Wheel of Fortune (X)

Waite says outright that he did not design this card. He took the arrangement from Eliphas Lévi, who had redrawn the old Wheel of Fortune with Egyptian figures on it, and he keeps the figures while refusing the Egyptology that came with them: it is legitimate to use such symbolism, he writes, ‘provided that no theory of origin is implied therein’. So the picture is a wheel hanging in the sky with a sphinx on top holding a sword, a serpent sliding down the left side, a jackal headed figure climbing the right, and four winged creatures on clouds in the corners, reading.

The rim is lettered, and the letters do two jobs at once. Read one way round they spell TARO, the deck; started a quarter turn along they spell ROTA, the Latin for wheel; and set between them are the four Hebrew letters of the divine name. Waite's gloss is that ‘the transliteration of Taro as Rota is inscribed on the wheel, counterchanged with the letters of the Divine Name, to shew that Providence is implied through all’. Inside the rim sit the alchemical signs for mercury, sulphur, water and salt. What the whole thing means he takes from Lévi again: the picture ‘stands for the perpetual motion of a fluidic universe and for the flux of human life. The Sphinx is the equilibrium therein’.

The snake going down the left has a name. Waite chose to draw Typhon in serpent form, the Egyptian Set as the Greeks called him, the destroyer, leaving the wheel as it turns. Coming up the other side is Hermanubis, the jackal headed guide of souls. Waite calls Lévi's grouping an invention made to prop up a hypothesis and then says that if the hypothesis is dropped the grouping is symbolically correct anyway. Down one side and up the other, destruction and return, on a single turning object.

The four in the corners are Ezekiel's, seen by the river of Babylon: a man, an eagle, a lion and a bull, each winged, each here holding an open book. Waite points out that they stop the card being purely Egyptian, since ‘the four Living Creatures of Ezekiel occupy the angles of the card’. They come back on the last card of the deck, where they watch a dancer. Here they read, because here they are the witnesses: the letters inside the wheel are the divine intention within, and the four creatures are the same intention shown from outside.

The lion at the lower right is one of the four, marked on its own because the lion has its own entry. It is Mark's lion and it is Leo, the fixed fire of the zodiac, one of the four corners the sky turns on.

Waite ends on a piece of drafting advice and a doctrine. Some designs lay the sphinx on a pedestal above the wheel, which he says ‘defrauds the symbolism by stultifying the essential idea of stability amidst movement’: the sphinx has to sit on the wheel itself, still while the thing turns under it. And behind the whole symbol, he writes, ‘there lies the denial of chance and the fatality which is implied therein’. A Wheel of Fortune that denies chance sounds like a contradiction until you notice whose name is on the rim. The wheel turns by law, four witnesses are watching it, and what looks like luck from inside the turning is Providence from outside.