Somebody emailed me back in February, about a week after her little online shop had gone very quiet, and the whole message was really just one question with a lot of worry packed tight around it. She had pulled the Wheel of Fortune three mornings running. Same card, three days in a row, and by the third morning she had more or less convinced herself that the universe was telling her money was on its way. Was it, she wanted to know? Was that what it meant?
I sat on that email for two days before I answered it, honestly, because the kind answer and the true answer were not quite the same shape as each other.
The Wheel is not a lottery ticket. It never was. And I think a lot of us who read cards have quietly let people carry on believing it is, because the disappointment on somebody’s face when you say otherwise is not a nice thing to sit across from.
What is actually painted on that card
Pull out your Rider Waite Smith deck, the one nearly everybody starts with, and really look at card ten for a minute rather than glancing at it the way we all do.
There is a great wheel hanging in a pale sky. Around its rim are four letters, T A R O, which you can read round and round as TARO or ROTA or even TORA depending where you start, and rota is simply the latin word for wheel. Between those letters sit the four Hebrew letters of the divine name. Inside the spokes there are alchemical marks for mercury and sulphur and salt and water. In the four corners of the card, floating on little clouds, are a winged man, an eagle, a lion and a bull, and every one of them is reading a book, which I have always found rather lovely. Those four are the fixed signs of the zodiac. Aquarius, Scorpio, Leo, Taurus. The steady ones. The ones that hold their position while everything else moves.
And then the wheel itself. A snake sliding down the left side, a jackal headed figure rising up the right, and a blue sphinx sitting calmly on the very top with a sword across its lap.
Notice what is missing from all of that. There is no pot of gold anywhere on the card. No coins, no treasure chest, no smiling figure holding up a winning hand. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith put an awful lot of symbolism onto one small rectangle back in 1909 and not one single bit of it says you are about to receive a windfall.
Fortuna and her rather miserable wheel
The idea is way older than tarot, which is the bit that changed how I read the card.
Medieval Europe was completely obsessed with something called the rota fortunate, the wheel of fortune, and it turned up carved into cathedral walls and painted into manuscripts all over the place. The picture is nearly always the same. A blindfolded goddess stands at a great wheel with her hand on the crank, and four figures are stuck to the rim of it. One climbing up on the left, one sitting crowned at the top, one tumbling off the right hand side, and one lying crushed underneath. There is usually latin written by each of them. I shall reign, I reign, I have reigned, I am without reign.
Boethius wrote about her while he was in prison waiting to be executed, which tells you something about the mood of the thing. Fortuna in his telling is not cruel exactly, she is just indifferent, and turning the wheel is simply the whole of her job. You do not get to ask her to stop when your at the top.
So the wheel was never a promise. It was a warning, and a fairly blunt one at that. Everything turns. The turn is the only thing on offer.
Once you know that, the card in your reading changes character completely. It stops being a yes and starts being a question about timing, and the question is not really will things change, because things are definitely going to change. The question is where on the rim you happen to be sitting this month, and whether you have noticed.
The small things we do while the wheel is turning
Here is what I find genuinely interesting about human beings. We know full well that we cannot reach the crank. And we go on doing things anyway.
Nearly every tradition has some version of this. Honey jar work, where a name goes into a jar of honey or sugar and the whole idea is to sweeten a situation you cannot force. Sweets left on the altar. Sugar in the offerings for Oshun. Cakes and honeycomb are put out for the dead in half a dozen cultures who never met each other. There is a folk logic running underneath all of it that says if you cannot control the outcome then you may possibly soften how it arrives, and the language for softening things is nearly always sugar.
And it is not only spellwork, is it. It is the lucky earrings you wear to a job interview. The little tap on the roof of the car. The number you notice on a receipt and take as a nod from somewhere. None of these things move the wheel one inch and every one of us does them, myself very much included, and I no longer think that is silly at all. They are how we sit without knowing. That is a real skill and it deserves more respect than it gets.
A pastel reel and a green sweet
Sweetness got everywhere, is the thing, and it did not stay in the sacred corner of the house for very long.
You can watch the exact same visual language turn up in seaside rock shops and pick and mix counters and, eventually, in games. The Candyland casino game at Vegas Mobile Casino is a fairly perfect little example of it, and I only know that because a friend of mine who is far more into slots than I will ever be sent it over as a joke about my honey jar. It is built by 1×2 Gaming across 5 reels and 3 rows with 9 fixed paylines, the RTP is 96.00%, and stakes run from as little as £0.01 up to £0.50 a spin. The whole grid is pastel skies and rolling sugar hills, with cola bottles and strawberry gums and fried egg sweets sitting where the usual playing card letters would normally be. A round green sweet acts as the wild. A purple sweet is the scatter, and one of them landing anywhere pays 5 free spins, scaling up to 25 free spins if five of them turn up together. Maximum win on it is 300x your stake.
Which is a wheel with better graphics, when you think about it. Nine fixed lines, a fixed return percentage, and absolutely no way whatsoever to reach the crank. The honesty of a published RTP figure is rather refreshing, actually, since Fortuna never told anybody her numbers. If you do wind down that way occasionally then set your limit before you open anything and treat the limit as the actual ritual, because that part is genuinely in your hands and the spinning never is.
When the readings quietly turn into the income
Now, the woman who emailed me in February was not asking a philosophical question. She was asking a rent question, and those are different.
A lot of you reading this have turned a practice into at least part of a living. Readings on a booking page, an Etsy shop, crystals posted out in little padded envelopes, a course, a Patreon, some affiliate links tucked into the posts you were writing anyway. And the thing nobody warns you about when you go from doing this for love to doing it for a portion of the rent is that the Wheel stops being a nice image on a card and becomes your actual cashflow.
November is enormous. Everybody wants a reading before the year turns over. Then February arrives and the shop goes silent for eleven days and you sit there refreshing the orders page at half past ten at night wondering what you did wrong. You did not do anything wrong. You are on the rim, same as the four little figures on the cathedral wall, and the rim is where this work lives.
The bill that goes up in your good months
Here’s the practical bit, and I promise it connects.
If you’re running any of this online, you are almost certainly paying for software, and a surprising amount of that software is priced in a way that quietly punishes you for the exact thing you’re trying to grow. Per click. Per contact. Per person on the team. Per ticket in the inbox. Have a really good month and the tools take a slice of the good month, which is a strange arrangement when you sit and look at it properly, and almost nobody does sit and look at it properly because each individual bill is small.
You see this most clearly over in the regulated gambling industry, oddly enough, where an enormous share of the business arrives through publishers and comparison sites rather than through advertising the operators bought themselves. Per click pricing there gets brutal really fast. A few platforms have gone the other way on purpose. The iGaming affiliate software built by MAP at Mediacle is priced flat with no per click fees at all, with the tracking and the commission rules and the fraud scoring bundled in, and the point of doing it that way is not the feature list. The point is that a good month stays a good month all the way to the invoice.
Support tools have the same problem in a smaller and more personal way. The moment you have more than about twenty emails a week you want somewhere to put them, and nearly every help desk out there charges per agent, so the second you bring in your sister or a virtual assistant to help with the December rush the bill goes up. Maxdesk took the opposite approach and offered its help desk free with unlimited agents and unlimited tickets, with the whole feature set sitting on the free plan rather than the usual arrangement where the useful half waits behind a paywall. The trade is stated plainly, which I appreciate. The free workspace carries ads and Maxdesk branding on outgoing email and keeps three months of rolling history rather than the lot. If you want it unbranded with a longer history, that’s 20 dollars a month for the workspace, not for each person sitting in it.
Small thing, but for anybody who has ever taken on their first bit of help and watched three separate subscriptions jump in the same week, it’s the difference between growing and flinching.
What the Wheel will not do for you
I want to be honest about the limits here, because I dislike readings that promise more than they can carry.
The Wheel of Fortune does not tell you a rise is coming. It genuinely does not. Pulling it three mornings in a row is not three times the promise either, it is more likely you noticing something you already knew and the deck agreeing with you about it. Sometimes the card lands and the honest reading is that you’re at the top right now and should be putting money aside, which is a much less fun sentence to say out loud than the other one.
Sorting out your subscriptions will not fix a quiet February either. Flat pricing is a smaller and duller win than it sounds and it does not bring the customers back. All it does is stop the machinery taking a bigger bite in the months that are already thin, and that is worth having, but it is not a spell and I am not going to sell it as one.
And no card, no jar, no perfectly organised inbox is going to get anybody near the crank. The blindfold on Fortuna is the whole point of her. She is not looking at you specifically, which is either the most comforting thing about this card or the most frightening one depending entirely on the week you are having.
One small thing for this week
If you take anything from all this, take the question rather than the answer.
Sit down with the card and ask where on the rim you actually are this month. Not where you want to be, and not where you were in November when everything was flying. Just where you are now, honestly. Then write down one thing that would be different if you were wrong about that, because that single line is worth more than a whole spread most of the time.
And if some part of this has become your income, spend twenty minutes with your bank statement sorted by company name instead of by date, and put a note next to each one saying how it charges you. Flat, or per something. That is the entire exercise and it costs nothing but a cup of tea and a bit of nerve.
I wrote back to the woman in February eventually. I told her the card was not promising her anything and that I was sorry about that, and then I told her the wheel had her at the bottom which meant the next turn had nowhere else to go. She emailed me again in June to say the shop had picked back up around Easter. I do not think the card did that. She did that, by staying on the rim long enough for it to come round, which is most of the work and hardly ever the part anybody wants to hear about.
