Wheel of Fortune

• goddess of fortune (Fortuna/ Tyche / Τύχη )
• unpredictability of fate, chance, unexpected turn, good luck, sudden relief
• woman standing, blindfolded on a ball
• VS → blindfolded fortuna, centre of a wheel, inscription 'i rule/i was ruling/i am without rules/i shall rule'
• cycles of life. youth→maturity→decline
• C16 and C17, discard 4th figure surrounding wheel (cf. TM) use hybrids, e.g. sphinx wearing a crown.
• different directions of turning the wheel. fortuna is no longer presented
• RW → 4 elements/evangelists/animals

• Cannabis sativa. hemp, happiness, joy, utility, ROTA, Hassan-i Sabbāh ( حسن صباح‎ ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hassan-i_Sabbah
• sugar cane
• walnuts (?)
• hickory (?)

• sun yellow
• blue
• purple
• rusty brown

The wheel of fortune is a vine. Every individual wheel of fortune exists in four stages of its life at the same time: sprouting, flowering, fruiting and decaying. It's life extends itself in space rather than time. The survival of the individual plant is important, hence each vine spirals back to its beginning, using it's decaying ends to feed the shoots, forming the shape of a wheel. The vine is segmented, as a stalk of the sugar cane. Older plants have several vines growing around and around, forming an increasingly strong 'rope' of vines, with flowers and fruits all growing in the same portions of the vine. Each vine has only one leaf growing in between the vines, as spikes on a wheel, or a sparse spider-web, with the leaf connecting to the circular vine through its tips. The plant is not attached to the ground, but has aerial roots, which allow it to rotate through the space, carried by the wind, or sometimes it is even propelled by the force of its own growth and fruiting. Its flowers have the power to influence the environment around them. There are four types of flowers, all of whom have a rigid triangular shape, resembling alchemical symbols of earth, water, air and fire. The flowers can be picked to add more of a specific element into an eco-system, thereby changing its balance. This is a plant able to incite change even in the most static and inert of environments. Its fruits are hybrids of itself and organisms it has encountered on its journeys, particularly of animal origin. The plant collects DNA and integrates foreign DNA with its own. The fruits are a mixture of the plant's own and animal characteristics, bound by the elemental power of one of its four types of flowers (e.g. a water creature resembling a lion with legs made of passion-flower stigmas and quickly drying flower-petals instead of fur). The fruit is a true plant-animal hybrid, the animal often being of human origin. Once the fruit falls of, its animal ability to move takes over and the hybrid lives on as an independent entity. When the time comes for it to die, the entity always comes back to die in the arms of its parent, who strangles it and feeds it to the young shoots.

note: work in progress for PARN. not general reference

major arcana