Wheel of fortune fate vs free will

The Wheel of Fortune sits at the center of the Tarot's major arcana precisely because it names the question that will not resolve: are we turning the wheel, or is the wheel turning us? The image has a long genealogy, and tracing it reveals that the tension between fate and freedom is not a problem the symbol is trying to solve — it is the problem the symbol is.

The oldest literary ancestor of the Wheel is Plato's Myth of Er, where the cosmos itself rests in the lap of Necessity (Ananke), her daughters the three Fates — Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos — spinning, measuring, and cutting the thread of each mortal life. As Place (2005) reconstructs it, the soul descends through the planetary spheres into incarnation and thereby becomes subject to mortality and fate; the Wheel of Fortune in the Visconti-Sforza deck is this cosmic spindle compressed into a single image. The four figures ascending and descending — regnabo, regno, regnavi, sum sine regno — are not four different people but one life cycling through its phases, none of them exempt from the turning.

What Homer knew, and what the later tradition largely forgot, is that moira was never a clean determinism. Adkins (1960) shows that in the Iliad and Odyssey, fate operates more like a game of celestial snakes and ladders than a clockwork mechanism: most moves are free, but certain junctures are fixed — the death of Hector, the homecoming of Odysseus — while the route to those junctures remains open. Dodds (1951) adds that moira in Homer is not a personal goddess dictating to Zeus but a fact, a "portion," the recognition that the world is apportioned and that boundaries exist. To write it with a capital M and imagine it as Cosmic Destiny is already to import a later, Hellenistic heimarmene — the compulsion of the stars — into a text that does not support it.

Edinger (1996) draws the distinction cleanly: heimarmene is fate as stellar compulsion, modifiable by sufficient consciousness; moira is one's allotted portion, the hand dealt by the divine card-dealer, unalterable once it has been played. The practical consequence is that we can never know in advance which we are facing, so we must proceed as if it were heimarmene — as if consciousness could alter the pattern — until the fait accompli arrives and the distinction collapses.

Greene (1984) gives this the fullest psychological elaboration. Fate, she argues, is not solely without; Moira also lies within, in the unconscious:

"My fate" means a daemonic will to precisely that fate — a will not necessarily coincident with my own (the ego will). When it is opposed to the ego, it is difficult not to feel a certain "power" in it, whether divine or infernal. The man who submits to his fate calls it the will of God; the man who puts up a hopeless and exhausting fight is more apt to see the devil in it.

The Wheel, on this reading, is not Fortune's arbitrary cruelty but the Self's insistence — the psychic totality pressing its pattern against the ego's preferred narrative. Jung's formulation, quoted by Greene, is that what happens to a person is characteristic of them: "He represents a pattern and all the pieces fit." This is not fatalism; it is the recognition that the unconscious has intentions the ego did not author and cannot simply override.

The Tarot commentators hear this differently depending on where they stand. Nichols (1980) reads the Wheel as a mandala, the spiral motion of individuation — the same place revisited at a different elevation — and emphasizes that the extravert and introvert experience its turning differently, each needing distinct techniques for moving within its confines rather than being crushed at its rim. Hamaker-Zondag (1997) locates the Wheel's mechanism in the complex: the repetition of "fate" is the repetition of projection, and the moment one sees one's own psychic dynamics in the apparently external event, one can step off the wheel. Pollack (1980) goes furthest toward dissolving the opposition entirely, suggesting that fate is itself an illusion covering the inner connection between all things — a mystical position that the symbol supports without requiring.

What none of these readings quite says, but what the symbol's history implies, is that the question fate or free will is itself the wheel's trick. The sphinx sitting atop the Wheel in the Marseilles deck holds her sword carelessly, amorally — she is not interested in the answer. She is interested in whether you can hold the tension without resolving it prematurely into either fatalistic passivity or the ego's fantasy of total self-determination. Jung's formulation of free will in Aion is precise on this point: within the field of consciousness, the ego has what we call free will — "the well-known psychological fact of free choice, or rather the subjective feeling of freedom" — but outside that field, the self acts upon the ego like an objective occurrence that free will can do very little to alter (Jung, 1951). The wheel turns in both registers at once.

Further reading on seba.health:

  • moira — the Greek concept of fate as apportioned portion, from Homer through Plato
  • daimon — the indwelling pattern of a particular life, fate as character
  • Liz Greene — portrait of the depth-psychological astrologer whose Astrology of Fate gives the fullest Jungian treatment of these themes
  • individuation — the process through which the Self's pattern becomes conscious, the psychological alternative to being simply turned by the wheel

Sources Cited

  • Adkins, Arthur W.H., 1960, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values
  • Dodds, E.R., 1951, The Greeks and the Irrational
  • Edinger, Edward F., 1996, The New God-Image
  • Greene, Liz, 1984, The Astrology of Fate
  • Hamaker-Zondag, Karen, 1997, Tarot as a Way of Life
  • Jung, Carl Gustav, 1951, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self
  • Nichols, Sallie, 1980, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey
  • Place, Robert M., 2005, The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination
  • Pollack, Rachel, 1980, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom