The Wheel of Fortune required no invention. The rota fortunae was one of the most heavily used images of the European Middle Ages, given its classic statement in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy and reproduced in manuscripts, sermons, cathedral windows and floor mosaics for a thousand years before anyone printed a tarot card. Fortune turns her wheel; the figures on it rise and fall; the wheel does not care, and neither does she.
The medieval versions frequently carry four figures with Latin tags reading, in effect, I shall reign, I reign, I have reigned, and I am without a kingdom. Some early tarot cards carry precisely that scheme, sometimes with the figures given animal heads. This is not esoteric symbolism. It is a commonplace, and its presence in the deck is evidence that the trumps were drawing on the ordinary visual vocabulary of their century rather than on a hidden tradition.
What the occultists added was a claim of mechanism. Where Boethius's wheel is indifferent and its point is that worldly goods are not worth attachment, the nineteenth-century reading turns it into cycles, karma, and a law of return, something that can in principle be understood and worked with. The Golden Dawn assigned the card the letter Kaph, the planet Jupiter, and the twenty-first path from Chesed to Netzach, which places it firmly among the expansive and beneficent attributions.
That is a real change of meaning, and it is worth naming as one. Boethius's wheel offers consolation by teaching detachment. The modern Wheel offers consolation by promising that the turn is meaningful. Those are different consolations.