The Wheel of Fortune

Tarot Major Arcana X

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My favorite book of the Bible is the Book of Ezekiel. It’s a delightful gem of off-kilter occult matrices and fixations that never took root in canon. Aside from Revelation, which is basically a dude wishing he could rewrite Ezekiel but make it weirder, it has the best imagery of the entire Bible.

(Not the best imagery of all of the Biblically-adjacent writings; of all of them, I vote heartily for the Gnostic Gospels because that many layers of reality is just… impressive. Also, I am a big, big fan of the word “archon” for no discernable reason.)

I enjoy the flaming wheel as the Wheel of Fortune primarily for its connection to Ezekiel and the living creatures that make up God’s chariot. But I also like that it reminds me of Event Horizon and Contact, both of which clearly referred to Ezekiel's flaming wheel as a link between man and something beyond (one for better and one for worse).

The spinning wheel of fate does more than mark us, it moves us through states of being by virtue of altering our (spatial, temporal, and spiritual) course on a continuous, unrelenting basis. That sounds very woo-y, but it’s really just a matter of fact that we’re all hurtling through a chaotic universe bouncing off of one thing after another until one of those things is simply too much and we die as a result of the impact.

That’s not woo; that’s just physics.

I want my Wheel of Fortune to be perpetual. Not in a narrative cycle of up and down, death and rebirth kind of way, but in an every moment is the shattering and rebuilding of an infinite amount of realities kind of way.

The wheel turns, fate burns.