Wheel of Fortune tarot card meaning: upright, reversed, love and yes or no

Four winged creatures sit in the corners of this card, each with an open book, while a great wheel turns in the middle of the sky. An angel sits at the top left, an eagle at the top right, a bull at the bottom left and a lion at the bottom right. Nothing about the spinning seems to bother them. They match the four fixed signs of the zodiac, Aquarius, Scorpio, Taurus and Leo, and in Christian art they stand for the four Gospel writers. The same four figures appear on the World, card twenty-one.

The orange wheel is marked with the letters T, A, R and O. Read one way they spell TARO, and read another they spell ROTA, Latin for wheel, a wordplay older than the deck itself. Between those letters sit four Hebrew letters that spell the name of God, and on the inner spokes are alchemical symbols for mercury, sulfur, salt and water.

Three figures ride the wheel. A sphinx holding a sword sits on top. A yellow snake slides down the left side, and a red figure with a jackal’s head rises on the right, usually identified as Anubis, the Egyptian guide of souls. One figure going down and one coming up, with the sphinx holding its place above them, gives you the whole cycle in a single image.

The wheel floats among gray clouds against a blue sky, with no ground anywhere in sight. None of it rests on anything solid, which is part of the message.

It’s card number ten, the end of one count and the start of the next, and it sits almost exactly halfway through the Major Arcana.

Delays and last-minute changes of plan fit work questions here, like a promotion that gets postponed or a client who pulls out. If a client walks, use the gap to rebuild your pipeline. Financially, the reversal warns against counting on income that hasn’t arrived yet and against chasing losses.