I can turn on a slight upright bias if you'd rather see mostly upright cards. So if you'd rather not deal with reversals, we can just read everything as it falls and only call out a reversal when it genuinely says something the upright card doesn't.

The upside of keeping them: two identical cards in two positions stop meaning the same thing. The cost: twice as many meanings to learn, and a lot of beginners start reading "reversed = bad," which is the fastest way to make the deck useless.

One thing I can't do is decide for you which convention is "correct" — different traditions disagree honestly, and any reader who insists theirs is the only right one is selling something. Pick whichever one you'd actually keep using.

Want me to remember "no reversals" for your future draws, or leave the default 50/50?