Major Arcana · 10
Wheel of Fortune
La Roue de Fortune (Tarot de Marseille) · La Ruota (Italian tarocchi) · Lord of the Forces of Life (Golden Dawn) · Fortune (Thoth Tarot)
A great wheel marked with letters and alchemical signs, turning in the sky with a sphinx above and creatures rising and falling around it. In the Waite–Smith tradition it stands for cycles, change and turns of fortune.
Upright cycles · change · fate · turning point · luck · timing · opportunity
Reversed setbacks · resistance to change · bad timing · repeating patterns · loss of control · delay
- Astrology
- Jupiter
- Element
- Fire
- Hebrew letter
- Kaph
- Number
- 10
- Golden Dawn title
- Lord of the Forces of Life
- Yes or no
- Yes
Upright
The Wheel of Fortune is the card of turning points. In the Waite–Smith tradition it signifies change, the rhythm of rising and falling, and those moments when circumstances shift in a person's favour. It reminds the querent that nothing stays still: what is low will rise, and what is high will turn.
Love and relationships: a meeting that feels fated, a relationship entering a new phase, or a pattern repeating until it is recognised. It favours movement over stagnation.
Work and money: opportunities, lucky breaks and changes of circumstance, often arriving through timing rather than effort alone. Readers advise using the upswing well.
Advice: go with the turning of the wheel rather than against it. Seize openings when they come, but hold good fortune lightly; the card's older moral lesson is that fortune rewards those who stay steady at the centre rather than clinging to the rim.
Reversed
When the Wheel is reversed, readers usually see the downturn of the cycle: delays, setbacks, plans overtaken by events. Another emphasis is resistance — trying to stop a change that has already begun, or repeating a pattern without learning from it.
In relationships it may point to the same argument recurring, or to bad timing between two people. In work and finances it can counsel patience until circumstances improve.
As with every card, many readers do not use reversals, and some note that the Wheel, being round, looks much the same either way up.
The image
Smith's Wheel hangs in a blue sky among clouds. Its outer ring is inscribed with the letters T, A, R, O, alternating with the four Hebrew letters of the divine name, Yod Heh Vav Heh; inner spokes carry the alchemical signs of mercury, sulphur, salt and the symbol for water or dissolution. A blue sphinx holding a sword sits on top. A yellow serpent slides down the left side, and a red, jackal-headed figure like Anubis rises on the right. In the four corners winged figures — a man or angel, an eagle, a lion and a bull — sit on clouds reading books.
History
The Wheel of Fortune was a familiar medieval image long before tarot: Fortuna turning a wheel on which kings rise, reign, fall and lie crushed, often labelled regnabo, regno, regnavi, sum sine regno ("I shall reign, I reign, I have reigned, I am without reign"). The Visconti-Sforza card shows such a wheel with human figures, some with asses' ears. The Tarot de Marseille reduced the riders to three odd animal-like creatures.
Éliphas Lévi redesigned the card with a sphinx, a Hermanubis and a Typhon, and Smith adapted his version. The Golden Dawn gave it Jupiter and the letter Kaph. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) presents it as the perpetual motion of a fluid universe and the flux of human life.
Symbolism
The letters on the rim can be read clockwise as TARO, ROTA (Latin "wheel") or TORA, a word-play that Waite took over from the French occultists; the Hebrew letters add the divine name, the unchanging centre of the turning world. The alchemical signs stand for the basic principles of matter (see alchemical symbols). The sphinx represents a stable wisdom above change; the serpent descending is decline, and the jackal-headed figure rising is renewal. The four creatures, from Ezekiel and the Book of Revelation, are also the four fixed signs of the zodiac.
Ten completes the decade and begins a new cycle (one plus zero). Jupiter, the greater benefic of traditional astrology, gives the card its association with good fortune and expansion. Kaph, "palm of the hand", links it with the palmistry idea that fate is held in one's hand. Its path joins Chesed and Netzach.
In a reading
The Wheel often marks a hinge in time. With the World it signals the close of one cycle and the start of another; with the Tower, an abrupt change; with the Eight of Wands, swift developments. Readers ask what stage of the turning the querent stands at, and treat the card less as luck than as timing.
Sources and further reading
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot — A. E. Waite, 1910
- Dogme et rituel de la haute magie — Éliphas Lévi, 1856
- The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City — Michael Dummett, 1980
- Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom — Rachel Pollack, 1980