10 – Fortune

Traditionally, Fortune—often called The Wheel of Fortune—is among the most visually fixed cards in the tarot. A great wheel dominates the image, marked with arcane symbols and sacred letters. Figures rise and fall along its rim, while a crowned authority presides from above, implying judgment, destiny, or divine order. In many historical decks, Christian cosmology is reinforced through the symbols of the four Evangelists, framing fortune as something allocated by forces beyond human influence.

This imagery rests on assumptions I do not share. I do not believe in luck as a governing principle, nor in fate as a predetermined path imposed from outside the self. I also reject the notion that fortune is a zero-sum system, where one person’s rise requires another’s fall. In lived experience, the opportunities we encounter are unevenly distributed, shaped by circumstance, history, and collective structures—but how we respond to those conditions matters.

Fortune, to me, is neither random nor ordained. It is contingent, relational, and deeply human.

In seeking an image that could hold these ideas, I was drawn to the circus Wheel of Death. Unlike the symbolic wheel of tradition, this apparatus is a physical structure: a beam with circular tracks at either end, occupied by performers whose movement causes the entire system to rotate. The wheel turns not because it must, but because it is inhabited. Motion is generated through effort, balance, and coordination.

This version of Fortune depicts change as a lived condition rather than an abstract force. The figures within the wheel occupy different relationships to motion. Some exert themselves to alter their position. Others sit or recline, accepting where the wheel has carried them. None are judged. Each response reflects a valid human way of meeting change.

Agency exists here, but it is neither absolute nor evenly distributed. Individual effort can influence momentum, yet no one figure controls the system alone. Acceptance is not portrayed as passivity, but as conscious recognition—of limits, timing, and reality. Striving and surrender are shown not as opposites, but as alternating states within the same cycle.

At the hub of the wheel, an ouroboros encircles the center, reinforcing the continuity of change. Endings fold into beginnings. Positions reverse. Effort gives way to rest; rest eventually becomes movement again. Fortune, in this card, is not reward or punishment, but process: the ongoing negotiation between action and acceptance that shapes a life.