catboxer
This card, right near the middle of the deck, is in some respects very simple and easy to understand. During the middle ages and the Renaissance, churches built throughout Europe contained sculpted, carved, or painted representations of this wheel, and they can still be seen in many places today. Even the most illiterate worshiper instantly understood this image as a reference to the vicissitudes of life's ups and downs. A belief in "Fortuna" had been a major element in Mediterranean culture since before the classical era.
Here again, there were pictorial elements incorporated into the Marseilles decks different from those in the earliest Italian cards, in this case chiefly the substitution of animals for the human figures seen in the Visconti decks. But I would hope that even the animals are understood as a reference to the human fate all of us share, of having to ride the wheel.
Despite its relative simplicity, I find that this trump, at least for me, carries a number of potent ramifications pertaining to the entire deck, because it's a wheel. There are two wheels among the trumps, this one, near the center of the sequence, and the World, at the very end. Whenever I think of the two of them together, I also think of this passage from Ezekiel:
"...behold one wheel upon the earth by living creatures with his four faces...and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up...for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. (Ezekiel 1:15-21 KJV)
Now, this is just me, and I'm certainly not putting this forward as the "correct" interpretation of the trumps as a system (for as I've said many times, I don't believe they are a system), but I always think of the Wheel of Fortune as "the wheel in the middle of a wheel," with the outer part of the same wheel being the World. It's a way of saying that the chance sequence of random events is a central part, the hub you might say, of the cosmic master plan. In other words, just because there is a cosmic master plan doesn't mean there's no such thing as random events.
Am I making sense? Anyway, I thought I'd just throw that out.
Love 'n' Kisses,
(catboxer)
PS: Thanks for the birthday wishes for my daughter Rachel, who is a true artiste in the San Francisco tradition.
Here again, there were pictorial elements incorporated into the Marseilles decks different from those in the earliest Italian cards, in this case chiefly the substitution of animals for the human figures seen in the Visconti decks. But I would hope that even the animals are understood as a reference to the human fate all of us share, of having to ride the wheel.
Despite its relative simplicity, I find that this trump, at least for me, carries a number of potent ramifications pertaining to the entire deck, because it's a wheel. There are two wheels among the trumps, this one, near the center of the sequence, and the World, at the very end. Whenever I think of the two of them together, I also think of this passage from Ezekiel:
"...behold one wheel upon the earth by living creatures with his four faces...and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up...for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. (Ezekiel 1:15-21 KJV)
Now, this is just me, and I'm certainly not putting this forward as the "correct" interpretation of the trumps as a system (for as I've said many times, I don't believe they are a system), but I always think of the Wheel of Fortune as "the wheel in the middle of a wheel," with the outer part of the same wheel being the World. It's a way of saying that the chance sequence of random events is a central part, the hub you might say, of the cosmic master plan. In other words, just because there is a cosmic master plan doesn't mean there's no such thing as random events.
Am I making sense? Anyway, I thought I'd just throw that out.
Love 'n' Kisses,
(catboxer)
PS: Thanks for the birthday wishes for my daughter Rachel, who is a true artiste in the San Francisco tradition.