Wheel of Fortune

Fortuna (the Greek Tyche) is the goddess of fate in Roman myth. She turned a great wheel, the Rota Fortunae, lifting up and casting down the humans clinging to it. That yesterday's king became today's beggar, and yesterday's slave today's general, was all owing to Fortuna's caprice. She was often depicted blindfolded (blind to merit), and sometimes balancing as she stood upon the wheel. One of the most popular deities of the Roman age, she had a temple in nearly every city. In the 6th century Boethius, in The Consolation of Philosophy written in prison, used Fortuna's wheel as the most powerful image of life's impermanence — "It is in Fortune's very nature to be fickle. Were she not fickle, she would no longer be Fortune." The word fortune entered English in the 13th century, and good fortune, fortune (wealth), and fortune-teller all share this same root. Shakespeare in Hamlet wrote of "outrageous fortune," and Machiavelli in The Prince offered the figure: "Fortune is a river, and human virtù (ability) is the dike."

Johwaong (造化翁) means "the old one (翁) who creates (造) and transforms (化) all things." Its intellectual root lies in the Dazongshi chapter of the Zhuangzi — "夫大塊載我以形, 勞我以生, 佚我以老, 息我以死" — "That great clod [Nature] gives me form, wearies me with life, eases me with old age, and rests me with death." Zhuangzi saw Nature itself as the great craftsman who makes and shapes humankind. Later Daoism personified this as the Johwaong. Like an old potter molding clay, he forms human beings and decides their fates. In Du Fu's poem the line appears, "造化鍾神秀, 陰陽割昏曉" — "The Maker has gathered here a marvelous splendor; yin and yang divide dusk from dawn" — and this expression came, in East Asian poetry, to point at once to the grandeur of nature and the mystery of human destiny. Scholars of the Joseon dynasty too, when their fortunes ran ill, would lament that it was "the will of the Johwaong."