Dame Fortune’s Wheel Tarot

[Albadawn]

Good evening all!

 

I recently felt the itch to get back into more historic decks and stumbled across this deck. I did search the forum but it doesn’t seem to have had much discussion in its own right. 
 

It’s not *technically* a TdM but the author has aimed to delve into the history of tarot in creating it (ie pre Golden Dawn interpretations). I absolutely love the art style and consistent colour coding of the suits (even though the choice of fiery red for Swords and deep blue for Batons seems unusual, it actually works for me somehow, even though the Batons are still about willpower and so, fire!)

 

I only just received the deck and its companion Pictorial Key book today but so far I am loving poring over it. The art reminds me so much of stained glass windows and the cards seem to lend themselves well to the kind of storytelling style I love so much about TdM readings. 
 

I really like the pairing of the suits with their playing card equivalents. The pip card meanings of course are somewhat different to the systems I’m more familiar with and I think it’ll be great fun getting to know this deck.

 

@Flaxen, @Barleywine - I have seen you both mention this deck in past threads. Are you still using it? Any words of advice for an Etteilla newbie?

 

I’d love to hear about anyone’s experiences with this deck!

 

Best wishes

Dawn

[Flaxen]

Dame Fortune’s Wheel is a great deck @Albadawn. When I started using it, I found it helpful to focus on it exclusively for a couple of months.

Like you, I loved the art style and the meanings were quite easy to pick up. Once I’ve finished the ‘30 days of working with the Moon’, I’ll gladly pick it up again if you wanted to exchange readings for practice. 

[Albadawn]

3 hours ago, Flaxen said:

Dame Fortune’s Wheel is a great deck @Albadawn. When I started using it, I found it helpful to focus on it exclusively for a couple of months.

Like you, I loved the art style and the meanings were quite easy to pick up. Once I’ve finished the ‘30 days of working with the Moon’, I’ll gladly pick it up again if you wanted to exchange readings for practice. 

That's a most kind offer @Flaxen and I'd be delighted to practice with you! I'll be studying it closely for a while I think, there are so many layers of depth to it which far exceeded my expectations. I'm really excited to work with it! Most likely I will start up a new section in my journal on here with reflections etc. 🙂

[Papageno]

14 hours ago, Albadawn said:

It’s not *technically* a TdM but the author has aimed to delve into the history of tarot in creating it (ie pre Golden Dawn interpretations). I absolutely love the art style......

Thank you so much for bringing this deck to my attention. It's definitely an overlooked GEM!

 

No, it's definitely not a TdM, and I too love the art.

 

Regarding the art, take a very close look at some of the cards.........don't some of them look familiar? 

ummmmmm, no, not stained glass windows

[Scandinavianhermit]

I've been using Dame Fortune's Wheel Tarot since the late 00s, if I remember correctly, and it was a great relief when it was published.

 

I began practicing tarot with 1JJ Swiss (with great results with the trumps, less so with the pips) and the edition of RWS available at the time (plaid backs).

 

One of the few handbooks about tarot, available in my native language  at the time, insisted that five of coins ('pentacles' in RWS parlance) refer to infidelity, 'sex out of wedlock' and kinks when reversed (presenting the mores of a time before the sexual revolution of the 1960s). The artwork of RWS (beggars in snow) do not hint at this meaning at all, despite Waite's nervously evasive choice of words:

Quote

For some cartomancists, it is a card of love and lovers-wife, husband, friend, mistress

 

Another frustrating detail with the RWS (among others) was the random reordering of Justice and Strength, which caused it to diverge from the ordinary normal standard Milanese arrangement.

 

Later on, I became familiar with Grimaud's Grand Etteilla (with great results with the pips, less so with the eccentrically reordered trumps), and I began to long for a tarot deck combining Etteilla's pip keywords and more traditional Milanese trumps. Learning about how court cards in older French playing card decks were associated by mythical and historical characters (King David, Judith, Hector, Alexander the Great et cetera), I wished there was a tarot deck out there preserving this French tradition.

 

Lo and behold! The thoughts of Paul Huson must have peregrinated along similar paths of reflection, because Dame Fortune's Wheel Tarot combine what I appreciate in 1JJ Swiss, RWS, Etteilla and Marseilles decks, without the useless baggage of any of them. Since then, I have warmed up to the Marseilles tarot, thanks to Yoav ben Dov (and I'm still learning CBD Tarot), but for prediction purposes I still find it easier to use Dame Fortune's Wheel. Take a look at five of coins in Dame Fortune's Wheel, and there is no longer any doubt, that it has something to do with sex. The latter association isn't something Etteilla came up with either: The five of coins in Aluette cards and Spanish playing cards depicted a man and a woman in a bed long before Etteilla's time.

 

I suspect, that Waite tried to fuse together too many separate methods of tarot reading, resulting in that some of his and Colman Smith's cards and handbook became too all-encompassing and indistinct to say something coherent, particularly so in the suite of wands. Huson more or less decided to stick to one French school of interpretation of the pip cards (very similar to the one I found in my first book about tarot), and this gives a much clearer interpretation. That said, when it comes to the meanings of trumps, Huson allow himself to include some of his personal takes in the LWB and the pdf, but his artwork, which is closely inspired by hand-painted north-Italian 15th century decks, doesn't force his customers to follow him on this point. 

 

[akiva]

6 minutes ago, Scandinavianhermit said:

Later on, I became familiar with Grimaud's Grand Etteilla (with great results with the pips, less so with the eccentrically reordered trumps), and I began to long for a tarot deck combining Etteilla's pip keywords and more traditional Milanese trumps. Learning about how court cards in older French playing card decks were associated by mythical and historical characters (King David, Judith, Hector, Alexander the Great et cetera), I wished there was a tarot deck out there preserving this French tradition.

It's nice to see that someone else does this! The Grand Ettiella is a lovely deck but the majors can be a real headache! His minors are excellent for divination though, and work well with TdM's that have a more standard major sequence.

 

Have you read this book:

https://archive.org/details/1791dictionnairesynonimique/mode/1up

It was most likely written by one of Ettiella's students and has a great list of keywords for the minors. 

[Scandinavianhermit]

7 minutes ago, akiva said:

The Grand Ettiella is a lovely deck but the majors can be a real headache!

I agree about both the loveliness and the headache. 

 

As for Etteilla's trumps, the reader has to acknowledge, that it is a world of its own, with its own particular internal coherence and integrity, but if anyone expect it to be a Milanese set of trumps, one is up for a bewildering surprise. There are aspects of Etteilla's method worth preserving, like this way to predict political matters:

 

• Hanged man: People, voters and Parliament (National Assembly/Congress/Duma/Maǧlis)
• Strength: The executive branch
• Justice: The judiciary
• Temperance: Generally: Denominations influencing public opinion. Before 1789: The clerical estate. In UK only: The Lords Spiritual. In Iran only: The Guardian Council.

The weakness with this method is the absence of media and the lacking separation of Head of State (President/Monarch) and Head of Government (Prime Minister/Chancellor/Taoiseach), but Etteilla is forgiven, because he shaped his method according to the French constitutional situation before 1789.

 

25 minutes ago, akiva said:

Have you read this book:

https://archive.org/details/1791dictionnairesynonimique/mode/1up

It was most likely written by one of Ettiella's students and has a great list of keywords for the minors. 

 

Yes, I'm aware of it. More tarot readers should be aware of it. 

 

With Dame Fortune's Wheel Tarot, we have all the advantages of the Etteilla system and the advantages of standard Milanese trumps combined.

 

[akiva]

1 hour ago, Scandinavianhermit said:

As for Etteilla's trumps, the reader has to acknowledge, that it is a world of its own, with its own particular internal coherence and integrity, but if anyone expect it to be a Milanese set of trumps, one is up for a bewildering surprise. There are aspects of Etteilla's method worth preserving, like this way to predict political matters:

 

• Hanged man: People, voters and Parliament (National Assembly/Congress/Duma/Maǧlis)
• Strength: The executive branch
• Justice: The judiciary
• Temperance: Generally: Denominations influencing public opinion. Before 1789: The clerical estate. In UK only: The Lords Spiritual. In Iran only: The Guardian Council.

I need to dive deeper into his trumps. Thank you for sharing! Do you know where I can read up more about the political side to his trumps? 😊 

 

1 hour ago, Scandinavianhermit said:

Yes, I'm aware of it. More tarot readers should be aware of it. 

 

With Dame Fortune's Wheel Tarot, we have all the advantages of the Etteilla system and the advantages of standard Milanese trumps combined.

It's good to find someone else who is aware of it!

 

I need to get my Dame Fortune's Wheel tarot out more, unfortunately the copy I got was damaged by two cards getting stuck together, plus they wrote meanings on the cards completely unrelated to Hudson's or Etteilla's ideas. It was second hand though, and incredibly cheap, so can't complain too much! 😆

[Scandinavianhermit]

34 minutes ago, akiva said:

Do you know where I can read up more about the political side to his trumps? 😊 

 

http://etteillastrumps.blogspot.com/2012/05/cards-9-12.html

 

Etteilla reinterpreted the Hanged Man as Prudence. 

[Penthasilia]

Funny to see this thread popped out as I just unburied this deck. I did a recent deep dive (read that as Alice falling down the rabbit hole) into all my historical tarot books, Marseille/playing card courses, and some of the historical forums and coordinated a set of meanings for the pips/majors that made the most sense (at least in my brain). Lo and behold, the majority of it fell in line with Huson, though not all (some were very different). I basically used a sharpie on the deck to put all the meanings on it and will be using that as my practice deck until I get comfortable with all the new meanings, then back to my Vachetta/Payen. I would recommend his larger book on tarot history, not just the one for the deck- it is pretty great. 

 

I was doing a lot of reading with my old Grand Etteilla, using the compilated meanings I had from various books and decks a while back but that sort of fell by the wayside as I always needed to refer to my word docs for the combinations. Etteilla had some interesting ideas, and his pip meanings were what really drew me in. I had difficulty with his reinterpretation of the majors though, so that was another reason I put the deck aside. Every once in a while I will pull it out, it is gorgeous, but overall I tend to stick to my old pip decks.

[Scandinavianhermit]

3 minutes ago, Penthasilia said:

Etteilla had some interesting ideas, and his pip meanings were what really drew me in. I had difficulty with his reinterpretation of the majors though, so that was another reason I put the deck aside. Every once in a while I will pull it out, it is gorgeous, but overall I tend to stick to my old pip decks.

That resemble my own experience: By using Huson's Dame Fortune's Wheel, I'm able to keep all the useful things from Etteilla, without having to deal with Etteilla's bewildering trumps.

 

5 minutes ago, Penthasilia said:

 I would recommend his larger book on tarot history, not just the one for the deck- it is pretty great. 

Paul Huson has written three books about tarot:

 

• The Devil's Picture Book (1972)
• Mystical Origins of the Tarot (2004)
• Dame Fortune's Wheel Tarot: A Pictorial Key (2017)

[Penthasilia]

9 hours ago, Scandinavianhermit said:

Paul Huson has written three books about tarot:

 

• The Devil's Picture Book (1972)
• Mystical Origins of the Tarot (2004)
• Dame Fortune's Wheel Tarot: A Pictorial Key (2017)

 

Ah, forgot about the Devil's Picture Book. Was referring to the Mystical Origins of the Tarot. Overall, I do really like his deck. There are only a few of the minors that I use meanings where his pictures do not match at all. I figure once I am done using this one as a good learning deck, I will go back to the unillustrated pips. 

[Penthasilia]

And just found this beauty- a 62 Bolognese style deck with Etteilla meanings that reminds me a great deal of the old Carnivale deck I had from Folchi.

 

Ordered it for myself and figured I would share. I like the mix of old and new, your mileage may vary.

 

https://stolen-thyme.com/tarocchino-arlecchino/

[Scandinavianhermit]

5 hours ago, Penthasilia said:

And just found this beauty- a 62 Bolognese style deck with Etteilla meanings that reminds me a great deal of the old Carnivale deck I had from Folchi.

 

Ordered it for myself and figured I would share. I like the mix of old and new, your mileage may vary.

 

https://stolen-thyme.com/tarocchino-arlecchino/

What a delightful deck! I have a long held opinion, that the Bologna and Belgian tarot decks hold the key how to improve the Marseille World.

 

 

[Kellian]

Thank you for the reminder about this deck - I was just thinking it was time to unpack my other decks (I kept out only one deck during a long and arduous move). It will be good to stretch my brain with Paul Huson's 'outside my habitual meanings' interpretations, if that makes any sense.

 

I too love the artwork!

[Tanga]

It is an awesome deck 🙃.  I cannot contribute more except to say - the colour palette of this deck has a calming effect on me.

Sometimes - I look through it before bed, and it feels like a breath of fresh air.

Edited February 4, 2024 by Tanga

[Wooden_Nickel]

It's tremendous to see people are using this deck and exploring its hidden corners!  I got my copy about eight years ago and found the combination of traditional trumps, scenic pips, and named courts offered exciting possibilities. Unfortunately I couldn't overcome my ingrained RWS habits when reading the pips. I had a secondary issue with the art: I found the dead-white human faces seemed odd in contrast with the surrounding riots of color.  So I put Dame Fortune's Wheel aside in favor of a new acquisition. But this discussion's inspired me to pick it up again and read more about Etteilla's way of interpreting pips!