Wheel Of Life

These essential Buddhist teachings are portrayed in the diagram of the Wheel of Life. The Japanese version of the Wheel of Life was engraved and published by a monk named Cho-on during the Tempo era (1830-1844)... the Wheel of Life is held in the claws of the devil of impermanence, indicating that the wheel is put into motion by the unavoidable fact of impermanence.

Spiegelman identifies the Wheel of Life as the canonical pictorial summation of Buddhist doctrine, its motion driven by impermanence rather than design, with the hub encoding the three root-causes of unenlightened existence.

Spiegelman, J. Marvin, Buddhism and Jungian Psychology, 1985thesis

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the six realms are represented as a wheel, whose six segments depict the six main types of unenlightened existence. These forms of existence are conditioned by the illusion of separate selfhood, which craves for all that serves to satisfy or to maintain this 'ego', and which despises and hates whatever opposes this craving.

Govinda presents the Tibetan Wheel of Life as a mandala of samsaric conditionality, where the six realms express modes of ego-illusion and the hub-animals embody greed, hatred, and delusion as structural motors of rebirth.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960thesis

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the wheel symbolizes the self-moving power of the unconscious; that is, the Self. To move in rhythm with the movement of the psyche, the wheel, is the goal of the Indian. His aim is to keep in touch with the 'course' given by the Self. But the Self may become a negative, torturing factor if its intentions are misunderstood.

Von Franz reinterprets the wheel across Vedic, Buddhist, Babylonian, and medieval European iterations as a symbol of the Self's autonomous psychic energy, which liberates when understood and enslaves when not.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, 1970thesis

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In the Buddha's teaching, the image of the turning spoked wheel, which in the earlier period had been symbolic of the world's glory, thus became a sign, on one hand, of the wheeling round of sorrow, and, on the other, release in the sunlike doctrine of illumination.

Campbell documents the axial-age semantic reversal of the wheel symbol from a sign of cosmic triumph to the Buddhist image of samsaric suffering and, simultaneously, the dharma-wheel of liberation.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis

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the mill becomes a symbol of the negative wheel of life, the Indian samsara, the aimless cycle. But this aimless cycle is a form of the Great Round... As the Tibetan wheel of life, the Great Round is held by a female demon of death, the witch Srinmo.

Neumann situates the Wheel of Life within the archetype of the Great Round, identifying its negative pole as the devouring, fate-spinning Terrible Mother and its positive pole as the sheltering World Mother.

Neumann, Erich, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, 1955thesis

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like the Buddhist 'wheel of being,' this also has six spokes... The felly is bound by the linked chain of the twelve causes of rebirth: ignorance, action, consciousness, name-and-form, the sense organs, contact, sensation, desire, intercourse, birth, life, and finally disease, old age, and death.

Campbell maps the Buddhist bhavacakra's structural anatomy—the six realms, the twelve nidanas, and the three hub-animals—drawing explicit comparison with Celtic and Dantesque parallels to argue for a universal mythic substrate.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968thesis

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Life presents itself here as a process – as a system of constant transformation equally involving integration and disintegration, generation and degeneration. Up and down are not shown here as two fixed forces playing at tug of war.

Nichols reads the Tarot Wheel as an energy system whose essence is perpetual becoming, a living diagram of nature's transformative spectrum that dissolves fixed moral polarities into a continuum of graduated change.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980thesis

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The ever-turning Wheel of Life came to signify the laws of karma, leading you to reincarnate in one body after another... our limited understanding prevents us from directly experiencing the truth behind the wheel.

Pollack traces the Wheel of Life's transmutation from archaic goddess sacrifice into the Hindu-Buddhist doctrine of karma and reincarnation, framing it as a symbol whose innermost truth exceeds ordinary comprehension.

Pollack, Rachel, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980supporting

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we see two odd-looking animals revolving helplessly on Fortune's ever turning Wheel. The animals wear human dress. Is the Tarot trying to tell us that we, like these animals, are trapped in the endless predestined round of Fortune's Wheel?

Nichols poses the central hermeneutic question of the Wheel card: whether its imagery of helplessly revolving human-dressed animals encodes determinism or carries a more redemptive psychological message about fate and individuation.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

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Now, after the Wheel's turning, the remaining Trumps will picture the ensuing stages: evolution and regeneration. In the classic formula this was stated as the disentanglement of spirit from matter and its ultimate ascent to a new and heavenly unity.

Nichols positions the Wheel of Fortune as the structural pivot of the Major Arcana, marking the transition from ego-establishment in the first half of life to inward spiritual development in the second.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

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The Wheel of Fortune can also repeat decidedly positive situations! If we continue in this process for too long, we often become the victim of mistaken guilt feelings. And then we can hide, or... passively accept what happens in life as the 'due punishment for our crimes.'

Hamaker-Zondag analyses the Wheel's repetitive dynamic psychologically, warning that misunderstanding karma as punishment produces passive victimhood, and that genuine inner transformation alters the patterns the wheel recycles.

Hamaker-Zondag, Karen, Tarot as a Way of Life: A Jungian Approach to the Tarot, 1997supporting

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The Wheel of Fortune, number 10, terminates the first decimal cycle of the Major Arcana. Its circular shape and the handle attached to it indicate its primary meaning: the end of one cycle and the pause to wait for the strength that will set the following cycle in motion.

Jodorowsky treats the Wheel of Fortune as a structural marker of cyclic closure and incipient renewal within the Tarot's numerical grammar, emphasising the card's orientation toward ending and expectant pause rather than perpetual spinning.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting

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The Wheel of Fortune invites reflection upon inevitable alternations of ascents and falls, of prosperity and austerity, of joy and sorrow. It orients us toward change, whether positive or negative, and acceptance of the constant transformation of reality.

Jodorowsky reads the Wheel as an invitation to conscious acceptance of cyclical alternation, linking it to karma, astrology, and the Buddhist cycle of death and rebirth as overlapping frames for the same psychic truth.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting

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the Wheel of Fortune symbolizes the task in life. The ego does not at all like the change of direction that becomes necessary here. It really hates giving up its claim to being the only one capable of clearly explaining everything.

Banzhaf interprets the Wheel of Fortune as the hero's confrontation with a life-task that requires ego-relinquishment, connecting Jungian individuation with the card's archetypal demand for a change of inner orientation.

Banzhaf, Hajo, Tarot and the Journey of the Hero, 2000supporting

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The Eastern culture, he says, is near the Wheel's center; it is a world of archetypal principles slow to change. Western culture he locates near the Wheel's periphery where these archetypal ideas have been spun out into objective reality.

Nichols uses the wheel's geometry—centre versus circumference—to map the contrast between Eastern introverted contemplation of eternal principles and Western extraverted engagement with worldly phenomena, underscoring why Jung cautioned against uncritical adoption of Eastern methods.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

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The sphinx on top of the Wheel represents Horus, Osiris's son, and god of resurrection. Life has triumphed over death. But the sphinx, as we saw in the Chariot, also signifies the mystery of life.

Pollack decodes the Wheel's mythological figures—Set, Anubis, Horus—as stages in the Egyptian death-rebirth cycle, arguing that the sphinx above the wheel embodies the mystery that only the unconscious, not the ego, can reveal.

Pollack, Rachel, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom: A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, 1980supporting

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Nemesis' symbols were a gryphon, a lash, scales, and a wheel. Another goddess associated with fortune was Necessity, who was also connected with the globe and the wheel of the cosmos.

Place traces the iconographic genealogy of the Tarot Wheel through Greek Tyche, Nemesis, and Necessity to Roman Fortuna, demonstrating how cosmological fate-goddesses converge in the wheel as their shared emblem of inescapable destiny.

Place, Robert M., The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005supporting

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on a whirling platform, he saw a man with blood dripping down his body; for a wheel was whirling on his head. Then he made haste and said: 'Sir, why do you stand thus with a wheel whirling on your head?'

Campbell presents a Sanskrit narrative in which a karmic wheel of suffering transfers from head to head, illustrating the doctrine that ignorant desire perpetuates the wheel's torment and that only wisdom breaks the transmission.

Campbell, Joseph, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume IV, 1968supporting

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We cannot free our creative energies with mental gymnastics nor outwit our human fate by clever answers. As von Franz reminds us, it is a familiar plot of the unconscious to distract the hero (human consciousness striving towards wholeness) by proposing philosophical questions at the very moment

Nichols, drawing on von Franz, argues that the sphinx on the Wheel resists intellectual solution, and that genuine encounter with fate requires not clever reasoning but a transformation of consciousness.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting

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The Wheel of Fortune and Judgment are the two cards that close their respective decimal series. Of the tenth stage, both point toward the end of a cycle. In The Wheel of Fortune (X) we observe a pause: the three animals are being held back and waiting for Providence to come turn the handle.

Jodorowsky aligns the Wheel of Fortune structurally with the Last Judgment as twin markers of cyclic endings, reading the animals' stasis as a liminal moment of providential awaiting rather than mechanical inevitability.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards, 2004supporting

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In the Tarot of Marseilles, the wheel supports three foolish creatures that are chasing each other's tails around the rim of a six-spoked wheel. They are three monkeys, symbols of human folly.

Place traces the iconographic reduction of the Wheel of Fortune's human figures into animals and ultimately monkeys in the Marseilles tradition, reading the devolution as a commentary on the folly of ego-consciousness caught in fate's turning.

Place, Robert M., The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination, 2005aside

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In the drawing on the margin of the note this centre is portrayed as a wheel with eight spokes... Mercurius turning the eight-spoked wheel which symbolizes the process.

Jung identifies the eight-spoked wheel in alchemical iconography as a symbol of the transformative process driven by Mercurius, connecting the wheel motif to the mandala and to the Self's role in psychic individuation.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944aside

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