The Wheel
Turning time, fortune, and the round of birth and death.
The Wheel: what does it mean in analytical psychology?
The wheel turns about a still centre, and so joins the circle and the centre: time moving around what does not move. Jung read the sun-wheel and the wheel of fortune alike as images of the round of life, and the hub as the Self around which it turns.
The sun-wheel is among the oldest signs men made, cut on the rocks of Scandinavia before there were wheels to roll; Jung saw it as a mandala before the mandala, and read the wheel of Fortuna, which raises and casts down, as the turning of the psyche’s opposites about a centre that does not turn, the hub. In Buddhism the wheel is the law set rolling at Sarnath and also samsara, the round of births from which the law frees.
Ezekiel’s wheels, full of eyes, moving with the living creatures, are the vision that fascinated the Merkabah mystics and the alchemists alike: the chariot of God as a mandala in motion.
The Wheel: where does it appear in myth and tradition?
The wheel of Fortuna, the Buddhist wheel of the law and wheel of becoming, Ezekiel’s wheels within wheels, the sun-wheel. The wheel of Ixion; the breaking wheel of Saint Catherine; the prayer wheel; the wheel of Fortune in the Tarot and in Carmina Burana; the rota of the Sator square.
In the Press’s Books
In “The Three Metamorphoses” the child is “a self-rolling wheel.” Machiavelli’s Fortuna turns hers.
From the Sources
Jung writes that man wishes to remain a child too long, and would stop the turning of the wheel that bears the years along with it, to keep his childhood and eternal youth.
“But man wishes to remain a child too long; he would fain stop the turning of the wheel, which, rolling, bears along with it the years; man wishes to keep his childhood and eternal youth”
Dr. C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido, Part II, Chapter VIII, "The Sacrifice". Authorized translation, with introduction, by Beatrice M. Hinkle, M.D.; New York: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1916. The text, read in part
In Fortune's own words, as Boethius gives them, her art is to turn the wheel that spins, delighting to see the high come down and the low ascend.
“This is my art, this the game I never cease to play. I turn the wheel that spins. I delight to see the high come down and the low ascend.”
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book II, section II. Translated into English prose and verse by H. R. James, M.A., Ch. Ch. Oxford. The text, read in part
Each passage is quoted from the text named, which the press fetched and read, and was checked word for word against a fresh copy of it; the link opens that copy. Passages are given as printed, without the editors’ footnote numbers, and with words broken across lines joined.
Where to Read
- Symbols of Transformation, CW 5
- Ezekiel 1:15–21
- Symbols of Transformation, CW 5
Jung’s writings are cited by the volume of the Collected Works (CW), Bollingen Series / Princeton, 1953–79.
Related Symbols
In the Glossary: Fortuna.
Also among Things Held and Worn
“Learn as much as you can about symbolism; then forget it all when you are analysing a dream.”
Cite This Entry
“The Wheel.” In Symbols of the Psyche, the Symbolarium. The Thinking Press, 2026. https://thethinkingpress.org/symbolarium/psyche/wheel.
Nearby in the alphabet: The Well: The deep source, and the way down. The Whale: The monster of the deep that swallows. White: The whitening: the first light after the dark. The Wind: Spirit that blows where it will.