Wheel of Fortune

Arcana

Major Arcana — one of the twenty-two

Number

X — card 10 of the sequence

Place in the sequence

eleventh of twenty-two

Numbered alongside

the four Tens of the Minor Arcana

Reduces to

The Magician (I) — because 1 + 0 = 1

Upright

Good luck, karma, life cycles, destiny

Reversed

Bad luck, resistance to change, breaking cycles

Listing position

card 11 of 78 as the deck is written out

Nothing on this page is calculated from your birth details or your name — the readings below are the traditional attributions for Wheel of Fortune, written plainly. The one part of it that is arithmetic, and exact, is how often a card of this kind actually turns up; that has its own section further down.

What Wheel of Fortune means

Change is coming, and the turn is in your favour. Stay alert for an unexpected opening.

Wheel of Fortune is numbered X, card 10 of the twenty-two, and Major Arcana cards are read as the large theme of a stretch of life rather than as the day-to-day events the four suits describe. A Minor card puts one subject — the work, the feeling, the argument, the money — at a particular stage; Wheel of Fortune names the chapter all of that is happening inside.

Its keyword line — good luck, karma, life cycles, destiny — is the short form for a grid, not a second meaning. When Wheel of Fortune lands beside two Minor cards, the usual reading is that it outranks them: they describe the events, Wheel of Fortune describes what the events are for.

Wheel of Fortune reversed

Bad luck, resistance to change, breaking cycles

Reversed, Wheel of Fortune does not become its opposite. X is the same chapter either way; the reversal turns it inward, or slows it, or points at the version of good luck that has gone wrong. On a chapter as large as X that is a real difference in tone rather than a different card, which is why Wheel of Fortune reversed is written here as bad luck, resistance to change, breaking cycles and not as the opposite of good luck.

Plenty of readers do not use reversals. Do that and Wheel of Fortune keeps one meaning, and the cards around it decide whether the chapter it names is arriving well or badly.

Where Wheel of Fortune sits in the sequence

Wheel of Fortune stands at X, between The Hermit (IX) and Justice (XI). Read as a sequence — and most readers do read it as one — the twenty-two run from a first step to a completion, so Wheel of Fortune arrives after soul-searching, introspection, inner guidance and hands over to fairness, truth, cause and effect, law.

The number X

Wheel of Fortune is numbered 10, and readers who reduce the Majors add the digits — 1 + 0 — which lands on The Magician (I). In that scheme Wheel of Fortune is the worldly, complicated form of The Magician: the same number underneath, with more life on top of it. Going the other way, The Sun (XIX) reduces to X, which makes Wheel of Fortune the plainer statement of a number that card carries in a more worldly form. Both at once, in other words: with only nine roots to reduce towards, a card in the middle of the sequence is the complicated form of one number and the simple form of another, and which it is depends on which direction you came from.

The same number reaches the Minor Arcana directly: the four Tens — Ten of Wands, Ten of Cups, Ten of Swords and Ten of Pentacles — are the day-to-day version of what Wheel of Fortune names as a theme. The limit in four different subjects, against one chapter of a life.

Reading Wheel of Fortune in a spread

A Major in a three-card spread usually reframes the other two rather than sitting level with them. Wheel of Fortune in each position:

• First — the setting. Wheel of Fortune as the theme already in place behind the question: good luck, karma, life cycles, destiny.
• Second — the situation. X as what the matter is actually about now, which generally outranks whatever the Minor cards beside it are describing.
• Third — the direction. Wheel of Fortune as a chapter opening rather than an event: the position where a Major reads least like a prediction and most like a description of where things are heading.

In a love reading

Wheel of Fortune describes the theme a relationship is inside rather than an event inside it — good luck, karma, life cycles, destiny applied to two people. That is a broader claim than any Cups card makes, and a vaguer one, which is why X usually wants the cards either side of it before it says anything useful.

In a career reading

On a work question Wheel of Fortune answers about the direction rather than the task: not whether the report gets filed but whether the chapter you are filing it in is the one you meant to be in.X on its own will not tell you what to do on Monday; read it with a Pentacles or Wands card beside it and that card supplies the practical half Wheel of Fortune leaves out.

How often Wheel of Fortune actually comes up

This is the part of a card page that can be checked, so it is worth stating exactly. Three cards drawn from seventy-eight means any named card — Wheel of Fortune included — appears in one three-card spread in 26, or 3.8% of the time. No card in the deck is rarer than another, and any page telling you its own card is unusual to draw is wrong about arithmetic rather than about tarot.

• At least one of the twenty-two Major Arcana appears in 63.6% of three-card spreads. A "big card" showing up is the ordinary case, not a sign.

Reversals do not change any of that. Whether Wheel of Fortune lands upright or reversed is a separate coin from whether it lands at all, which is worth remembering when a reversed card feels like it was aimed at you.

The full set of these figures, including what the most-feared cards actually add up to, is on the tarot page.

Wheel of Fortune — common questions