“Indicates the ARTISTS contempt for earthly glory”.
Indeed!
Fortune or the Wheel of Fortune is a symbol of the cycle of life. A man climbs, enjoys a brief spell at the top, and then falls again. I suppose I chose to call it Fate because it seems to me more reflective of this cycle than Fortune, and less fixedly materialist, like the endless hamsters wheel of the rat race.
Amor Fati (Nietzsche)…love your fate…it means to be reconciled with your true self, to love what you really are and to accept that loss and decline are as valuable and necessary as gain and growth.
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”
From “Why I am So Clever”.
The blank white star in the middle is like the unknown. It gives a feeling of falling into the void…a leap of faith. The emergence of birth, the white out of anasthesia, and the light at the end of the death tunnel. It is a portal into another dimension.
Take The Wheel is really what this card is about…your fate is in your hands, like a steering wheel, like a ships’ wheel and when storms hit you have to lash your self to it. Or a spinning wheel making the thread of your life. The thread that leads you through the Labyrinth of life and then is cut.
Also there’s the idea of going “chest to chest with the cosmos”. which belongs to DHL. Lying on your back, looking up at the stars, you are chest to chest with the ever spiraling universe. This kind of communion is what I was trying to express.
And also the obvious one, conception, both actual and metaphorical.
This is wonderful! Accepting, nevermind LOVING, one’s fate runs counter to everything our modern culture teaches us. We’re always supposed to be rising, striving, straining for more. Nothing is ever enough. What a great lesson, if we could learn it.
What passes for education and “culture” in our society is really just brainwashing designed to exploit the people as much as possible. And wow! Does it work or what! An anxious unfulfilled sheep is so much easier to fleece.
It fills me with horror the vast amount of unnecessary suffering this creates. But even when you are aware of it it’s very hard to free yourself of this kind of endemic programming. Somehow the physical act of painting these ideas does help.