Wheel of Fortune

The Rider-Waite-Smith version, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909, is dense with layered symbolism. The wheel itself bears the letters T-A-R-O arranged clockwise, which also spell ROTA (Latin: wheel) and TORA, with the Hebrew letters Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh (the Tetragrammaton) interspersed between them. At the four corners sit winged figures reading books — the Tetramorph: a man (Aquarius), an eagle (Scorpio), a lion (Leo), and a bull (Taurus), corresponding to the four fixed signs and the four Evangelists. A sphinx sits atop the wheel holding a sword; a serpent descends on the left side; Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, ascends on the right. Upright, the card points to a significant shift incoming — usually favorable but not always controllable. Reversed, the wheel is still turning, just against you: delays, bad timing, a cycle that won't break.

The Wheel of Fortune predates tarot entirely. As a medieval allegory, Rota Fortunae — Fortune's Wheel — appears in Boethius's *Consolation of Philosophy* (524 CE) and remained a fixture of European iconography for centuries before cards existed. When tarot emerged in 15th-century northern Italy as Trionfi, the Wheel was among the earliest trump cards documented in the Visconti-Sforza deck (c. 1450). The French Tarot de Marseille tradition, standardized through the 17th–18th centuries, kept the wheel imagery but with simpler figures. Eliphas Lévi's *Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie* (1854) reframed the trumps as a Kabbalistic and esoteric system, and Court de Gébelin's earlier *Monde Primitif* (1781) had already pushed tarot toward occult interpretation. A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith's 1909 RWS deck added the Tetramorph and Hebrew lettering, deepening the Hermetic layering. Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris's Thoth deck (1944) reworked the wheel into a more explicitly astrological and Thelemic framework.

Pull the Wheel of Fortune and sit with one question: what cycle in your life is actually ending right now, not what you want to end? Rachel Pollack's *Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom* (1980) has one of the sharpest readings of this card's layered symbolism — worth reading before assuming it's just 'good luck incoming.' Mary K. Greer's *Tarot for Yourself* (1984) includes journaling exercises that work well here: map out the last full cycle this card might represent. Biddy Tarot's online Wheel of Fortune breakdown covers both upright and reversed interpretations with practical spread positions. Labyrinthos Academy's free app includes a card-a-day practice that pairs well with tracking where you actually feel stuck in a loop.