Letter: Yud (I/J) = Virgo
Path: Between Tiferet and Gevurah
Quality: House of Health
In the Wheel of Fortune, we have a representation of the circular and cyclical metabolism of time as a bubble within eternity. Fast or slow, the Wheel never stops and it never retraces its steps, despite rhythmic fractal reflections. Creation is forever carried along via the Wheel’s interlocking cycles, though at the macrocosmic level nothing ever changes.
In Sophiology this is God’s providence or Pronoia, the gift of seeing forward through time, understanding the cyclic dynamics that mediate the outworking of the macrocosmic ideal. Pronoia refers to God’s “providential koine” expressed as heavenly governance through what may at the moment seem to be chaos.
After the Justice card presents the thesis in the Light trine, and the Hermit card gives the antithesis, we move to the Wheel of Fortune, representing the synthesis of this radiant triangle of Light. The Wheel of Fortune evokes the law of karma, which simply stated means that “reality is round.” Whatever we put out there will eventually come back to us, bringing its consequences along as well.
One cannot escape one’s widening wake, and there is no relief for the repetitious nature of daily life. Each one of us is married to our unique daily track, whether the personal sphere is tiny or huge. The nervous system plays its tape-loops over and over again. One must eat, sleep, wash, and make order, and every day it’s all to be tackled anew. Some find this repetitiveness comforting and safe; some find it appalling to the point of rebellion and even self-harm.
All who exist within a human body are subject to the mill-wheel of time, which, as has been said, grinds slow and exceedingly fine. The pre-Christian world called this cosmic mechanism Heimarmene, the personification of fate. The historical Wheel of Fortune is a very sophisticated image in that it combines a number of allusions in its details. Sometimes at the bottom of the picture we see a small and fragile moon-shaped boat bearing a giant Wheel in the place of sails.
This little craft floats upon the turbulent ocean of the subconscious, reminding us how dependent fate is on accident and synchronicity. Sometimes a Wheel of eight spokes recalls the Wheel of the Year or the compass-rose of the mapmakers and navigators. Other times the Wheel shows only six spokes, which references the Great Arcanum of the Hebrews. On the left you see the descending path of those who are abandoning eternity to come into materialization and incarnation.
On the right side ascends the avatar of those who are evolving beyond the merely human, whose aim is to return to their point of origin in the invisible. This is the mythic World Mill, the wheel of time/space that brings us into these bodies for our personal schooling and the evolution of our inner life. As each of us dives onto matter, we become that reptile creature of the descending side, avidly embracing sensation, ego, and entrapment in matter.
This path of descent is seen in spiritual teachings as a Fall of sorts: from the purity of immortal life into this dense flesh that is locked and limited to temporally and hormonally dominated modes of thought. The soul that chooses to follow the path of return, longing to extract itself from the terrestrial bog, is symbolized by that ambiguously gendered human-headed creature climbing the right side of the wheel. This illustrates the effort needed to move out of entrapment in the flesh towards the higher self and away from the realm of attachments and addictions.
At the top of the Wheel, we see an alchemical hybrid (sometimes a phoenix), which in this case is a blend of an angelic human, a lion, and an eagle. This creature suggests the fused Fire/Air/Water intelligence that defines our fulfilled being according to the three Mother Letters, the three Modes of Astro-Alchemy, and the Trinity of Jehova/Christ/Sophia according to Boehme and his followers.
The above text is an excerpt from our book Tarot of the Holy Light: A Continental Esoteric Tarot - Volume One.
