Wheel of Fortune
Trump X of the tarot: a turning wheel with creatures rising and falling on it. A. E. Waite read it as destiny and fortune.
Meaning
Waite followed Éliphas Lévi's reconstruction of the card: a wheel inscribed with the letters of Taro, read also as Rota, a sphinx above and a serpent-form Typhon descending, and the four living creatures of Ezekiel in the corners. In the eighteenth-century cards, he noted, the rising and falling animals were "of nondescript character, one of them having a human head".
What does the Wheel of Fortune card mean?
Waite's meanings are "destiny, fortune, success, elevation, luck, felicity"; reversed, "increase, abundance, superfluity".
In older decks
Papus joined the card to the tenth Hebrew letter, Yod. A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum gives its title in abbreviated Italian, Ruot. della For., the wheel of fortune.
See also
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
Last reviewed September 27, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research