O Fortuna velut luna . . .

Yesterday I did some urban exploring and kept running into capital letter Rs in strange orientations -- upside down, backwards, "lazy," etc. Today, I saw someone wearing a hoodie with a huge blackletter R (normal orientation) and under it -- in Latin, but written as if it were German -- Fortis Fortuna adiuvat -- one of several Latin versions of the proverb "Fortune favors the bold."

This served as a reminder that I had been meaning to post about Fortuna ever since she came up in William Wright's January 26 post "Predators, Manticores, Dwarf-Lions, the Mary Celeste, Sirens, and Illusions." In that post, he discusses a movie called The Last Unicorn, which I have never seen, and a character in it called Mommy Fortuna. Fortuna is the Latin name of the goddess Tyche, ancient mother of all Tychonieviches, and I suppose I show myself her true son in having taken "The highway is for gamblers" as my personal motto.

I thought of the old medieval poem from Carmina Burana which begins O Fortuna velut luna statu variabilis -- "O Fortune, like the moon you are changeable." I posted about this back in 2019 as part of a series of posts on the development of the Wheel of Fortune Tarot card. The post even mentions "my august ancestress Tyche or Fortuna herself," tying in with the Mommy Fortuna theme. After holding forth on the philosophical meaning of the symbol, I end with a throwaway pun:

I had no deeper meaning in mind than that cats like to eat tuna, but Túna, as a geographical name from Tolkien's writings, where it is glossed "Hill City," has appeared several times on William Wright's blog, suggesting other possible meanings.

The idea of Fortuna as a single goddess who changes "like the moon" was synchronistically interesting to me. William's post with Mommy Fortuna was largely in response to my own January 25 post "An old pre-dator, chameleons, and le Demiurge." In that post, I discuss the Piers Anthony character Chameleon, who first came up on my blog as the mother of the character Dor. In the novel A Spell for Chameleon, we meet three very different women -- Wynn, Dee, and Fanchon -- who all turn out to be the same person, Chameleon, who undergoes extreme physical and psychological changes in a regular cycle following the phases of the moon. He personal lunar cycle only has three "phases," though.

In my January 5 post "Rapunzel and the True Song of Wandering Aengus," I recount a dream in which a woman going by the pseudonym Claire Delune (i.e. clair de lune, "moonlight") elicited from me a poem about the phases of the moon, but only three phases were mentioned:

From none to half, or half to all,
Or all to half, or half to none
Takes seven days, and this we call
A week, and now my tale is done.

It was the final line of this poem that first got me thinking about Chameleon, by way of her son Dor, as detailed in my January 7 post "My tail is dun."

On January 25, just after posting "An old pre-dator," I posted "Surround, confound," about a dream in which three women were singing. In comments there, William Wright suggested that, though they appeared human, the women in the dream might actually represent spiders. Then he added that they also reminded him of the Sirens.

That checks out. There were three Sirens according to Hesiod and many later writers (though not Homer, oddly), and as William notes there is something spider-like in the way the Sirens passively wait for victims to be drawn into their trap.

Then I thought of another female trio from myth: the Fates. One of them, Clotho, even has the spiderly task of spinning thread. Fate and fortune are clearly closely related concepts, which can be personified either as a single changeable woman (Fortuna) or as three different women (the Fates). Just as Wynn, Dee, and Fanchon in A Spell for Chameleon are aspects of a single woman, Chameleon; there is another Piers Anthony novel, With a Tangled Skein (which I have not read), in which Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos are aspects of a single Irishwoman.

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Several things have conspired to make me think of a Tarot card in connection with all this -- and no, not the Wheel of Fortune, but Strength.

First, the hoodie I saw today used fortis instead of the more canonical audentes. The card called Strength in English is Fortezza in Italian and Force in French, both of which derive from fortis.

Second, the card features an orange-colored tame feline, like the "Oh, for tuna!" image.

Third, in my October 2020 post "Can the deck itself be prophetic?" I discuss how the structure of the Rider-Waite deck itself successfully predicts the outcomes of five U.S. presidential elections in a row. (It strongly predicted a Trump win in 2020, though, which failed to play out.) In connecting the eighth trump with the 2008 election, I identified the woman on the card with Barack Obama's mother. Her name was Dunham, which means "hill home" -- a close cousin to the "Hill City" of Túna

Fourth, when I ran an image search for fortune favors the bold, this was one of the results:

Fifth, wolves have been in the sync stream, which prompted regular commenter Debbie (Ra1119bee) to leave a comment on this morning's post "The pillar of blackness" about how wolves have been paranormally associated with her. The first time she told me that story was in response to an email I sent her back in October 2021, just a few days after we first "met" online. I had written (edited slightly for privacy):

The other day, as I often do when some new person enters my life, I asked, "So who is this Debbie lady?" and drew a single Tarot card from the Rider-Waite deck. I got Strength, which portrays a woman with a lion. As I have detailed elsewhere on my blog, this image likely descends from pictures of Samson killing a lion -- with Samson's long hair causing someone along the line to mistake him for a woman. The idea of a "female Samson" relates directly to your name: Samson was one of the 12 biblical Judges, and the only female Judge -- the only woman ever to play Samson's role -- was Deborah. Note also that when Samson returned to look at the body of the lion he had killed, "behold, there was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion" (Judges 14:8).

On August 19 . . . I had posted about the version of this card that appears in the music video for the Grateful Dead song "Ripple" (https://magicianstable.blogspot.com/2021/08/strength-in-grateful-dead-ripple-video.html). In the "Ripple" version, the woman is black and wears a crown of red flowers. . . . The "Ripple" version also removes the Samson imagery, replacing the lion with a wolf.

Debbie had replied with her wolf stories, explaining how the wolf version fit her even better than the lion. So reading those stories again today was yet another factor steering my attention to the Strength card.

Sixth, one of the things William Wright says about Mommy Fortuna in his post is that "she captures an old harmless lion, and has him appear as a fearsome Manticore."

The Wheel of Fortune in Carmina Burana (13th century)

Long before the appearance of the first Tarot cards, the Wheel of Fortune was already a fairly standard allegorical image. Once it entered the Tarot tradition, it began to evolve in some unexpected ways, but before discussing the Wheel of Fortune in Tarot I will be doing a few posts laying the historical groundwork, looking at a few representative pre-Tarot and non-Tarot specimens of the motif. Of many extant examples, I have selected those that seem to me to be particularly relevant to the Tarot.

Among the poems in the 13th-century collection known as Carmina Burana are several dealing with Fortune (the most famous being "O Fortuna," later set to music by Carl Orff), and they are accompanied by the illustration seen below.

The picture is dominated by a large, eight-spoked wheel around which four figures are situated.

At the top is a crowned king, dressed in royal robes and seated on a throne. In his right hand he holds a scepter topped with what may be a fleur-de-lis but almost looks more like a jester's cap and bells. With his left hand he points upward. While the other three figures around the wheel look as if they could be three versions of the same man, the king at the top appears to be a different person; his hair is a different color, and his face is differently shaped. It is not clear whether this difference is intended, or whether it merely reflects the limits of the artist's technical skill. Next to the king is the Latin label Regno, meaning "I reign."

On the right, holding the wheel as he falls, is the reigning king's predecessor, judging from the crown falling from his head and the Latin label regnavi, "I have reigned." He is no longer wearing the royal robes and red hose of the king, but he still appears to be better dressed than the other two figures on the wheel. His garment is embroidered or otherwise decorated, and he is wearing some kind of cape.

At the bottom, being crushed by the wheel, is a supine figure in the simple clothing of a peasant. His hair, unlike the curls of the other three figures, is matted and unkempt and may have blood in it. He appears to be older than the others; his leg muscles are wasted, and his hands look arthritic. His eyes are closed, and it is possible that he is dead or dying. He is labeled sum sine regno, "I am without reign."

On the left is a man climbing up the wheel, his legs wrapped around it. With his left hand he reaches up to grasp the dais on which the king is seated. His clothing is similar to that of the figure on the right, but without the cape or crown. His label reads regnabo, "I shall reign."

At the center of it all, staring straight ahead, is the real monarch of this scene, crowned and dressed in royal robes: my august ancestress Tyche or Fortuna herself, whose turning of the wheel causes the vicissitudes depicted along its rim. She is not actually shown turning or controlling the wheel, but rather holds what appear to be two long banners or scrolls, on which nothing is written. I am not sure what these signify but note that Fortuna as depicted on the arms of Glückstadt ("Fortune City"), Germany, appears to be holding something similar.

Arms of Glückstadt

The banner held by the Glückstadt Fortuna looks like something that would blow in the wind, symbolizing fortune's unpredictable and fickle nature. We do tend to think of fortune as arbitrary, unpredictable, random -- a synonym for "chance" -- but the symbol of the Wheel seems to suggest the opposite: a regular cycle, predictable in principal, mechanically going through its foreordained motions. An intelligent agent (Fortuna herself) is shown controlling the motion of the wheel, but her options appear to be limited. She can make the wheel turn faster or slower, but turn it must. Can she even control the direction, unpredictably changing between clockwise and counterclockwise? Perhaps not. Of the figures on the two sides of the wheel, there doesn't seem to be any uncertainty as to which is going to rise and which is going to fall. Their fate is already written, right there in plain Latin.

The basic symbolism of the Wheel of Fortune, then, is that of the great, broadly predictable cycles of life. Chief among these is the life cycle of each individual person: from the ambitious "I shall reign" of youth, to the "I reign" of the prime of life, to the nostalgic "I have reigned" of old age, and then death. And then? Then, the Wheel seems to suggest, the whole process starts again. A human life has a beginning and an end, but a wheel does not. This could suggest reincarnation (of which the wheel of samsara is a standard symbol), or the eternal repetition of the same events as envisioned by Nietzsche and others, or it could simply mean that the process starts again with different people. After all, when the life of a holometabolous insect is represented as a life cycle, we do not mean that the adult insect becomes an egg again, but rather that it produces a new generation of eggs. However, the "final" stage in an insect life cycle represents sexual maturity, not old age or death. For organisms such as human beings, whose life includes a post-reproductive phase, that phase is not part of the life cycle properly so called. Old men and corpses do not produce the next generation.

In the Carmina Burana illustration, though, all four figures appear to be roughly the same age. There are no children on the wheel, and if the figure under the wheel does appear older than the others -- or perhaps just more weathered, more ravaged -- he still lacks the white hair, long beard, and cane which are the standard accoutrements of old age. The Wheel apparently represents not a biological life cycle but rather just what it says on the tin: the vicissitudes of fortune. A person could be born at any point along the wheel's rim, and the speed at which the wheel turns is unpredictable. Some pass through multiple complete cycles in a lifetime; others live and die without traversing more than a few degrees of arc. If some appear to have lived successful lives, this is only because they happen to have died at the right time, before the wheel had begun its downward turn -- to have quit while they were ahead. But even that advantage is illusory. Those who die "at the right time" still die, and Death -- as depicted on the 13th Arcanum, the one with no name -- is the great leveler. How dieth the wise man? As the fool. One event happeneth to them all.

It is interesting to note that none of the figures on the wheel appears to be bound to it. They climb -- or perch atop, or cling to -- it of their own free will. Only the one being crushed underneath it seems to have no say in the matter, and even he appears to be reaching up, attempting to grasp the wheel even as it rolls over him. What about just not grasping the wheel? What about letting go? Is that an option? Not for those who have risen to any great height. If they let go, they fall -- hardly a fate to be preferred over being crushed by the wheel. But for those who are still on the ground, do they have the option of just staying there, of not getting onto the wheel to start with? It would mean remaining earthbound, but also uncrushed.

The answer to that question depends on what we take "grasping the wheel" to mean. Does it mean clinging to a particular way of life -- one of worldly ambition, for example? Or does it just mean clinging to life itself? (All those who live do so because they cling to life, because they keep doing day after day those things that are necessary to stave off death. Death is what happens by default, if we do not actively choose to go on living.) On the former interpretation, those on the wheel are fools reaping, sooner or later, the fruits of their hubris, when they would have been wiser to rest content with their allotted station in life. On the latter interpretation, though, those who refuse the wheel are Dante's "wretched ones who never were alive" (on whom I have written before), who never did anything either good or bad and are thus disdained by heaven and hell alike; or the devils of Mormonism, spirits who could have been human but, preferring Satan's promise "that one soul shall not be lost," declined to undergo the risks inherent in incarnation.

All in all, the Wheel presents a pretty grim picture, with no desirable options -- which is why Valentin Tomberg insists that, despite its medieval provenance, it is essentially a pre-Christian image. Riding the wheel only brings you right back to where you started, and is thus clearly an exercise in futility; but just staying where you started hardly seems preferable. Any meaningful life must somehow transcend the Wheel altogether.