What is the Golden Wheel?
The Golden Wheel of Fortune is a printed divination chart published in London in 1909 by A. E. Waite, the scholar who co-created the most widely used tarot deck in the world. It holds one hundred numbered answers. You mark a number, look it up, and read the answer. That is the whole device: a hundred short pieces of counsel arranged so that one of them can reach you without you choosing it. This site reproduces his hundred answers as he printed them.
How to consult it
The rite the book gives. Lay the wheel face down. Hold your question in mind. Touch the wheel once, wherever your hand chooses, and look that number up. One mark. The first number is your answer, and the instruction is not to reach for a better one.
The modern way here. Spin the wheel and stop it. The number arrives the same way, by not being chosen. Either way there is no sum to work out and nothing to be good at.
Where it really comes from
The short answer. Waite did not invent the Golden Wheel and did not claim to. His 1909 description of it is almost word for word the description Felix Fontaine published in New York in 1862, down to the claim that it came from an old Latin manuscript on astrology. No such manuscript has ever been found.
There are two wheels in this story. The older line is the calculating wheel: in 1591 Cattan's English geomancy manual printed a numbered wheel read by a sum, named "the wheele of Pythagoras", and Waite printed its arithmetic in 1909 as the Oracle of Human Destiny. The younger line is the object in front of you: four rings of numbers, no arithmetic at all. Two wheels, both printed in the same 1909 book.
Above 1591, the story gets larger than the wheel. Medieval Arabic sources describe the zairja, concentric letter-rings turned to answer a question, its answer returned as verse. The Golden Wheel and the Oracle between them hold the zairja's two halves: the object without the arithmetic, and the arithmetic without the object. Where the evidence stops, we say so: between 1591 and 1909 the calculating line is a demonstration; above 1591, family resemblance and not descent.
The full history: Wheel, Letter, and Verse and The Two-Way River.
Questions the curious ask
Who was A. E. Waite, and why does 1909 matter? Arthur Edward Waite was an English scholar of the occult and the co-creator of the tarot deck most people picture when they hear the word tarot. In 1909 he published a manual for ordinary readers that gathered several fortune-telling systems into one book and gave the working method for each. The Golden Wheel of Fortune is one of them.
Why are the answers so harsh? Because 1909 was harsh. These aphorisms come from a tradition of fortune books that did not soften unwelcome answers, and Waite printed them as they stood. A device that only told you pleasant things would be no use to you.
Did Cagliostro use it? Nobody can show that he did, and the claim is older than the evidence for it. Waite wrote that the wheel was "said to have been used by Cagliostro", repeating a sentence Fontaine had printed in New York forty-seven years earlier. What is documented: the Wellcome Collection holds five hand-drawn fortune wheels watermarked 1794, bearing the note "Numbers calculated by Count Cagliostro for the Lottery 1776 in London." The wheels are real; the attribution is a sentence that travelled further than the manuscript it names.
Is this the same wheel as the Oracle of Human Destiny? No. The Oracle is the calculating one: add three numbers, divide by thirty, nine hundred answers. The Golden Wheel is the marking one: a hundred answers and no arithmetic at all. One book, two wheels, opposite methods.
Do I have to believe anything for it to work? You have to be willing to take a sentence seriously for a minute. That is all the device has ever asked.