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Wheel of Fortune

MAJOR ARCANA · X

The Wheel of Fortune is card X of the major arcana. A great wheel turns in the sky, surrounded by strange creatures. Upright, it stands for turning points, opportunity and timing; reversed, for a stalled flow, bad timing and misfortune.

Name and number

Upright meaning

Keywords: turning point, opportunity, fate, change, good fortune

After the Hermit has thought things through alone, the world begins to move. The Wheel of Fortune is a card of the great currents that your own strength cannot control.

Upright, the Wheel stands for a turning point when the tide changes: an unexpected meeting, a chance opportunity, things taking a turn for the better. Like a turning wheel, nothing stands still. If this is an opportunity that has come your way, it is read as a time to take it without hesitating. The card also teaches the cycle of life itself: neither good times nor bad last forever.

Reversed meaning

Keywords: stagnation, bad timing, misfortune, resisting the flow

Reversed, the Wheel is read as turning against you.

Things will not move forward, the timing is wrong at every step, misunderstandings or bad luck keep coming. It also shows pushing against the flow and only spinning your wheels. Yet the wheel does not stay still. It is also read as a time to wait patiently for the tide to turn again.

What the picture shows

• The great wheel: the turning of fate and the cycle of time. In the Rider–Waite–Smith deck it bears the letters "TARO" (which rearrange into ROTA, Latin for "wheel," TAROT and more), the Hebrew letters of the divine name, and alchemical symbols.
• The sphinx with a sword: sitting still atop the wheel, it stands for unchanging wisdom, watching over the cycle.
• The dog-headed creature: the Egyptian god Anubis, the force rising with the wheel.
• The snake: said to be Typhon (Set) from Egyptian myth, the force descending with the wheel.
• The angel, eagle, lion and bull in the corners: the four living creatures of the Bible, which later became the emblems of the four Evangelists. They are also linked with the four fixed signs of astrology: Aquarius, Scorpio, Leo and Taurus.

History

The Wheel of Fortune comes from a picture well known in medieval Europe: the wheel turned by the goddess Fortune.

People cling to the wheel that Fortuna turns: one rising, one crowned at the top, one falling, one crushed at the bottom. Its lesson was that however high someone rises, they will one day fall.

In the fifteenth-century Italian Visconti–Sforza deck, too, a blindfolded goddess sits at the center of the wheel, and the figures around it carry Latin words: "I shall reign," "I reign," "I have reigned," "I am without a kingdom."

In the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Tarot of Marseille, the people became animals like monkeys or dogs, with a crowned creature sitting on top. Drawing on the ideas of Éliphas Lévi, the Rider–Waite–Smith deck redrew them as a sphinx, Anubis and Typhon, and added the four living creatures in the corners.

Correspondences

Previous and next cards

• Previous: 9 The Hermit
• Next: 11 Justice
• The major arcana

Lucky colors for Wheel of Fortune