THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE AS DIVINATION TOOL
At what point some genius came up with the idea of using the Wheel of Fortune as a divination tool, I don’t yet know. The earliest one I’ve found so far is ‘The Golden Wheel Fortune Teller’ from Fontaine’s Golden Wheel Dream Book & Fortune Teller by Felix Fontaine. It was published in 1862, and author Fontaine claimed his wheel was the translation of an earlier wheel from some medieval European manuscript. This may or may not be true; I’m learning that when it came to fortune-telling methods, nineteenth-century authors and publishers of such tools were not above fudging the history of such things in order to give them a little ‘mystique’ and pedigree.
ALL THAT HAVING BEEN SAID…
Fontaine’s Golden Wheel Fortune Teller has an impressive 100 possible answers. It’s just that many of the questions and answers aren’t quite the sort of thing which would’ve been of-the-moment to the medieval mind. It’s still available on InternetArchive.org, if you want to go and check it out. Quite a piece of work, really, I’m inspired.
So inspired, that I’m offering here a couple of Wheels of Fortune I created this week. One of them is based on images commonly-associated with Halloween. For the second one, I returned to the African Adinkra symbols, for their wisdom, their predictive ability and their beauty. The Halloween Wheel of Fortune is self-explanatory and self-contained. The Adinkra Wheel of Fortune is number-coded, and accompanied by four pages of explanatory notes by me. You choose your symbol, note its number, and go to that number in the answer key for the symbol’s name and its details.
As always, you might want print these out on card-stock, then give them a coat or two of acrylic sealer so they don’t smudge with use.