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Fate & Fortune

If you’re seeking your fortune, ready to receive it, or perhaps change it, then knowing how to work with Donkey Magic is particularly important for you in 2026.

This year, the wheel turns, and I’d like to offer you a steadfast companion throughout all the radical changes coming.

Your steadfast companion is the donkey.

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For The Travelers

Donkeys are the tireless partners of wandering souls.

She’s part of the pack, sturdy enough to carry the entire weight of a family’s domestic life on her back. When humans feel weary, they entrust donkeys to find the way home in the dark.

As a traveling mystic, I’m drawn to the traditional Romani “Gypsy” culture.

Drabardi and Donkeys

The “gypsy fortune teller” is a fixture of folklore, conjuring images of headscarves, crystal balls, caravans, and donkey carts. But the term “gypsy” is considered a racial slur by many Romani people. The proper term is Drabardi, a Romani word for a female fortune teller. She does divination for prophecy and psychic insight. This includes palmistry, tarot reading, crystal balls, and more…

The Drabardi and donkeys are kindred spirits.

Both are outsiders, shrouded in misunderstanding and mysticism. Outcast creatures of the margins, living on the edges of society. Both are known for their endurance and resilience. And both know the hardships of navigating long and winding roads.

From Fortune tellers and Donkeys

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Donkeys and Tarot…

When my fascination with donkeys began, I remembered that I’d recently seen donkeys represented on tarot cards. A long, long time ago, donkeys appeared on The Wheel of Fortune card. And in tarot, 2026 is the year of The Wheel of Fortune.

But first, some context with a little tarot trivia…

Donkeys in Tarot:

In the Visconti-Sforza Tarot, “The Donkey King” is the figure at the top of the Wheel of Fortune. He is a human with donkey ears.

This refers to the Asinine King. He’s reached the top of the wheel due to luck. Now, he mistakenly thinks it is his own brilliance. Big mistake.

Donkey Kings warn us against asinine pride.

This suggests that when we’re successful, we must remember our humble, animal reality. The closer he climbs without humility, the more asinine he becomes.

This concept is literally shown in an illustration by Albrecht Dürer. It’s from the book Ship of Fools by Sebastian Brant, published in 1494.

The card warns: enjoy the rise, but don’t mistake luck for mastery. Because the wheel always turns. And those who forget their fallibility are the ones most shocked when they fall. Or, as the old adage goes, “Pride comes before a fall.”

The central theme of The Wheel of Fortune Card is the question: Who are you with everything and with nothing? With or without, what lives at the heart of you?

The answer is: your humanity.

How closely you’re connected to your humanity determines how you’ll feel based on where the wheel spins you.

Are you humiliated because you’re too removed from your own humanity?

Did you hit rock bottom, or are you just being brought back to Earth? Remember that Earth is the only place where anything can grow.

In my bible, “Women Who Run with the Wolves,” Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes:

“…Remember, at bottom is where the living roots of psyche are. It is there that a woman’s wild underpinnings are. At bottom is the best soil to sow and grow something new again.”

In that sense, hitting bottom, while extremely painful, is also the sowing ground of a new life.

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Your Tarot Companion Card

For this wild and uncharted year, I wanted to create a companion tarot card for extra guidance. The card is a combination card, including:

The Wheel of Fortune, The Moon, and a Donkey.

#1 The Wheel of Fortune

Because that’s the energy of 2026.

#2 The Moon

​The Moon card is one of my favorite tarot cards and was my personal talisman for 2025. 2026 brings with it the solar intensity of the Year of the Horse. While the world may gallop under the sun’s bright demand, those on a mystical or magical journey often find their rhythm in the lunar paths and hidden ways.

Walking the path of the Moon requires a patient trust. A belief that clarity will reveal itself in stages, waxing and waning rather than appearing all at once.

Without the bright light of the sun, you cannot charge ahead on a white stallion to save the day.

Instead, the lunar path calls for a donkey as your guide: slow and steady steps, quiet endurance, and the humble wisdom needed to navigate the shadows. This is an offer of a different type of intelligence.

This intelligence moves by cycles, intuition, and trust.
In half-light, listening, sensing, pausing, and grounding, before choosing a direction and taking action.
You’re unhurried amidst the world rushing by, and so where speed would mislead, you stop to sense the safety through what cannot yet be seen.

#3 The Donkey

Like the lobster in the moon card, donkeys are also linked to having psychic gifts.

In the story of Balaam, the donkey is a natural psychic. It could see the Angel of the Lord standing in the path long before the human prophet could. So if you feel a sudden, stubborn urge to stop or change direction, trust it. Your intuition (the donkey) sees the obstacle that your ego (the rider) cannot yet perceive.

Here are two AI visual takes on your tarot companion card for 2026:

The Steadfast Companion

At the center of the card sits the donkey, full-faced and attentive, framed by the spinning Wheel of Fortune and bathed in the Moon’s silvery glow. Beneath, shadowed paths, wolves, and moonlight hint at hidden currents of fate and intuition.

This card offers the wisdom to pause, the courage to refuse what is unsafe, and the quiet strength to endure cycles of change without losing your essence.

Keywords: Endurance, Quiet Guidance, Perception, Humility, Cycles, Intuition, Grounded Wisdom

Active Meaning:

• Trust in your discernment, even when the world rushes past.
• Recognize the difference between luck and mastery.
• Remember that your endurance outlasts fleeting fortune.
• Be a steady guide for others.
• Share your insight and loyalty without seeking applause.
• Honor your inner rhythms, intuition, and pauses as self-protection.

Reactive Meaning:

• Beware of taking on burdens that are not yours to carry.
• Do not mistake visibility, hype, or fast-moving success for stability.
• Avoid ignoring your body, instincts, or intuition in the rush of the world.

Tarot Message: Humility is your compass.

And here is a second version for you.

In the center of this card, the Wheel of Fortune is anchored by the soulful, unblinking Donkey. The Donkey differs from the traditional Sphinx. Instead of sitting atop the wheel, it is the hub. Everything moves around her stillness. The Moon hangs above, bright and full. It casts a soft silver light over the land. This light gently guides the way, unlike the Sun’s harsh glare of clarity. It creates the gentle glow of the moonlit path to follow. The pile of clothes represents discarding what is not yours to carry.

The Symbolism

The Donkey tunes its large, sensitive ears to the frequency of the Moon. She does not watch the wheel’s rim turn; she feels the vibration of the Earth.

The Inscriptions surrounding the central face are the four figures of the Visconti-Sforza tradition (ascending, reigning, descending, and fallen). All characters in the card have donkey heads to serve as a reminder:

In 2026, do not let your status define your soul.

A winding road flows beneath the wheel, guarded by the dog and the wolf. This is the Lunar Path, the journey of intuition, dreams, and the subconscious. The Donkey is the an animal that can walk this path without slipping into the muck of illusion.

The Message for 2026

The Wheel is spinning fast, but your power lies in your refusal to change due to external circumstances.

The Gift: You possess the Donkey Sight to see through the illusions. While others are frightened by shadows or intoxicated by sudden luck, you remain grounded in your humility.

Your role this year is to be the tether. Stay calm and stick to your values. This gives others stability when they feel lost.

“I am the eye of the storm.”

Tarot Message:

In the Year of the Horse, the world will gallop toward the horizon. But you must walk the moonlit path at your own pace. Trust your ears to hear the truth behind the noise. Trust your hooves to find the solid beyond the scurry. To be lowly is to be unshakeable. To be humiliated is to be free.

Tail note…

The Fool card in tarot symbolizes traveling through life with all you need on your back. Like the donkey. The donkey is also sometimes seen as the ass – the fool with false assumptions. Riddled with ego, like the Donkey-Kings with their asinine pride. But on the flip side of the ass is the idea of the scared fool. Or Clown, the humble hero. ​

Donkey as Clown​

The donkey is the four-legged embodiment of a shamanic clown. The clown serves as a living mirror to the humiliation of being human. The donkey has an awkward, sharp bray. She has big ears, hairy hooves, and a heavy-footed presence. Her body and soul don’t always sync.

To walk the path of the donkey is to acknowledge the fact that we have a soul that longs to fly contained inside a body that needs to eat, sleep, pee, scratch, clean… and inevitably makes a mess of many things. This knowledge keeps us grounded instead of crushed by the weight of our own importance.

Nothing can humiliate a soul that has already embraced the beauty of its own absurdity.

Humor is an incredible survival magic, which the wisdom of the clown shares with the donkey. It’s wise to laugh at the absurdity of being an animal. We desperately hope to be rational, yet we’re driven by primal desires. We’re big, beautiful beasts, charading around like we know what we’re doing.

Most things are so far outside our scope of control that we can’t grasp them. So we take it all on, carry too much that isn’t even ours, and attempt to do impossible things, plotting and planning and thinking our way through… when all the while, the fates laugh as the wheel spins…

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Want to book a 1:1 session to discover how to work with donkey magic this year?

Or a tarot reading? Reply to this email and we'll book time together.

Love, Lauren