10 Wheel of Fortune
The Wheel turns for everyone. (Well, almost everyone, but we will deal with strange exceptions later.) Wheels are part of everyone's life. The turning seasons of the year – this card is ivten taken as depicting the passage of a full year in time – the "circle game(1)" of life itself; the cogwheels and circular sweep of a watch or clock face; the wheels under the Chariot; the roulette wheel of F****a, a Goddess whose name is carefully not spoken lest she fail to appear. Gambling is a possibility here.
The card depicts the Buddhist prayer wheel, with a reptile, an ape, and a man, at three of its four cardinal points. This symbolises the upward evolution of life, and again hearkens back to the Platonist concept of the three superimposed souls, vegetable/reptilian; animal, and human, the id, ego and superego, and the hypothalamus, hindbrain, and corpus callosum. (the three superimposed human brains, one atop the other)
The fourth and uppermost cardinal post is occupied by a lotus flower, symbolising the next stage in evolution, the emergence of the fourth brain, and the only dimly guessed at higher-than-human life forms.
The message is that we are all passengers on the Wheel, both the lesser wheel of our own life and the greater one of the interconnected universe. At any one time some people are going up; some people are going down. Which are you?
And really inventive thinkers, like History Monk Lu-Tze, might consider that just sitting on the rim and passively waiting for the wheel to turn is not enough. What's wrong with running across it, using the spokes…
Lu-Tze, the renowned Sweeper, stood on the precarious bridge over the central floor of the Hall of Mandelas. The Abbot, now in the form of a sulky and hormonal adolescent youth of about fourteen, stood nearby, occasionally remembering to stand up straight and look attentive, but most of the time in a slumped listless angry scowl. Full of injured teenage angst, he stared fiercely into the distance.
With then were half a dozen senior monks, who were being initiated into one of the Higher Degrees of the Order of the Monks of Time.
Lu-Tze sighed and shook his head, With the Abbot at his current age, it would mainly be down to him, then. He looked at the knot of freshly shaven-headed monks in their impeccable saffron robes, as they wordlessly competed with each other to look the most keen and attentive.
"Right, you lot. Oh, relax, wonderboys, and try not to look like a herd of constipated thargas! It don't become you, so breathe out, act natural, take it easy! This is a lesson, remember, not a test!"
Lu-Tze waited until they had all relaxed, then said
"Look down. What do you see?"
"A pattern in the sand? Outlined in all colours?" one monk nervously ventured.
"Right, good start. But what shape is it, wonderboy?"
"Circular? It's got a rim, and bands of all colours…"
"Full marks for observation." Said Lu-Tze. "But what do you actually see in there? What does it mean?"
Another of the monks was leaning over the edge, watching intently. Finally he spoke.
"It looks static" he said. "But it isn't. As far as I can make out, all the sand grains are moving and shifting all the time and gradually forming new patterns as they interact with each other. Erm."
"Got it in one. Give that lad a big steaming bowl of thunga!" he said, exultantly. "With extra momos!" Maybe some of 'em aren't as dense as they seem…
Lu-Tze suddenly fired full of serious intent. "He's right. It's in continual movement. What you are looking at down there is the Mandala for the whole world. Everything in it is in continuous interaction, right, with everything else. And we are dead lucky that for once everything is in balance and harmony with itself, though it might not seem that way when you're on the ground and watching. This is a picture of the world, right? And the world is a process. Everything is a process. And processes need time to happen in, which is why you wonder boys are here!"
He paused to let this sink in, and went on:
"and because everything is the way we want it, all the movements are imperceptible and harmonious and you only notice 'em if you squint your eyes up and stare for a long time. It took a long time to achieve this and with any luck it will last until the next time one of the buggers gets the bright idea to build a Glass Clock, or something equally numbskulled. I don't know, talk about turkeys looking forward to Hogswatch".
Lu-Tze shook his head. All eyes swivelled as a thin reedy whine came from the other end of the group.
"Nobody understands me mumblemumble I'm so depressed mumblemumble I'll throw myself off, see if anyone cares. Or even notices."
Lu-Tze sighed. He'd been here before, the last few times the Abbot had reincarnated. It had been left to him to deliver the stern in loco parentis talk about no, it doesn't put hair on the palms of your hands and it doesn't make you go blind, and if you remember, Abbot, we are not a celibate order, though you lose interest after about age five hundred. I don't care what Rinpo warned you, he's an idiot, but there are limits, right, don't scare the washerwomen as we depend on 'em for clean robes! He knew the drill.
"Go on, jump, then!" he said, calmly.
"What?" said the teenage Abbot, shocked.
"Go on. Jump!" said Lu-Tze. "If life really is that meaningless to you right now. Best solution. Although it'll make a mess of the Mandala, though".
There was a pause.
"Well, obviously I didn't mean jump, jump…" and then the teenage boy straightened and stood upright. The petulance disappeared and the 630th Abbot re-asserted continuity.
"Thank you, Sweeper" he said, awkwardly. "In many ways this is worse than being an infant. At least an infant does not have hormones and… urges… to contend with! They rather take over a body, I find."
"We understand, your reverence. And the little problem we discussed?"
"I'm restricting myself to three times a night with the pillow books, yes(2). At this age they are addictive! Thank you for setting up the subscription. But to pick up your point. Should they ever build a glass clock again or otherwise threaten the flow of time, that is when we cease watching and have to act. And the six of you music with rocks in rules! Especially goth and emo! The six of you are high-flyers who I'm sure have long careers ahead of you as field agents. It is here, in the Mandala Hall, that we so often get the first sign something is wrong. Lu-Tze?"
The Sweeper took the stage again. He led the group on to a different part of the bridge, overlapping what looked like unformed images on the floor where the sand had all mixed into a uniform grey-green-yellow.
"We discovered we can also focus right down to individual lives and see the shape of them. Everyone's got a mandala of their very own. Unique, see, like a fingerprint."
He called to a monk who was standing by a bank of small procastinators.
"Rambut? Run me Example One, would you?"
Rambut spun a couple of procastinators. The sand swirled up into the air, separated, and reformed. They settled into a relatively plain, simple, pattern.
"Mrs Enid Scroggins of thirty-two Dimwell Street, Ank-Morpork." said Lu-Tze. "An uncomplex life, Not a simple one. For her it was full of quiet excitement and action. But to us…"
He waved an arm.
"Born, there. Grew up. First school. First kiss. Marriage. Three children. All clearly marked if you know where to look. That spike there is when her oldest daughter told her she was a lesbian. Blowed if I know what one of those is…"
There's an iconospread in Girls, Giggles and…"
"Thank you, abbot. Perhaps as a strict Offlerian, what upset her was her daughter turning to worship of the Goddess Dike?"
Lu-Tze's face was a mask of inscrutability. The monks looked at each other, as if wondering if it was alright to snigger.
"First grandchild here. Widowhood here. And finally, last Thursday, her personal circle closed, age seventy-three."
He paused for a moment.
"An uncomplex life, led as well as she knew how. But now…. Rambut, Example Two!"
The monk below raised a thumbs up, consulted a scroll, and reset the proscatinators. The sand swirled up again and settled. Lu-Tze nodded.
"But that's not a cirle!" A monk objected." It's more of a…a…"
A Moebious strip." said the Abbot. "Strip!" snickered the teenage boy.
"Sir Samuel Vimes, Duke of Ankh and Commander of the Watch. A downward spiral until late forties. The usual markers for school and early experience. A brief and sticky experience with Mavis Trouncer, here. Joins the Watch. Participates in the Glorious Revolution, here. This is where it gets interesting, as this is the point where the Moebious strip crosses itself. And there's a damn good reason for this, as at the time he was in the same place as the same person only separated by thirty years of age. Took some sorting out, did that one. Anyway. He grows older. Gets disillusioned. Gets drunk. Plummets to the pits at the very bottom of his wheel.." He said "bottom!" But the wheel that rolls you down , if it doesn't crush you under it, rises again and takes you up. Hear what I'm sayin? He meets Sybil Ramkin, here. Fights a dragon. Gets the respect, if not the trust, of Vetinari. Marries Sybil. Becomes richest man in town by marriage. Becomes Commander of a reborn Watch. Now here's another glip. We're still trying to work it out, but another Vimes buds off at this point and goes off into a different reality where the Klatchians invaded and conquered Ankh-Morpork. Gets killed. We had to put that bastard timeline straight as we didn't want it at all! You see it as the loop here, spinning off into nothing. We had to cut and cauterize. We think the spur was a defective Dis-Organiser with a malfunctioning timeline, but it's somewhere in the deep ocean now.
"Fathers a son. And on the day of the son's birth… it was the day we sorted out the Glass Clock. The fallout sent Vimes skidding off down this side of the Moebious to a point thirty years in his own past where he met himself going the other way. We couldn't have that and anyway we felt obligated, so we brought him back. But his wheel is no longer wheel-shaped, do you see? And it's still rising and taking him up further!"
Lu-Tze allowed this to sink in, answered a few questions, and went on to Example Three.
Again the sand swirled and reformed. There were gasps of consternation from the monks.
"The Wizard Rincewind." Lu-Tze said, indicating the multi-dimensional monstrosity that was before them, a thing that might once have had a plain two-dimensional circle somewhere in its distant ancestry. "Frankly, we gave up tryin' to understand this one a long time ago. With all his to-ing and fro-ing in time, we gave up even trying to trace a logical path..."
They stood in silence and regarded it.
"We think it's a multi-dimensional spheroid tesseract." said the Abbot, in a lucid moment.
"Whatever it is, it's a bugger" said Lu-Tze, reflectively.
There will be a second story on the theme of the Wheel. This is rare, I know, but it's too good to lose. This one is a card where you can truly let the imagination go wild – lots of potential. Watch this page!
(1) As Joni Mitchell wrote "we're captives on the carousel of time; /we can't return, we can only look/ behind from where we came,/ and go round and round and round in the circle game…"
(2) To an Ankh-Morporkian, "pillow books" mean those very interesting connoisseurs' woodcuts imported from Agatea for the discerning gentleman. (or some cases, the discerning lady). To a Hubland monk who routinely looks for wisdom in faraway Ankh-Morpork, it means a subscription to Girls, Giggles and Garters, the city's premiere iconographic magazine containing artistic representations of young ladies in a state of undress. Lu-Tze reasoned a discreet subscription to GG&G would help the Abbot over those difficult teenage years. And it also annoyed Rinpo, which was the main thing.