What goes up, must come down; this too shall pass; you reap what you sow. Round and round the wheel goes, and where she stops, nobody knows!
Although the Wheel of Fortune is almost always a—wait for it—fortunate card, interpreting it requires digging a little deeper than that.
One kind of wheel involved in modern paganism is the Wheel of the Year, which is the set of eight holy feasts starting on Samhain. The Witches’ New Year starts on the day when the veils between the lands of the living and the dead are said to be the thinnest. We can speak to our ancestors and our mighty dead, and we can call to new souls waiting to be born.
Whether or not you’re a practicing witch for whom Samhain is the most sacred of days, there’s no getting around the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Maybe you think of “the circle of life” from The Lion King and can’t get past the cliche of it, but it’s indisputable that all that lives, must die, and that new life (at least so far in the history of Earth) is always born.
What does this have to do with luck?
Another interpretation of the Wheel is that it’s the Karmic Wheel, that our choices, words, and deeds that add to the greater good contribute to our luck not in this lifetime but in the next, and that harm we cause now harms our future incarnations. It’s the ultimate in “paying it forward,” in that we’re contributing to the fate of future lives we’ll never meet. Another way to look at that is to consider what kind of world we’re leaving for our descendants—and this should be true whether or not we ourselves have children of our own blood.
You’ll note that our karmic debt is both to the future and the past. We owe our predecessors gratitude for all that goes right in our lives, and we owe our descendants the best world we can leave them.
Those who refer to “karma” when a nasty-tempered person has their ill will bounce back on them aren’t being entirely faithful to the philosophy of karma, but the idea of “instant karma” is fine for illustrating that other cliche, that you reap what you sow.
Fortune has a double-edged meaning, as does luck. At least three different songs I know of have a variation on the lyric “If I didn’t have bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all.” Fortune can mean destiny, or it can mean opportunity. It can mean reward, or just the dumb luck of inheritance (of money or health or any other property that gives one a leg up.)
So when you pull The Wheel of Fortune, it’s generally an augur of good luck coming your way, but in the context of other cards, it can be a bit of a warning to not coast on your luck, or to watch that you don’t repeat patterns that will keep you stuck in the same behaviors each time the wheel turns.
Design Note: There is neither a rocket ship nor a downhill skier on the Rider-Waite Wheel card; I used those to both fill out the grid around the Ferris Wheel and to indicate clockwise motion around that grid.
Numerology Note: The Wheel card is number 10, and tens are often seen to be completion of a series of events.
The Wheel was posted to Twitter and Magic Vibes on September 1.
