Tarot Card Meanings: The Wheel Of Fortune

“That’s life, that’s what all the people say
You’re ridin’ high in April, shot down in May
But I know I’m gonna change that tune
When I’m back on top in June

I said that’s life, and as funny as it may seem
Some people get their kicks stompin’ on a dream
But I don’t let it get me down
‘Cause this fine old world, it keeps spinnin’ around

I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king
I’ve been up and down and over and out and I know one thing
Each time I find myself flat on my face
I pick myself up and get back in the race”

‘That’s Life’ by Frank Sinatra (Kay/Gordon)

Welcome to my (literal) Wheel of Fortune!

My first mnemonic for this card was the simple phrase “what goes around, comes around.” And honestly? However much more I study Tarot, that still feels like the essence of the Wheel. This is a card of change: often good luck sweeping in (it’s ruled by Jupiter, planet of expansion, after all). However, other times it’s that sinking feeling when our luck runs out, fortune turns against us, everything tilts topsy-turvy, and we’re thrown into uncertainty. Either way, it speaks to the rise and fall of fortunes beyond our control. The Goddess Fortuna, who could crown or crush with the same spin of her wheel, personified that ancient recognition of chance as a force of nature (cue the opening strains of Carmina Burana in my head). Change is the one constant in our lives, and our task is not to resist it, but to learn how to meet it with a little grace.

Conversely, in more psychological interpretations of the Tarot, the Wheel can also be about the exact opposite of change. Sometimes it’s the reminder that our lives run in cycles, and that old patterns are stubbornly hard to break. The wheel turning not in the outer world, but within, as we make the same mistakes over and over again.

I used to dislike the Wheel showing up in a reading because it felt a bit trite and simplistic: “destiny is a bitch,” and that’s that. Now I don’t find it trite at all, but I’ll admit I still get that little ‘uh oh‘ when it appears in a reading I’m doing for a client. Because, perhaps more than any other Major, the Wheel asks us to grapple with philosophy – the kind of deep, unsettling questions most of us don’t chew over in daily life, and certainly not while getting a Tarot reading on a Saturday morning at a market stall, while someone on the next bench demolishes a Greggs’ sausage roll. “I only dashed out for milk, Lucy! I don’t want to debate Nietzsche versus Stoicism!”

And from Boethius onward, the wheel became a central image not just for occultists, but for philosophers, theologians, and poets alike – a way of thinking about fate, impermanence, and the capriciousness of human fortunes.

“You have put yourself in Fortune’s power; now you must be content with the ways of your mistress. If you try to stop the force of her turning wheel, you are the most foolish man alive. If it should stop turning, it would cease to be Fortune’s wheel.”

Lady Philosphy to Boethius, ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’

So how to intrepret the Wheel exactly? When you start studying Tarot, you realise the Wheel of Fortune is a bit like a philosophical Rorschach test – every thinker projects their favourite obsession onto it. And unlike, say, Justice or the Emperor, the Wheel doesn’t hand you a tidy concept; it drops you into paradox and says, “Good luck with that, hun.” In readings, that paradox often translates less as a person or an event, and more as a nudge toward process. In ‘WTF is Tarot?‘, Bakara Wintner writes about how she sees the Wheel as drawing attention to the patterns we repeat in our lives. In that sense the card holds revolutionary potential: it can illuminate the cycles we’re trapped in and inspire us to break them. But breaking old habits is rarely simple: destructive patterns are hard to leave behind, even when we know they’re harmful. Still, as Wintner puts it, “every time we truly break a cycle, we dismantle that particular wheel. It will no longer leave us dizzy and nauseated because we are no longer reeling inside of it.”

While I see a LOT of value in Wintner’s interpretation, I also think this card lends itself to some good old-fashioned cartomancy more than many others do. Waite (of RWS fame) sees the Wheel of Fortune as not really about luck at all, but about the illusion of luck. The deeper truth is necessity, fate, the turning of an ordered cycle. And while he dismisses the more grandiose occult interpretations, he’s oddly generous to “common fortune-tell[ing],” saying it gets closer to the card’s spirit than self-important metaphysical jargon. I get his point. Much of the Tarot, for me anyway, focuses on self-actualisation: on what we can do to change ourselves and our lives. But the Wheel is different. Sometimes it’s just Tarot saying: you got lucky, or you’re shit out of luck. Things happen to us that we cannot control, and we rise and fall on the turn of the Wheel. We can’t always pin down the future – sometimes fate intervenes.

This can feel a bit scary – just like change in the Tower card can feel scary. And especially because often people come to Tarot searching for consolation and certainty, not challenge and mystery. However, in ‘The Tidal Zone‘, Sarah Moss asks whether, deep down, we’d really want it any other way: “You think you want a story, you think you want an ending, but you don’t. You want life. You want disorder and ignorance and uncertainty.” The Wheel of Fortune is not a tidy story with a beginning, middle, and end. It resists narrative closure. Moss captures this perfectly: we think we crave resolution, certainty, a fixed “ending” to cling to, but what we actually need is the mess of life itself. The Wheel turns and throws us into flux, into disorder, into not-knowing. To draw this card is to be reminded that uncertainty isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system. Life isn’t a novel with a clean finale or a Happy Every After; it’s the wheel spinning, over and over, and our task is not to demand closure but to learn to live inside the motion.

Symbolism in The Wheel of Fortune Tarot Card

In much ‘classic’ Wheel of Fortune imagery, we see a spinning wheel (more on that later) surrounded by a lot of fairly busy looking iconography. Unlike cards with central archetypes (e.g. The Hermit, The Empress, The Devil etc.), the Wheel is populated with symbols, creatures, and glyphs rather than a single protagonist. That absence underlines that the Wheel isn’t a person or a personality, it’s a force. You don’t “meet” the Wheel, you get swept into its turning.

The four book-reading figures in the corners of the card link the Wheel of Fortune to the World (where they appear again, framing the central dancer), Christian mythology, the four quarters of the year, and the four elements. They’re often read to be the four Evangelists: Matthew (angel/winged man), Mark (lion), Luke (ox), and John (eagle). In old school Christian art (think stained glass windows or illuminated manuscripts) these “tetramorphs” often surround Christ in glory, a vision of divine order beyond worldly chaos. On the Wheel, they sit outside the spin of fate, calmly reading their books (I can’t not think of Ethan Hawke’s character in ‘Reality Bites‘: “I am not acting like anything. I am calmly reading”, lol). Their serenity hints at wisdom that transcends fortune’s rise and fall, and their books suggest eternal learning: don’t panic about the spin, study it.

In occult symbolism, the tetramorphs double up as the four elements (air/eagle, fire/lion, earth/ox, water/angel-man) and echo the four compass points, providing stability against the wheel’s dizzying turn. They also align with the fixed signs of the zodiac: Aquarius (man/angel), Leo (lion), Taurus (ox), Scorpio (eagle). These are the anchor-points of the astrological year: not the beginnings (cardinal signs) or the endings (mutable signs), but the consolidated middle of each season, when the energy is most stable. Taurus = mid-spring, fertile and steady; Leo = mid-summer, blazing and sustained; Scorpio = mid-autumn, deep in harvest and transformation; Aquarius = mid-winter, the coldest clarity.

Taken together, these four figures frame the Wheel as a kind of cosmic architecture: balance and fixity on the edges, flux and fortune in the middle. They invite us to shift our perspective. Don’t just cling to the rim and reel wildly around with every turn. Step back, read the signs, and remember the patterns that endure.

However, before we get too cocky thinking our smarts might save us from bad luck, we should look to the figure on the top of the Wheel. Maddy Elruna explains that the Sphinx with the sword reminds us that “neither Oedipus, nor Bilbo Baggins, nor you, can escape destiny by using wit. Sometimes we have to work with the cards we have been dealt; do the best we can with what fate has given us.” In Greek myth, the Sphinx (with her lion’s body and woman’s head) was a monster who terrorised Thebes, devouring anyone who couldn’t answer her riddle. When Oedipus arrived at the city gates, she asked: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening?” Oedipus, being a smart cookie, solved it – the answer is a human being, crawling as a baby, walking upright in adulthood, leaning on a cane in old age. The Sphinx, defeated, hurled herself off a cliff, and Oedipus was hailed as the saviour of Thebes. Hooray!

BUT here’s the kicker: as a reward, he was given the throne and married the widowed queen, Jocasta, not knowing she was his mother. The very riddle that proved his cleverness and secured his destiny also set him on the path of the infamous tragedy that followed. The story is often read as a warning: intelligence might win you the battle (outwitting the Sphinx), but it doesn’t save you from the larger cycle of fate (the prophecy that Oedipus would kill his father and marry his mother). In other words: you can’t outsmart the Wheel.

In esoteric symbolism, the Sphinx is a threshold guardian. It sits atop the wheel as if to say: “You can ride, but you’ll never fully know.” The sword reinforces this; it’s the sword of discernment, cutting through illusion. But even sharp intellect can’t stop the wheel spinning. So: the Sphinx with the sword is like the Wheel’s philosophical riddle in miniature. It says: “Life is a puzzle you can’t solve once and for all. You can sharpen your mind, but the Wheel will still turn. Wisdom lies in riding the paradox, not conquering it.”

Alongside the Sphinx on the rim of the Wheel we often see two other figures: Anubis and a snake. Together they represent opposing but necessary principles: passive/active, growth/decay, masculine/feminine, hope/fear. Life is balance, and even fear has its place. And what does Tarot love, folks? BALANCE! Lol.

Anubis, the Egyptian jackal-headed god of death and mummification, guided souls through the underworld, to have their hearts weighed against the feather of Ma’at. He’s a god of thresholds, transition, and unseen realms. On the Wheel he rises up the right-hand side, linked to rebirth and the soul’s ascent. He is a psychopomp – a guide between worlds – reminding us that even in the Wheel’s most disorienting turns, we’re not alone. Death here is not an ending but a passage: every fall contains the seed of a rise. On the other side, the snake slithers downwards. In Waite’s notes the snake is identified as Typhon or Set, symbolising descent into entropy, the inevitable decline side of the cycle. Yet snakes also carry older mythic association: temptation, skin-shedding, life-death-rebirth – so even in descent there is transformation. Taken together, Anubis and the serpent turn the Wheel into more than fortune’s roulette. They remind us that the spin is a cycle of death and renewal, chaos and guidance, fall and rise.

Finally, the Wheel itself is split into three separate wheels. The outer wheel is inscribed with the letters TORA, which can be read in several ways: Torah (divine law), Rota (Latin for “wheel”), or Taro/Tarot. It’s a clever anagrammatic trick, hinting that meaning itself shifts depending on how the Wheel turns. Interwoven with these are the Hebrew letters YHWH, the ineffable name of God. Together, the rim binds divine law, cosmic order, and fate into one eternal spin.

The middle wheel is marked with the alchemical symbols for the four elements: air, earth, fire, and water. These map onto the four suits of the Minor Arcana (Swords, Pents, Wands, Cups), and also echo the four compass directions and the fixed signs of the zodiac (man, lion, bull, eagle) that we see around the borders of the card. Symbolically, this layer grounds the cosmic spin in the day-to-day reality of the material world (‘and I am a material girl!‘) – the elements we live, breathe, eat, and feel.

The inner wheel is divided into eight spokes, often linked to the Pagan Wheel of the Year – the seasonal cycle of solstices and equinoxes. These mark the rhythm of earthly time: growth, harvest, decline, rebirth. This is the most intimate layer of the Wheel, time as humans experience it. So the Wheel isn’t just one turning circle, rather, it’s a cosmos layered in three rings: divine order, elemental reality, and seasonal rhythm. Together they say: as above, so below; as within, so without.

To everything, turn, turn, turn
There is a season, turn, turn, turn
And a time to every purpose under heaven

A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep

A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time for love, a time for hate
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late

‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’ by The Byrds (Seeger)

The Turners and The Turned: The Symbolism of Human Figures on The Wheel of Fortune Tarot Card

While the RWS Wheel of Fortune doesn’t show any human figures, many other Tarot decks do, including those that pre-date Waite and Smith, e.g. the Visconti-Sforza (15th century) and later Tarot de Marseille versions. In these, we often see people both riding the wheel and one figure (usually Fortuna herself) turning it.

In medieval thought, the Rota Fortunae – the Wheel of Fortune – was a central image of fate. The goddess Fortuna stood at its side, often blindfolded and seemingly spinning at random. On the rim of the Wheel clung kings, popes, peasants, and fools alike, rising and falling without mercy. A classic motto summed up the cycle: Regnabo (“I shall reign”) – the one climbing. Regno (“I reign”) – the figure at the top, crowned in glory. Regnavi (“I have reigned”) – the fallen ruler, crown slipping away. Sum sine regno (“I am without reign”) – the crushed figure at the bottom. Then the Wheel turns again, and the cycle repeats endlessly. Fortuna herself was not malicious, but neither was she kind. She was capricious and indifferent, a goddess who spun without pity or preference.

When the Wheel of Fortune entered the Tarot tradition (late medieval/early Renaissance), it brought this imagery with it. In the Marseille and other early decks, you can see it clearly: creatures and humans climbing, perching, tumbling. In Tarot terms, the message is simple: circumstances change, success and downfall are temporary, nothing lasts forever. The card is a reminder of impermanence, echoing the medieval lesson that earthly power is precarious. In sermons and morality plays, the Wheel was a memento mori: don’t be arrogant in success, don’t despair in failure – the Wheel always turns.

In a modern reading, the card often asks for the same balance. No one can freeze the Wheel; life is movement. To cling desperately to the “I reign” moment is to guarantee heartbreak when the turn comes. Medieval audiences read the Wheel as a moral warning about vanity. Tarot readers can read it as a spiritual one about grace and resilience. Whether we call it sum sine regno or just “shit happens,” the message is the same: Fortune turns, and we have to learn how to roll with it.

Interestingly, some manuscript illuminations and carvings (and even the Tarot de Marseille, above) show the figures on the Wheel with donkey’s ears and tails, except for the one at the bottom who has been toppled. In medieval symbolism, donkey-features meant you were an ass, literally and figuratively, lol. Stubborn, ignorant, full of undeserved vanity and pride. Giving the rising and reigning figures asses’ ears marked them as deluded – puffed up by fortune, blind to their own ridiculousness. The fallen figure, stripped of ears and tail, is crushed but also kinda noble. In losing fortune, they lose the illusions that come with it. They see more truly than the others. So the detail is a moral punchline: when fortune favours you, you’re actually at your most asinine – thinking you’re in control, forgetting the Wheel will turn. The one brought low may be miserable, but paradoxically they’re also free of delusion.

In many decks, from the Morgan Greer to the Anna K and Tarot of the Crystal World, we see not just a crank for the Wheel, but a mighty hand turning it. As discussed earlier, the god-like hand serves as a reminder that Fortune is arbitrary, external, and unstoppable. Yet in some later decks the crank almost looks like something we might grasp ourselves, raising that tantalising (and misleading?) question: are we the ones spinning it? I think we’re not, I think instead here the crank is a metaphor for human illusion; we may think we’re steering, but life’s larger cycles rarely obey our grip. This is not the Chariot, folks!

This tension between determinism and agency is right at the heart of the card. Is the Wheel turned by a divine hand, be that Fortuna, God, or the cosmos? Or do our choices, rituals, and actions exert some influence? The Hebrew letter paired with this card in the Golden Dawn system, Kaph (כ), literally means “palm” or “hand,” which adds another layer to the symbolism. As well as the hand that spins, there’s also the hands of the riders, the hands that cling or let go. Sometimes this card might be asking us: Are you clutching so tightly to control, to staying the same, that you can’t move with the turn, or can you open your palm and let the spin carry you?

The crank is the visible reminder that fate is not purely passive, nor purely chosen: it’s the eternal dance of surrender and participation. By loosening your grip on where you think your life is headed, you don’t only (or exclusively) “lose”, you also gain the freedom to ride the turn more lightly. It’s almost Zen: the more you unclench, the more space fortune has to flow in.

Some decks focus almost entirely on the blindfolded figure of Fortuna herself, either sightlessly surfing her Wheel of Doom or tipping her cornucopia indiscriminately over all and sundry. Interestingly, in art history, as in (some) Tarot (decks), she shares her blindfold with Justice. As Samuel Chew puts it, “Fortune looks not where she bestows her gifts but scatters them at random, while Justice, as many poets tell us, is blind so as to play no favourite, see no friend.” Justice is blind to ensure fairness; Fortune is blind to underscore randomness.

Shakespeare picked up this symbolism in ‘Timon of Athens‘:

“Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning and inconstant, and mutability, and variation; and her foot, look you, is which rolls, and rolls, and rolls.”

In Shakespeare’s plays more broadly, Fortune is fickle and unpredictable. She has no agenda, she cannot see where she is going or who clings to the wheel she spins. That blindness has an important moral implication: it softens characters’ choices. Fortune’s turns mean consequences are not always just desserts; prosperity and hardship alike may fall by chance, not by divine reward or punishment. If Fortune were sighted, her gifts and cruelties might feel intentional. Because she is blind, they are arbitrary.

In Tarot terms, this helps us read the Wheel not as karmic bookkeeping, but as pure luck. It’s not about what you “deserve.” The Wheel turns because it turns. Our task is to live inside its mutability, not to expect moral order from it. And as Meg Jones Wall points out, “there can also be relief in being released of the responsibility of certain things, in knowing that we are being swept along by something that is beyond our own understanding.”

Charlie Claire Burgess believes that this is why many Wheel of Fortune cards, like the RWS’s, for example, “look so damn arcane and confusing, because this card is to some extent about realizing that not only can we not control everything, we cannot even understand it all. Maybe things happen for a reason, and maybe they don’t. Maybe there’s no grand design, or maybe there is, but either way we can’t possibly comprehend it. And that’s okay. When we’re at the top of the wheel, it is easy to mistake ourselves for gods. When we’re at the bottom, we remember we are human.”

Sometimes when this card comes up in a reading for someone who is struggling, the reader’s role is to affirm: you’re not failing by feeling overwhelmed by things right now. It’s the process, and you are in it.

From Fortune’s wound I’m weeping where
my eyes are wet with crying,
the gifts she gave me for my share
she takes now in denying.
It’s true, what has been written,
we start with curling hair,
but generally we’re bitten
by futures bald, threadbare.

On Fortune’s throne I once might boast
I sat there glorious,
crowned with prosperity’s fair host
of flowers various;
yes, though I have flourished
happy once and blessed,
from the heights I’ve vanished
of glory, now distressed.

Fortune’s disc revolving, I
descend and am made less;
others swiftly rise on high;
exalted to excess
the king sits on the summit –
all beware of ruin!
For beneath the wheel, we read,
lies Hecuba the queen!

‘Fortune Plango Vulnera – CB16′ from the anon author of ‘Carmina Burana, the Codex of Latinus Monacensis’ (c. 1230), trans. A.S. Kline

Thomas Witholt at The Hermit’s Mirror points out that it makes total sense that in the RWS Justice follows the Wheel. The Justice card is “the mortal answer to divine law” he explains: when karma doesn’t take care of business, Justice is meant to rebalance the scales. In this sense, Justice functions as a stabiliser, “a readjusting force, balancing and harmonizing what has, shall we say, ‘spun’ out of control.” Where the Wheel is prone to wild highs and lows, Justice restores equilibrium. It’s also “a rationalizing force,” giving us the explanations we crave when the universe feels inexplicable. If the Wheel is the mystery of fate, Justice is the human impulse to measure, reason, and decide, rather than leave everything to the “arcane mechanisms of the universe.”

‘Oh what a tangled web we weave…‘: The Wheel of Fortune and the Weavers of Fate

I love how many decks imagine the Wheel of Fortune as a weaver. In the Lily White Tarot it’s a spider, in the Bonestone Earthflesh Tarot it’s the three Fates themselves, and in the Tarot of the Divine it’s Anansi, the trickster spider of West African stories. Each vision reminds us that life is a rich tapestry always being woven, and, crucially, we are not the only one holding the needle and thread! We have some say in how our lives are stitched, but there are other hands, other spindles, and sometimes fate itself tangles or unpicks the weave.

Nowhere is this clearer than with the Moirai (Μοῖραι), the Greek Fates, which we can see in the Ink Witch Tarot. The Three Fates were literal weavers. Clotho spins the thread of life, Lachesis measures it out, and Atropos, grim and inexorable, cuts it. Even the gods are mostly subject to their work. Zeus might try to bargain or consult, but the Fates usually stand beyond divine meddling. They embody necessity: the structure of destiny that no one (not even a god!) can escape.

And what do the Fates use? Spindles and looms: wheels again! Their craft overlays perfectly with the Wheel of Fortune: one spinning image stacked upon another. Both speak of cycles, inevitability, and the fact that what begins must one day end. But also, like the Wheel itself with it’s outer, middle, and inner rim, their work is threefold: spin, measure, cut. The lesson? Accept limits (your thread is not infinite). Accept uncertainty (you never know when the cut will fall). And most of all, live fully while the tapestry is still being woven – because your thread is singular, and you still have some choice in how it intertwines with the rest.

In Norse mythology, the Norns, who see in the Bonestone Earthflesh Tarot, are three powerful female beings who weave or carve fate. Their names: Urd (Past, “that which has become”) Verdandi (Present, “that which is becoming”) Skuld (Future, “that which shall be / debt / necessity”). They sit at the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree, tending the well of fate and inscribing destiny onto the trunk itself. The Moirai and the Norns are sisters across cultures, both loom-keepers of human destiny. To meet them on the Wheel is to be reminded that life is not random chaos but part of a larger pattern.

I’ve got a lot of spider-based Wheels in my collection, and that’s probably no surprise as spiders are the OG weavers. Their webs echo the concentric rings of the Wheel, spun outwards in fragile but resilient circles. These webs also reminds us that we are all connected; part of a vast world-wide web of stories, a wider narrative which involves all people and all things. Sometimes it can help to step back and see our lives as part of a greater narrative of human existence and the mysteries of fate and destiny; as a small – yet significant – part of a greater whole: “the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse”.

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse’

‘Oh Me! Oh Life!’ by Walt Whitman

The Wheel in the Interim Tarot also asks: are you the spider or the fly? Sometimes we’re weaving the web, shaping patterns with intention. Other times we’re caught in someone else’s design, tangled in threads we never chose. Most of us are both, depending on where the wheel spins.

This same message comes through in the Tarot of the Divine, which casts Anansi as the Wheel of Fortune. Trickster energy is at the heart of this card: the Wheel turns unpredictably, and fate can be sly and mischievous. What looks like a triumph may hide a trap; what feels like a loss may reveal an unexpected escape route. Anansi’s web is the Wheel’s visual cousin – a lattice of strands where every tug reverberates across the whole. Pull one thread, and the entire structure quivers. The artist and creator Yoshi Yoshitani, explains that Anansi’s outfit here is a Kente cloth with a pattern that reads ‘obi nyke obi kwan mu si‘ meaning, ‘sooner or later you will get into the path of the other‘. The Wheel reminds us of the same truth: our lives are always bound into patterns wider than our own control.

Luck, Be A Lady: Is The Wheel of Fortune A ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’ Card in Tarot?

Astrologically, the Wheel of Fortune is linked with Jupiter, the so-called Greater Benefic. Jupiter is the planet of expansion, growth, philosophy, and exploration; the cosmic sugar daddy who scatters blessings across the sky. On balance, then, the changes spun out by the Wheel often lean toward the positive.

Tradition backs this up. A.E. Waite listed its meanings as “destiny, fortune, success, elevation, luck, felicity.” S.L. Mathers of The Golden Dawn described it as “good fortune and happiness (within bounds).” Even Aleister Crowley, in ‘The Book of Thoth‘, admits that it “generally means good fortune – because the fact of consultation implies anxiety or discontent.” In other words, if you’re consulting a Tarot reader you’ve probably had a run of bad luck already, lol. The only way is up!

Numerologically, the Wheel sits at 10, the number that folds back to the 0 of the Fool. It’s the Fool’s leap into trust, writ large. Meg Jones Wall explains that, rather than relying only on ourselves, this card suggests the Fool putting faith in the movements of the universe, those vast, impersonal forces spinning far beyond our control.

Many of our sayings lean into this sunnier side of the Wheel: “fortune favours the bold,” “born under a lucky star,” or “make your own luck.” But even here there’s an undercurrent of risk. Good fortune is never guaranteed, and Jupiter’s gifts can easily slip into hubris or intoxication.

It’s no surprise that many modern decks lean into gambling imagery for the Wheel of Fortune: the coin toss, the roulette wheel, the spin of the slots. After all, Lady Luck – Fortuna herself – is the unofficial patron saint of gamblers. But here’s the catch: no matter how the wheel spins, the house always wins. And as Sinatra once sang, Lady Luck has a habit of “wandering all over the room and blow[ing] on some other guy’s dice”!

They call you Lady Luck
But there is room for doubt
At times, you’ve had a very unlady-like way of running out

‘Luck, Be A Lady’ by Frank Sinatra (Loesser)

Shakespeare goes even harsher than Sinatra in his ‘fortune is a floozy’ metaphor: in Hamlet, Fortune is a “strumpet”; in King Lear, she’s an “arrant whore”; in Henry V, she’s the “giddy goddess” who spins her wheel with furious fickleness. Her favours are cheap, her love untrustworthy, and her loyalties never last. Fortune doesn’t settle down to a life of 2.4 kids and an ISA. She flits, she deserts, she intoxicates, she betrays. The Wheel of Fortune carries that same lesson: don’t mistake luck for loyalty, and don’t assume today’s winning streak will last forever.

The very word carnival comes from the Latin carne vale – “farewell to meat” – referring to the customary feasting and indulgence in rich foods before the Lenten period of fasting and abstinence from meat and other pleasures. Celebrations often include parades, street parties, elaborate costumes, and masks, symbolizing a temporary setting aside of everyday life and individuality. And because of that cycle, carnival isn’t just “decadence” – it’s catharsis and renewal. Like the Wheel itself, it whispers: laugh now, because the fast is coming or endure now, because the feast will return.

In Criminology, then, the carnivalesque often crops up in studies of disorder, transgression, and the temporary collapse of social order. This can happen in riots and protests, but also at festivals – “licensed” spaces of chaos. The Wheel resonates here too: it dramatises how order and disorder are cyclical, how even the most stable structures of power are never absolute but always precarious.

Modern Tarot artists often pick up on this by showing the Wheel as a ferris wheel, carousel, or carnival ride. The carnivalesque spectacle of fate itself: colourful, chaotic, spinning endlessly. The ride makes the Wheel’s lesson visceral: fortune isn’t linear but a dizzying loop, part thrill, part terror.

The historic carnival was also a place of laughter. Part of this was because any serious political rhetoric against the authorities would have been punished; Bakhtin notes that frank and free speech at festivals and carnivals was permitted “but exclusively under the camouflage of laughter. Barriers were raised, provided there was nothing but laughter”. However, he also viewed carnival laughter as liberating: mocking death and authority by turning them into spectacle. The Wheel does something similar. Instead of despairing at fate, it invites you to laugh, to ride, to see the absurdity in life’s turns. Sinatra’s That’s Life is basically carnival laughter set to swing.

And of course, the carousel image, spinning endlessly but never really moving, echoes Bakara Wintner’s take on the Wheel as the cycles we get stuck in. As Aranarose puts it on Aeclectic Tarot, “The Wheel portrays cycles, and things in your life that repeat over and over and over, for good or bad.” It might be the bad relationship that ends only to start again with the same kind of partner, the addiction that gets swapped for another, or the yo-yo diet that goes round and round. The Wheel asks: “Do you go for another round? Or are you ready to get off and try something new here?” Sometimes we spin again, hoping maybe this time it’ll be different. Other times, we finally see the pattern clearly: he’s still a jerk, she’s still going to cheat – and decide to step off.

The Wheel isn’t “good” or “bad” in itself. Repeating cycles isn’t always negative, especially if we’re learning with each turn. What matters is awareness: recognising when we’re hearing a lie, “It’ll be different this time, baby, I promise” – and deciding whether we’re still willing to buy the ticket and take the ride.

And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game

‘The Circle Game’ by Joni Mitchell (Mitchell)

Seas of Change: Water and The Wheel

In ‘Wild Card‘, Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt write that it’s no coincidence that The Wheel of Fortune card is often depicted as a the wheel of a ship: “you don’t have to be an experienced sailor to know that travelling by boat means you’re at the mercy of some very powerful elements. Sometimes, when a storm races through your life… you just have to wait it out”.

I think the card from the Figuratively Speaking Mermaid Tarot is particularly striking, as we see it’s from a ship that has long sunk. Instead of making us fearful or sad though, this should remind us to enjoy fair sailing while we can. Afterall, we can’t control the fates, only our reaction to what befalls us. I immediately thought of ‘Death by Water’ from Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ when I saw this card, which is a very fitting poem for the Wheel of Fortune, highlighting as it does the way fate spins blindly on:

‘Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
                                                  A current under sea 
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
                                                  Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.’

‘IV: Death by Water’ from ‘The Wasteland’ by T. S. Eliot

‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’: The Wheel of Fortune and Time

The Wheel of Fortune as time, as seen in the Hayworth Tarot and the Modern Love Tarot, really resonates with me. After all, what is time if not change? The Wheel spins on and on like the hands of a clock, marking cycles we cannot halt. Change comes, inevitably, and it can bring joy or loss, but either way it arrives.

The hour glass image in particular makes me think of Shelley’s lines on the futility of hubris and how all our earthly deeds are lost to the passage of time in the end. The poem begins with a traveller describing the shattered remains of a colossal statue in the barren desert, marking what must once have been a grand city. All that is left is rubble, a broken face half-buried in sand, its arrogant sneer still visible – a monument to pride already crumbling into ruin:

“And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

From ‘Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Wheel insists on the same truth: all our deeds, monuments, and victories are temporary. None of us can fight the wheel, we can only choose how to ride it, with grace or with resistance. And there’s something oddly levelling in that inevitability. Time comes for everyone.

Rain is no respecter of persons
the snow doesn’t give a soft white
damn Whom it touches.

From ‘i will cultivate within’ by e.e. cummings

The Wheel as time strips away illusions of permanence and privilege. It reminds us that what matters is not clinging to control, but how we meet change: be that with despair, with laughter, or with grim determination.

Amor Fati, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wheel

So what do we actually do with the Wheel of Fortune? I love how Jessica Dore frames it in ‘Tarot for Change‘. She admits she’s “not big on advice like ‘trust the process’”, because, let’s be real, most of us don’t trust the process! That’s the problem. We panic whenever life veers off script, when forces outside our control override the way we thought things should go.

But, as Dore points out, it gets easier when you start to understand the process. Then, instead of spiralling – “Oh fuck, what’s happening?” – you can say something more grounded: “Wow. This is awful, and part of the process, and temporary.” And actually mean it. Life’s stages, she reminds us, can be both awful and necessary. The Wheel’s lesson is that existence isn’t nearly as neat or clear-cut as our minds want it to be, and that’s okay.

Other writers take Dore’s point one step further, suggesting that the Wheel’s deeper lesson is not just to endure life’s turns, but to love them, even the awful bits. This is where Nietzsche comes in:

This is from ‘The Gay Science‘ (yes really), where Nietzsche introduces the idea of eternal recurrence. The demon’s challenge is a thought experiment: what if your life were to repeat, endlessly, exactly as it is? No edits, no fast-forwarding the bad bits. Every heartbreak, every triumph, every embarrassing slip – again and again, infinitely. Nietzsche’s point isn’t that eternal recurrence is literally true. It’s more about testing your attitude toward existence. Would you despair at the idea, feeling crushed under the weight of repetition? Or would you affirm life so fully that you’d embrace the repetition, saying “yes” even to suffering, because it’s part of the whole? It’s a radical version of what he calls amor fati, the love of fate (AKA the Wheel!). Saying yes to life, as it is, not as you’d wish it.

In Tarot, the Wheel of Fortune also embodies cycles, recurrence, and inevitability. The Wheel turns, sometimes lifting you up, sometimes plunging you down. You don’t get to control its motion. What you can control is your stance toward it. Placed next to Nietzsche’s demon, the Wheel of Fortune becomes less about external “luck” and more about existential acceptance: If you resist the wheel, you experience despair, gnashing of teeth, and bitterness when fortune shifts. If you embrace the wheel, you acknowledge that life’s ups and downs are inseparable. Joy exists because sorrow exists; gain because loss. Like Nietzsche’s thought experiment, the card becomes an invitation to affirm the whole of life’s rich chocolate-and-shit cake, not just the sunny slice you prefer.

So: Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence can deepen a reading of the Wheel. The card isn’t just saying “life is a cycle” (we know that). It’s pressing a harder question: can you love the cycle? Can you look at all your experiences – even the painful ones – and say, “yes, I would live this again”? That’s the moment where the Wheel shifts from fatalism to empowerment. It’s not about stopping the wheel but learning to ride it – even throw up your hands and cheer as it spins.

“There are horrible things about our lives which we are powerless to change. Plenty of us think those things should be met, where possible, with dignity or even serenity… But, according to most readers, Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati demands something more: we should not merely accept, but love the terrible things that befall us.”

Tom Stern

However, the philosopher Tom Stern isn’t impressed by amor fati. He argues that it looks too much like “the pathetic love of the captive for the bars of his cage.” His critique is sharp: Nietzsche’s call to love fate risks collapsing into wishful thinking. Instead of truly affirming necessity as it is, we may just be loving a beautified version of it – a pretty mask we’ve painted over harsh reality. What looks like radical acceptance may, in the end, be self-deception.

Stern’s critique reminds us: when we draw the Wheel, we may not be “loving fate” itself. We might just be loving the story we tell about fate – a story we’ve gilded and yassified to make the cycle bearable. So the card, through this lens, asks: Are you affirming life honestly, or are you smoothing over its rough edges with wishful thinking? Is your embrace of the cycle active art-making, or passive self-delusion?

That ambivalence doesn’t weaken the card – it gives it teeth. The Wheel doesn’t just spin neutrally; it confronts you with the question of how you will face necessity: with resignation, beautification, or genuine affirmation.

It also bears remembering that numerologically, the Wheel sits at 10 a number that loops us back to the 0 of the Fool. As Meg Jones Wall puts it, “rather than only trusting in ourselves, we are now putting faith in the forces of the universe, the movements and energies that are far beyond our control.” The Wheel reminds us that the Fool’s leap of faith doesn’t end at card zero; it expands into a broader trust in the rhythms of life itself. Ten carries the Fool’s openness forward, inviting us to see each turn of the cycle not as random chaos, but as part of a larger pattern we may not yet understand.

The Lubanko Tarot captures this beautifully. Its Wheel looks like an ancient cave painting – all ochre and ash. There’s a primitive, uncanny air to it, as if this card belongs to a time before language. It reminds us that the big wheel has been turning for a long time – eons before we mastered fire, shipbuilding, electricity, space flight. And it will keep turning on and on, long after us.

This is not the kind of fate you can outsmart or dominate. The Wheel moves with a rhythm older than civilisation, older than memory. You can’t control it. You can’t slow it down. You can only learn to ride it. As the guidebook puts it: “If you try to fight the bucking horse, you’ll get thrown off. Get used to its rhythms enough and you might just stay in the saddle.”

This card reminds us: sometimes, surrender is survival. And even the wildest spin of the wheel is part of a larger pattern, albeit one we may never fully understand.

“The big wheel keeps on turning
On a simple line, day by day
The Earth spins on its axis
One man struggle while another relaxes

There’s a hole in my soul like a cavity
Seems like the world is out to gather just by gravity
The wheel keeps turning, the sky’s rearranging
Look, my son, the weather is changing”

‘Hymn of the Big Wheel’ by Massive Attack (Vowles/Del Naja/Hinds/Marshall/Cherry)

One of the Wheel’s strongest lessons is about finding the centre. Joseph Campbell once said of the medieval Rota Fortunae: “If you are attached to the rim of the wheel of fortune, you will be either above going down or at the bottom coming up. But if you are at the hub, you are in the same place all the time.” Charlie Claire Burgess echoes this in their Tarot writing: rather than being flung around by past hurts or future fears, the Wheel invites us to return to the hub, to the present moment. From that grounded centre of radical acceptance, we can meet whatever comes.

Burgess also introduced me to the work of Báyò Akómoláfé, a writer and ‘recovering academic’ (lol), who takes the image further. He reminds us, “Everything begins in the middle… The middle isn’t the space between things; it is the world in its ongoing practices of worlding itself.” For Akómoláfé, there are no pure beginnings and no tidy endings, everything bleeds into everything else. That’s exactly what the Wheel shows us: no single point can be marked as the start or the finish. Life isn’t linear but recursive, folding back on itself, beginnings haunted by endings and endings sprouting new beginnings.

This “middle-ing space” is not compromise or balance but porousness, interconnection, flux. It’s where everything happens, where we are always already becoming. To be at the hub of the Wheel is to inhabit this fertile middle: not clinging to binaries of up/down or win/lose, but recognising the messy, continuous worlding that makes the cycle possible.

As Sallie Nichols says of the Wheel, “everything is becoming and everything is dying – not sequentially in time, but all at once.” Or, as Burgess writes, “We may pause, but we don’t stop. We are in the middle. We find our centre. The world keeps worlding. We keep becoming. The Wheel rolls on.”

The sun rolling high
Through the sapphire sky
Keeps great and small on the endless round

It’s the circle of life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
‘Til we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the circle
The circle of life

‘Circle of Life’ by Carmen Twille & Lebo M (John/Zimmer/Morake/Rice)

The Wheel of Fortune FAQs

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Works Cited

Akómoláfé, B. (2017). These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home. North Atlantic Books.
Akómoláfé, B. (2018). When you meet the monster, anoint its feet. Emergence Magazine, October 2018. Available at: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/when-you-meet-the-monster/
Bakhtin , M. (1984). Rabelais and his World. Indiana University Press.
Boethius, A. M. S. (480-524/1969). The Consolation of Philosophy (V. E. Watts, Trans.). Penguin Books.
Burgess, C. C. (2023). Radical Tarot: Queer the Cards, Liberate Your Practice and Create the Future. Hay House.
Campbell, J., & Moyers, B. (2011). The Power of Myth. Vintage.
Chew, S. C. (1939). Time and Fortune. ELH, 6(2), 83–113.
Cownie, J. & Lensvelt, F. (2022). Wild Card: Let the Tarot Tell Your Story. Bluebird.
Crowley, A. (1913/1962). The Book of Lies. Hayden Press.
Dore, J. (2021). Tarot for Change. Hay House.
Elruna, M. (2022). Tarot: A Life Guided by the Cards. Matador.
Jones Wall, M. (2023). Finding the Fool: A Tarot Journey to Radical Transformation. Weiser.
Nichols, S. (1994). Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. Red Wheel / Weiser.
Nietzsche, F. W. (1882/1974). The Gay Science (P. V. Cohn & M. D. Petre, Trans.). Vintage Books.
Stern, T. (2013). Nietzsche, “Amor Fati” and “The Gay Science.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 113, 145–162.
Waite, A.E. (1911). The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. William Rider & Son.
Wintner, B. (2017). WTF is Tarot? And How Do I Do It? Page Street Publishing.