The story of the medieval Islamic device that computed its answers in poetry — and of the thousand-year road it walked from a Sufi's Marrakesh to a London fortune-teller's manual, through hands that never knew what they were holding.
Waite's 1909 Manual of Cartomancy prints two devices side by side: the arithmetical Oracle of Human Destiny and the mechanical Golden Wheel of Fortune. This essay follows the question they raise: what if they were once the same thing? The answer runs through Cattan's Geomancie (1591) and its "wheele of Pythagoras," the Godfridus chapbooks, Fontaine's 1862 dream-book, Wellcome MS.957's Cagliostro lottery wheels, and above all the zairja — the letter-arithmetic answer-machine described by Ibn Khaldun, which did not select its fortunes but composed them, as verse, in the first metre of Arabic poetry.
Turn the Golden Wheel · Consult the Oracle of Human Destiny · Read the companion map, The Two-Way River