Looking for a list of Yes No Meanings for tarot cards? In this post we’ll talk about 3 ways to get a “Yes or No” value for any tarot card. The first two are very easy:
1. The “Upright and Reversed” method
The simplest way to assign a “yes” or “no” meaning to any tarot card is to interpret upright cards as “yes” and inverted or reversed tarot cards as “no“.
This fast method is commonly used when you’re in the middle of a longer tarot reading and you need a quick yes or no clarifying card.
2. The “Courts and Majors” method
Another fast and simple method of establishing a “Yes or No” meaning is called “Courts and Majors“. To do a quick Courts and Majors Yes/No reading, the first step is to remove any two aces from the deck — then draw any card.
Using this method:
- All Minor Arcana cards that aren’t court cards, would mean “no“.
- All court cards and Major Arcana cards mean “yes“.
So should you use these methods? Sure, maybe for a quick answer.
The truth is, neither of these simplified methods is all that great. They’re okay for very simple tarot questions,
The truth is, neither of these simplified methods is all that great. They’re okay for very simple tarot questions, but they’re really no better than a coin toss or a Magic 8 Ball, and they aren’t very likely to yield accurate results.
The trouble with these simplistic approaches is they strip away all of the nuanced meanings from the tarot cards themselves. The entire point of reading tarot cards is exploring the multifaceted symbolic meanings contained in each card. If we just split the deck one way or another, we ignore all the special meanings hidden in each card.
3. The “right way” to do a Yes or No tarot reading
So what’s the most accurate way of preserving the unique meaning of each card while still returning a simple yes or no meaning? We’ll need to take into account the positivity or negativity of each card.
While the tarot deck can be a very “gray area” in terms of positive and negative interpretation, the following “mostly positive” or “mostly negative” — or “mostly somewhere in the middle” meanings have been used by generations of readers. Are they etched in stone? Absolutely not. There are hundreds of subtle variations to this list.
If you want to see this system in action, try our free Yes or No Tarot Reading which uses the same system as the list below.
Here’s the list of yes or no list for each tarot card:
What’s right for you?
The truth is, most tarot readers use all three methods to get quick yes or no answers. When you’re in the middle of a 10 card Celtic Cross reading, it’s probably not conveniet change gears and consult a list of yes or no tarot meanings. In those cases, it’s often far easier just to draw a tarot card and see if it comes up reversed or not.
On the other hand, there are many readers who would say, yes or no questions aren’t really what tarot is best at anyway. Considering the the entire medium is defined by subtlety and nuance, this world of absolute, black-and-white answers might not be where tarot really shines.
