Fate and the Turning Wheel

Four figures on the wheel: the most popular image of the Middle Ages

Medieval manuscripts paint the Wheel of Fortune to a standard scheme: four figures on the wheel, with four Latin tags — regnabo (I shall reign), regno (I reign), regnavi (I have reigned), sum sine regno (I am without a kingdom). The wheel turns, a man rises to the top and is thrown down, and Fortuna stands at the axle, turning it. Early tarot Wheels of Fortune paint exactly this scheme — and the point was never which slot you land in, but that the wheel never stops turning.

e.g. The Wheel of Fortune in the hand-painted Visconti decks shows precisely these figures in these poses — the scheme moved straight from the manuscript tradition into the cards.

Boethius: the textual engine behind the scheme

Around AD 524, the Roman nobleman Boethius, in prison awaiting execution, wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. In it, Lady Philosophy tells him that turning the wheel is Fortune's very nature: to complain that the wheel turns is to complain that she is being herself. The book was one of the best-read works of the entire Middle Ages, and because of it the Wheel of Fortune became a ubiquitous visual motif — tarot is only one of the motif's many landing places. The card's lesson comes with the original package too: the turning cannot be controlled; your attitude toward the turning can.

e.g. The "go with the turn / positions will change" register you use when reading the Wheel of Fortune traces to this book — not to any myth.

Justice: weighing with open eyes

The other end of the same theme is Justice: the Wheel of Fortune says "change comes to you," Justice says "outcomes answer for what you did." Tarot's Justice inherits the Roman Justitia scheme — sword and scales, and no blindfold. The blindfold only became common after the sixteenth century; tarot's design was fixed earlier, and the figure on the card looks straight at you. Put the two cards together and "fate" splits in half: one half is the turning you cannot control, the other is the account you must answer for.

e.g. When the Wheel of Fortune and Justice fall in the same spread, a common reading: upheaval is at hand, but what you have built up so far decides where you land.

"The wheel of karma": a late merger

Reading the Wheel of Fortune as a wheel of karma, or Justice as a karmic reckoning, is a fusion that dates from the late nineteenth century, when Theosophy carried the Indian doctrine of karma into Western esotericism. Fortuna's wheel was never a moral ledger — it turns without asking who you are; the karmic system is the exact opposite, with every entry accounted for. One logic teaches impermanence, the other causality: merged, both lose their edge. Keep them apart and both cards read sharper.

Key points

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The Rota Fortunae scheme

The medieval Wheel of Fortune: four figures with the tags regnabo / regno / regnavi / sum sine regno, and Fortuna turning the wheel. The point is that the wheel never stops turning.

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

Written in prison around AD 524, the textual engine of the Wheel of Fortune motif: the turning cannot be controlled; your attitude toward the turning can.

Justice unblindfolded

Tarot's Justice inherits the Roman Justitia scheme: sword and scales, no blindfold — the blindfold is a post-sixteenth-century addition. The figure on the card looks clearly before she weighs.

"Wheel of karma" is a late merger

Fortuna's wheel keeps no moral ledger; the karmic system accounts for every entry. The two logics were merged only by late nineteenth-century Theosophy — kept apart, both cut sharper.