Wheel of Fortune
Today you may be looking at the ups and downs in your life and thinking about how they’ve led you to where you are today. The Wheel of Fortune card is associated with fate, destiny, “karma,” life cycles and both good and bad luck.
Sometimes we blame ourselves for the down times (assuming we’ve “brought it all on ourselves”) while viewing the up times as outside of our control.
We all experience these up and down cycles — and we all try to maximize the former while minimizing the latter. But the Wheel of Fortune tells us that both are necessary and that the good times wouldn’t be good without the frame of reference of the not-so-good times.
In traditional (Rider Waite and Golden Dawn) style versions of this card, there are more ominous connotations of those up and down times, but as this deck was designed for children, the imagery is more positive, playful and whimsical.
We see a roulette wheel in the center with four sets of lucky symbols — hearts, 4-leaf clovers, horseshoes and brass rings — and eight sets of numbers around the perimeter.
The “eight” theme is repeated there in numerical increments as well. Rounding out the imagery is a pair of lucky white rabbits at the top of the card and a pair of unlucky black cats at the bottom.