Blogging the Tarot: Wheel of Fortune (X)
Following The Hermit (IX) from last week, we meet the next in sequence with Wheel of Fortune (X). The imagery on this card is packed with symbolism, and if you want rich and deep exploration of the symbolism in this and every tarot card, read Rachel Pollack’s Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom – I love this book and will recommend it every chance I get. It reads cover to cover like a piece of fiction while also being incredibly useful as a quick reference guide for finding the meaning of the cards.
The Wheel of Fortune keeps us in the Major Arcana and represents the season that follows that of The Hermit. I guess we haven’t really talked about that yet – how the Major Arcana is the tarot’s version of Canterbury Tales – because we haven’t met The Fool (0). The Fool is our pilgrim, and the rest of the Major Arcana are the characters he meets along his route to Canterbury. You see, while my little romp through the tarot is maddeningly out of order, the sequence of the cards matters.
“Now…” you may ask, “if sequential order is so important, why are you pulling cards at random?”
Fair question. Here’s my answer:
Doing it this way is feminine – this is a way to feel our way through the deck.
This is the way we learn as we go.
This is how I learned.
One card leads to one answer and about a dozen questions.
Which leads to the next card or a new resource with some answers and more questions.
And now we’re pulling at a thread.
We’re learning what we want to learn because we’re curious, not because there’s a text with rules and orders that we’re forcing ourselves to memorize in a tight, rigid sequence. Believe me, my engineering brain has been tempted on more than one occasion to hit you with a table; that’s the masculine way of presenting the information. Which is not incorrect, and for some people it’s absolutely the best way to learn. It’s just that learning to trust your feminine energy is essential for tapping into your intuition. Thus, enlisting feminine to learn tarot is the shortest distance between A and B.
So anyway, tarot’s Fool is marching through his spiritual journey – the Major Arcana – and meeting a broad cast of characters along the way. Each entity in the Major Arcana helps uplevel our Fool, perpetuating his evolution in a hand-over-hand fashion until he reaches total actualization at the end of the line. Last week, we were in our Hermit Era – position nine of 21 – forced to sit with ourselves and get cozy with the most Authentic version of Us.
Once we’ve grappled with our ego and our identity and our wants and needs and motivations and tendencies, we are ready to spin the…
WHEEL! OF! FORTUNE!
This card has never made me think of Bob Barker and daytime TV until just now, and I fear this will be my main association from now on. While we’re on the subject, what’s your association with the Wheel of Fortune TV show? For me, it’s mornings at home alone during the summer. That show came on at 11:00, which was around the time I was waking up. That show makes me think of the sunny living room in my childhood home and the smell of Pine-Sol because my mother kept our house scrubbed spotless. That feeling of sunshine and a fresh, clean new day is a pretty fair association with our tarot Wheel of Fortune and her fortuitous outlook.
Wheel of Fortune (X), from Tarot Mucha tarot deck
If you’ve sat with me for a reading, you know I pull from multiple decks. I find it more fruitful to have a variety of cards and images with a wide range of interpretations to help stimulate the conversation between me and your Guides. One of my favorite decks is called Tarot Mucha; it features gorgeous art nouveau imagery in the style of Alphonse Mucha. The Wheel of Fortune in this deck is distinctly different from the traditional wheel thanks to the presence of a woman. We see a maiden leaning over a wagon wheel with an hourglass passing time at her feet. She wears a flowery crown on her head and a dreamy look on her face.
Something about this card reminds me of the scene in the Wizard of Oz in which Dorothy sings Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Dorothy serenades the farm equipment, standing at one point with arms perched on the wheel of an old tractor. This is what our Wheel of Fortune reminds me of – a daydreamy Dorothy gazing upward and wishing for a technicolor sky.
Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) looking an awful lot like our Wheel of Fortune in The Wizard of Oz.
The Wizard of Oz was my absolute favorite movie when I was a kid, and in fact, my first imaginary friend was named “Dorothy.” I remember her dressed and looking like the character from the movie… and truth be told, I really remember seeing her with my eyeballs. I knew I was the only one who could see her, and still I talked to her and talked about her to my family. I was probably three years old at the time. Could this possibly have been my earliest encounter with the other side? Who knows. My memories of childhood are terribly fuzzy and fragmented, though I remember snippets of Dorothy plain as day.
I watched The Wizard of Oz every single day for what seems like years. I loved Judy Garland’s voice, and I loved the Scarecrow and his silly dance. I adored the ruby slippers; the horse of a different color; the munchkins in Munchkin Land; Glenda the Good Witch; and even the Wicked Witch of the West. Everything about that yellow brick road to the Emerald City was pure magic to me.
I got to create my own Emerald City actually, when I was a freshman in high school.
I went to Mercy Academy here in Louisville, which was my own personal Oz. From the time I was in fifth grade, I campaigned for my parents to send me to Mercy – it’s an all-girls Catholic school, and my older cousin had gone there. At the time, if I could have copied and pasted my cousin’s life onto mine, I absolutely would have. She was cool (she wore a black leather jacket in her senior pictures) and funny (she did voices and impressions that made everyone cackle) and athletic (she played three sports!) and pretty (her hair was so long and her teeth were so straight), and all her friends were cool and funny and athletic and pretty. Er go in my little 10-year-old brain: I need to go to the school where the cool and funny and athletic and pretty girls AND NO BOYS go.
My parents rejected the notion of me going to Mercy all throughout grade school. It was too expensive they told me, and I didn’t care. I never once let the small obstacle of someone else’s money and how they were going to spend it get in the way of my destiny. My parents didn’t show me their balance sheets, so I had no rational knowledge of money coming in and going out in our household, which made it easy for my mind to dismiss the, we-can’t-afford-it claims. Money was an intangible concept to me at that point in my life; I obviously knew what money was, but I had no practical idea of how much money was flying around in our household or in the community or beyond. Besides, as far as I could tell my parents would say, “We can’t afford it,” when they really meant, “We don’t want to.” And in this instance, I simply didn’t care what they wanted – I knew only the reality of me going to that school until eventually my parents aligned to my wavelength. They sent me to Mercy, and that is on manifesting the life you want.
Oh, the nostalgia of an overhead projector and a TV cart - Mercy Girl Lou, freshman year 2002.
The Mercy I graduated from was situated on East Broadway. It opened as a school in 1886, and in the century since had been added onto and revised so many times the floor plans all looked like an elaborate game of Tetris. Student lockers were tucked into any hallway that had the space, so there were several alcoves on numerous floors where students were corralled. Freshman lockers were on the first floor by the science classrooms, sophomore lockers were in the “dungeon,” and junior hallway and senior hallway were on the second floor. One of our Spirit Week traditions was for each class to decorate their hallway in a theme that highlighted their class color. The freshman color was green, and my freshman class chose Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz as our theme, construction paper yellow brick road and all. And that’s what we call a Full Circle Moment, or – to shoehorn this metaphor and call back our daytime TV reference – a Wheel of Fortune.
Our tarot Wheel of Fortune does in fact have more to do with life coming full circle than it does a lucky spin of a wheel.
She reminds us that life tends to unfold in seasons, and we humans tend to respond to it with our scripts and patterns. We are creatures of habit in more ways than we realize, and something about our primal brain has us believing that Predictable is safer than Unknown – even if the predictable includes consistent suffering. That’s what keeps us in unfulfilling jobs; toxic relationships; limiting belief systems; self-sabotaging habits. We stick with what we know even when it’s terrible because that somehow feels safer than venturing out into uncharted waters.
The Wheel of Fortune comes up to let you know a chance to make a different choice is afoot. You have ridden the Ferris Wheel of Life, and your car has completed its revolutions. You’re resting quietly at the foot of the ride, everything is parked, and the safety harness is unlocked. Now is your chance to disembark from this ride in favor of finding a new one; if you pass on this chance, you’re inviting the Universe to send you another cycle that is much the same as the one you just finished.
“But, Lou,” I hear you asking, “This ride is not terrible all the time. What if I go try to find a different ride, and the one I pick is actually even worse than this one?”
This fear is so normal, Dear Reader, and one I share with you! We have two things working in our favor though:
Remember that Hermit Phase we just completed where we took a step back from the distraction of society and other people in order to reconnect with our internal light source? Well, that Hermit Season helped recalibrate us back to our path and made it at least a little easier for us to know what’s best for ourselves. Which means when it comes time to choose our next ride, we’re doing so armed with the knowledge of what we actually like and want and need. So, we’re not choosing randomly or being chosen for by someone else; we’re empowered to do for ourselves.
Fortune is on our side. When this card shows up in a reading, it’s a positive indication that the choice to break free of a cycle is a win in and of itself. It doesn’t actually matter what choice you make next so long as it’s different than what you’ve chosen before. In choosing something better for yourself, you’ve already won. And who knows – you may just find yourself somewhere over the rainbow.
