Wheel of Fortune.
A mechanism turning with no hand on it.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
An orange wheel hangs in cloud with ROTA lettered round it. A sphinx with a sword sits on the top. A snake goes down one side and a jackal-headed figure comes up the other. In each corner a winged creature with an open book.
Something large has turned in your direction and no hand is on the rim. The four fixed things in the corners have their heads in books rather than on the wheel. This is not yours to turn, and the card does not ask you to like that.
Four things people go to on this card
- the wheel
You went to the wheel itself. ROTA runs round the rim, which also reads as TARO, and nobody is turning it.
A mechanism running without an operator. Nothing is holding the rim, the letters can be read starting from any of them, and the wheel goes round regardless of where you begin.
So the card is not about luck being good. It is about the size of something you did not arrange, which is usually larger than the part you did. Something has changed in your favour lately and you had nothing to do with it. Say that out loud once before you build a plan on it.
What has changed in your favour lately that you had nothing to do with?
- the sphinx
Up at the top: a sphinx, sitting still, with a sword, at the highest point of the turn. That is where you went.
The top of the turn is a position and not an achievement. It is holding a sword and doing nothing with it, and the wheel is still going round underneath it.
If you are near the top of something, the advice here is unglamorous. This is a place on a circle, and the sensible behaviour is the behaviour of somebody who will be somewhere else on it. Decide now what you want done by then, because you will not want to decide it later.
If you are near the top of this, what would you want to have done by the time it comes round?
- the four corners
You went to the corners. An angel, an eagle, a bull and a lion, and each one has a book open.
A spinning thing set inside four that do not move. All four are reading. Not one of them is watching the wheel, which is remarkable given the size of it and the noise it must make.
That is the instruction buried in a card about chance. The things that hold still while everything turns are studying: not resisting the turn, not riding it, reading. Name the fixed points in your life at the moment, and then admit how long it has been since you gave one of them an hour.
What are the fixed points in your life at the moment, and are you attending to them?
- the snake
The yellow snake is where you looked, going down the left-hand side.
The fall and the rise are one object here. Something goes down the left as something else comes up the right, and both are the same turn of the same wheel seen from two places on it.
What the card offers is proportion rather than comfort. This is a phase of a circle behaving exactly as circles behave. There is something in your life going down at the same rate as this thing is going up, and you have not connected the two, because they do not feel related from inside.
What is going down in your life at the same time as this is going up?
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.