A great wheel turns in the sky. A sphinx sits above it with a sword. A serpent descends along one side while a strange, jackal-like figure rises on the other. Hebrew letters alternate with Roman characters around the rim, alchemical signs appear within the wheel, and four winged creatures watch from the clouds.
Few cards in the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot contain as many different symbolic traditions as The Wheel of Fortune.
Yet the wheel itself is far older than the deck—and older than tarot.
Before Tarot, Fortune Had a Wheel
The idea of Fortune turning a wheel was well established in medieval European art and literature centuries before tarot appeared. The Roman goddess Fortuna survived in medieval thought as a personification of life's instability. Her wheel raised kings and brought them down again, providing an unusually direct visual lesson: position, prosperity, and power are temporary.
Medieval representations of the Rota Fortunae, or Wheel of Fortune, frequently showed human figures occupying different positions around a turning wheel—rising, reigning at the summit, falling, and eventually lying beneath it.
Tarot emerged in northern Italy during the fifteenth century. The earliest documentary references date from the 1440s and 1450s, and the Wheel of Fortune was already among its trump cards. A Wheel of Fortune appears in the surviving Visconti-Sforza tarot of approximately 1450. These early cards were made for a game; tarot's strong association with divination and occultism developed centuries later.
The fundamental idea, however, was immediately recognizable.
Fortune turns.
A Much More Complicated Wheel
By the time Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith created the deck now known as the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot in 1909, centuries of occult interpretation had been added to tarot's older imagery.
Their Wheel of Fortune, numbered X, is consequently far more symbolically elaborate than its fifteenth-century predecessors.
Waite acknowledged that his design drew heavily from the nineteenth-century French occultist Éliphas Lévi. He also explicitly cautioned against assuming that the Egyptian elements proved an ancient Egyptian origin for tarot. For Waite, they were symbols incorporated into a modern interpretation—not evidence of where tarot began.
That distinction matters.
Tarot did not originate in ancient Egypt. The Egyptian imagery on this card belongs to a much later layer of its history.
At the top of the wheel sits the Sphinx, holding a sword. Waite described the Sphinx as representing equilibrium within the constant movement surrounding it.
Along the wheel are two other figures. Waite identified the descending serpent with Typhon, while the rising figure derives from the Egyptianizing imagery associated with the wheel's occult development. Together they reinforce the basic motion of the composition: one figure descends while another rises.
Nothing remains permanently at the top or bottom.
The Letters on the Wheel
The wheel itself contains another layer of symbolism.
Four Hebrew letters spell YHWH, the Tetragrammaton—the four-letter divine name found in the Hebrew Bible. Between them appear the Roman letters T, A, R and O.
These letters are deliberately capable of different arrangements. Most importantly, TARO can become ROTA, the Latin word for “wheel.” Waite specifically described the inscription as the transformation or transliteration of Taro into Rota, interspersed with the letters of the divine name.
This is why it is slightly misleading to say that “TARO, TORA and ROTA are the same word read in any direction.” They are better understood as different arrangements and readings produced from the same four Roman letters.
Within the wheel are additional signs derived from alchemical symbolism, further combining several symbolic systems within a single image.
The card is therefore not an artifact from one ancient tradition. It is something arguably more interesting: a visual accumulation of ideas assembled across different periods.
The Four Who Do Not Turn
In each corner of Pamela Colman Smith's composition appears a winged creature: a human or angel, an eagle, a lion, and a bull.
Their immediate source in Waite's explanation is the four living creatures from the biblical vision of Ezekiel. These figures also became associated in Christian iconography with the four Evangelists and, in later esoteric correspondences, with the four fixed signs of the zodiac.
Notice what Smith does with them.
While everything surrounding the wheel suggests movement, the four figures remain calmly positioned in the clouds, each holding an open book.
The wheel turns.
They observe.
The contrast gives the card much of its visual power.
The Rise and Fall of Fortune
Waite described the Wheel as representing both the perpetual motion of the universe and “the flux of human life.”
That idea connects his elaborate 1909 card back to the much older Wheel of Fortune tradition.
The person at the top of Fortune's wheel occupies the most precarious position precisely because there is nowhere left to rise. The person at the bottom occupies an equally temporary position because the wheel continues turning.
Success contains the possibility of reversal.
Misfortune contains the possibility of recovery.
Neither condition is permanent.
That does not mean life moves according to a predictable schedule, nor that every loss inevitably produces an equivalent gain. The historical symbol is more restrained than that. The wheel reminds us that circumstances change and that control over them is never absolute.
Perhaps that is why the image has survived for so long.
The medieval king, the Renaissance card player, and the modern viewer all recognize the same uncomfortable truth.
We would like the wheel to stop when we reach the top.
We would like to push it forward when we reach the bottom.
But Fortune's wheel belongs to neither position.
It turns.
And perhaps wisdom lies not in believing we can stop it, but in remembering that wherever we find ourselves upon it, the wheel is still moving.
Wheel of Fortune -- Catalog No. 2111
Tarot Collection - Within Symbolism
Symbols Worth Wearing.