Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel is change you did not author. Cycles turn, luck moves, timing shifts. The card's hard teaching is that the wheel turns for everyone. Position on it is temporary in both directions.

A turning point, generally favourable. Luck, opportunity, the arrival of something you could not have arranged. Take it while the wheel is where it is, because it will not stay.

A downturn, bad timing, or resistance to a change already underway. It can also indicate a cycle repeating because its lesson has not landed: the same situation with different names in it.

A relationship at a turning point, often through outside circumstance. Fated meetings. Reversed, a pattern recurring across different partners, which points back at you rather than at them.

Unexpected opportunity, restructure, a role that appears from nowhere. Timing is doing more work than merit right now. Move fast.

Fortune shifting: windfalls, or the turn of a market. Jupiter expands what it touches, which cuts both ways. Reversed, a loss outside your control.

Fate, karma and cycles. The limits of control, and the peace available in accepting them. What goes around is not a threat here, it is a description.

A change in condition, often for the better and often suddenly. Chronic and cyclical conditions are indicated. Jupiter rules the liver.

The wheel bears TARO/ROTA and the Hebrew letters of the divine name. The mechanism is lawful, not random. At the corners sit the four fixed signs as the evangelists' creatures, each reading a book: the still points around which everything turns. The sphinx above, Typhon descending and Anubis rising are ascent and descent happening simultaneously.

The Rota Fortunae is medieval rather than tarot-specific. Boethius made it a commonplace of European thought a thousand years before playing cards reached Italy. Early tarot decks illustrated it literally, with figures crowned at the top and crushed at the bottom. Waite abstracted it into symbols and removed the human beings entirely.