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Fortuna

Domain: Fortune, chance, luck, fate, the turning of circumstance Symbol: Wheel, cornucopia, ship’s rudder, sphere, blindfold Greek Equivalent: Tyche

Overview

Fortuna is the Roman goddess of fortune and chance — the power that raises the low and casts down the high without regard for merit. She is most often shown with three attributes that together tell her whole story: a cornucopia, for the abundance she can bestow; a rudder, for her steering of human affairs; and a wheel, which she turns, lifting some to the top only to bring them under in the same revolution. Often she is blindfolded or balanced on a rolling sphere, signs that her gifts fall blindly and never rest.

Rome worshipped her under many faces — Fortuna Primigenia (the Firstborn), Fortuna Redux (who brings one safely home), Fortuna Virilis, Fortuna Muliebris — and her great oracular temple at Praeneste drew supplicants seeking to read what she intended. Yet no cult could bind her; her essence is that she cannot be counted on. To pray to Fortuna is to acknowledge how little of a life is chosen.

Her Greek counterpart is Tyche, the tutelary goddess of a city’s luck, though Fortuna grew far larger in the Roman imagination — a philosophical figure invoked whenever fate seemed arbitrary. Later writers would picture the whole medieval idea of Fortune’s wheel as her doing.

The Wheel

The image most bound to her is the wheel, and it is no accident that the same wheel sits at the center of the tarot. Fortuna turns it eternally: what rises must come round again to fall, and what lies at the bottom may yet be carried up. She teaches neither hope nor despair alone, but the truth that both are temporary.

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