Wheel of Fortune

Symbols

• The Great WheelThe great wheel hung in cloud, turning of itself — it belongs to no one and stops for no one. Understanding it is not a matter of control but of recognizing which notch you are riding.+

  Waite says he followed Éliphas Lévi's reconstruction here, and reads the wheel as 'the perpetual motion of a fluidic universe'. Older wheels carried climbing and falling creatures; here Egyptian figures take the rise and the fall, and the wheel itself carries letters and emblems.

• The SphinxThe blue sphinx atop the wheel — its sword held upright against its shoulder, drawn on no one. It is the centre that is not flung off by the turning: seeing, but not competing.+

  Waite rejects the variant with the sphinx 'couchant on a pedestal above'. Here it sits on the wheel itself, carried by the turning rather than watching from outside it — 'the equilibrium therein', in his words.

• The Descending SerpentThe serpent sliding down the left rim — Typhon in the old books. Every descent is not a fall but a dissolving of the previous arc, so another may rise.+

  'Typhon' is the Greek name Plutarch, in On Isis and Osiris, gives to Set, the god who kills Osiris. Painted yellow and heading down the left side, the serpent is the half of the turning that takes things apart.

• The Ascending Jackal-headed OneAnubis ascending the right rim — guide of the dead. In the wheel's grammar, every rise is preceded by someone who has walked the lower arc first.+

  In the Egyptian Osiris myth it is Anubis who embalms the murdered god, the work that lets Osiris live again. Red against the serpent's yellow, he climbs the side opposite Typhon: what one half undoes, the other restores.

• The Four Kerubim and Their Open BooksMan, eagle, lion, bull at the four corners of the sky — the fixed signs, also the four evangelists. The wheel may turn, but the witness in the corners does not; they are the chart against which the turning is measured.+

  Waite takes them from Ezekiel, whose vision of the four Living Creatures holds 'a wheel in the middle of a wheel' (1:16). He calls them 'the similar intention without': the Name says it on the rim, they say it from the corners.

• ROTA and the TetragrammatonThe R-O-T-A on the rim is Latin for "wheel"; rearranged it spells TARO (tarot) and ORAT (he prays). The four Hebrew letters of the divine Name are counterchanged with them around that same outer rim, while the inner circle carries four alchemical symbols. What turns is not luck but the rotation of letters — the same set rearranged once is a new fate.+

  Waite gives the reason: the Name is set among the letters to show 'that Providence is implied through all'. Round the rim, Latin and Hebrew alternate, so no word on the wheel can be read without passing through the Name.

• Clouds in a Blue SkyThe wheel and the four creatures all rest on cloud in an open blue sky — there is no ground anywhere in the card.+

  Ezekiel's vision opens with 'a great cloud' coming out of the north (Ezekiel 1:4), and only then shows the creatures and the wheels. The card keeps that order of things: cloud first, and everything else set upon it.

Story

There is no ground in this card. Everything floats: a wheel in open blue, clouds banked into the corners, and on those clouds four winged creatures, each with an open book. All the motion is at the rim — one shape sliding down one side, another climbing the other — while the hub stays still and the figure on top sits as if the turning does not reach it. Both shapes on the rim are caught midway: nothing has arrived yet, and nothing has finished falling.

Correspondences

Shadow

Related Cards

The World

Death

Ten of Pentacles

Combinations with this card