We give red roses when we’re in love, and call simply outstanding experiences “red letter days.” Red calls us to action, gets us motivated, and wearing red lets people know we feel confident and ready to take on the world. Red is also associated with luxury, it has a strong masculine energy and represents power and courage. They say that red is the first color that the human eye can perceive upon birth, next to black and white.
Red represents physical energy, lust, passion, and desire. It symbolizes action, confidence, and courage. The color red is linked to the most primitive physical, emotional, and financial needs of survival and self-preservation. Red stands for many things, all of them potent. Red is romantic love, and its physical passion. Red is violence, anger, and aggression, and it frequently indicates danger. Paradoxically for a color associated with action and energy, red is universally used as the color that means “stop.” Red is used professionally to capture attention, elicit emotion, and convey confidence. We think of vitality, the life-giving power of blood, and helping people in need.
Just as blood can be associated either with its life-giving properties or with violence, red is also paradoxically affiliated with notions of violence, danger, and anger. Matadors use red capes not to attract the attention of the bulls they fight, since bulls are colorblind, but rather to hide the bloodstains of their gory sport. Red can indicate anger beyond what reason can contain – “seeing red” – and red flags indicate, or should indicate, when something is wrong with a person or a situation. Red is assertive, daring, determined, energetic, powerful, enthusiastic, impulsive, exciting, and aggressive.
The Wheel of Fortune is a card with a multitude of interpretations whose reading depends much upon the circumstances alluded to by the subject of the reading. It indicates the point the subject has currently reached in his or her life. If it is present at the beginning of the drawing, it evokes the closing of a past cycle and the beginning of a new one. In a reading it can herald a work that has squarely come to completion and thus represent the turning of a page, a complete cycle. But often, coming at the middle or at the end of the draw, it indicates a block that needs to be overcome. It is then helpful to draw an additional card to see what will turn the handle or to elucidate the emotional mystery that it suggests.
The cycle of death and rebirth, in the large sense, can be seen in it as well as the circulation of life.
The Wheel of Fortune invites reflection upon inevitable alternations of ascents and falls, of prosperity and austerity, of joy and sorrow. It orients us toward change, whether positive or negative, and acceptance of the constant transformation of reality.
This card often symbolizes a crisis that cannot be avoided, a profound change that needs to be confronted and accepted. It evokes the idea of a teacher, a therapist, or a guide. But in a crisis, there is an equal possibility that The Hermit will renew himself or die. He therefore also refers to poverty, solitude, and even decay and degeneration. He can be seen as a “vagrant” or even an alcoholic who is hiding a quart of red wine in his lantern. This Arcanum is the most human and coldest counterpart of the great paternal archetype of Arcanum XVIIII. In this way he can depict an absent father, or one who is taciturn, remote, or has vanished. He also refers, for the subject of the reading, to an inner solitude, to the secret and dark space where a spiritual transformation is prepared.