MAJOR ARCANA
The Chariot Tarot Meanings
The Chariot tarot meaning is one of trust, willpower, and acceptance that we may not be able to do everything by ourselves. When we’re younger, we can’t wait to be an adult so we can take full control over our own lives, but once we reach adulthood, we realise that support from others is crucial.
Even for some seasoned professionals, reaching out for help and knowing when they’ve hit the ceiling, is something that is hard to accept. The Chariot then swoops in to remind you that we can all only get so far on our own and at some point, we will need to reach out and get help in order to reach the next stage in our growth.
The Chariot Upright Meanings
In the upright position, The Chariot is a card of ambition and focus. It represents your drive to succeed and achieve your biggest hopes and dreams. However, it is also a lesson in humility and knowing when to celebrate your successes and when to be humble. The main upright meanings of The Chariot are:
Success
Focus
Ambition
Goals
Willpower
In the upright position, The Chariot is our chance to test our willpower and flex our control over a certain situation. It’s about understanding what drives us and why we do what we do. In life, we will have many different challenges and goals, but it’s only by pushing ourselves that we gain strength, wisdom, and power.
The Chariot Reversed Meanings
In the reversed position, The Chariot can symbolise a lack of control or feeling like you are not in charge of your own life. It can often show that you have a desire to take back the power to your own life or situation, but currently feel unable to do so.
Lack of direction
Instability
Egotistical
Lack of willpower
Opposition
When thinking about the reversed meaning of the Chariot, think about the upright meanings and their negative counterparts. In the upright position you have ambition, but reversed you have a lack of ambition or even laziness.
Reading The Chariot in a spread
When The Chariot makes an appearance it shows that you’ve worked hard to get to where you are. You have pushed yourself in order to develop and grow and now you’ve reached a point where you need a leg up to reach that next level in life. Although it all sounds great, this is often a tough card to fully embrace, as a lot of us tend to feel like we shouldn’t need help to get to where we want to be or that we have the skills to do it all ourselves.
Re-framing The Chariot can help to reveal some really deep insight into our current mindset and feelings around our situation. Let’s have a look at some ways we can start to do this.
The Chariot as an Invitation
The Chariot marks the final chapter of the first cycle of life. It’s a great place to pause and take a breather to see how you should progress. This means that if we read it as an invitation, we can be confident that we’re being invited to take that pause, whatever that may mean for you in the context of your situation.
For The Chariot, this invitation could be the following:
An invitation to look at the bigger picture and see what you need to embrace in order to take that next step in your journey
An invitation to check in with your ego and make sure that you’re not giving it full control over your current trajectory
An invitation to see how external help and support could benefit you
An invitation to see if you’re being too overbearing or overpowering in certain areas of your life and where you could loosen your grip a little
The Chariot as Sage Advice
As advice, The Chariot can help you take a look at the bigger picture, rather than focusing on the gritty details. Its guidance centres on trust and self-assessment, it asks us to take our ambition and ego out of the equation for a second so that we can gain clarity and decide on the best way to move forward.
Some advice The Chariot may offer is:
Assess your decision making progress and decide if you’re trusting your intuition enough in order to make harmonious and balanced choices
Accept support when it is offered to you
Don’t allow your ego to take control of your direction in life, check yourself when arrogance starts to creep in and taint your hard work
Refocus on your priorities and don’t be distracted by temporary whims and desires
The Chariot as a Lesson
At this stage of the Major Arcana, the main lessons we are working through are the ones we need to learn to become wiser and more focused human. We’ve done a lot of internal work up to this point and now The Chariot is here to carry us to the next level of consciousness. We need to shed the last of our naive childishness and start to step into adulthood fully.
Some lessons that The Chariot may offer you are:
To learn to balance our desires and our commitments, so that we can take responsibility for our actions and move in the right direction
To trust others and know that support is all around us if we need it
To understand that we are not able to move through life on our own steam alone
The lesson of willpower and self-control
The Chariot as a Redirection
The Chariot has strong adventurous energy and it is a card of journeys, both internal and external. As a redirection, The Chariot can hint that we’ve been led astray by our vices and it’s time to get back on track. It can be a symbol that we need support in our next venture and that we are trying to do far too much on our own.
As a redirection, The Chariot could symbolise a need to:
Seek out help from your external world
Find a more efficient way of achieving our goals
Celebrate how far you’ve come instead of how far you have left to go
Think about whether the direction you are currently moving in, is the right one for you and what you’re trying to achieve
The Number Seven
Within the world of numerology, the number Seven is often seen as the spiritual number. It is a number that can represent independence and intuition. This is where we see The Chariot reflected.
Within The Chariot, we have a lot of energy that is pushing us forward, out into the wide open world and leaving us vulnerable to the power of chance and circumstance. The number seven also has these qualities, as it can point towards spiritual and esoteric exploration as well as perfectionism, something that many independent people will struggle with.
Astrological Cancer
Cancer is a water sign and when we think of The Chariot, a water sign may not be the type of vibe we get from it. The Chariot always first feels like it should be a fire or air sign. It has a power to it that’s not commonly associated with water signs.
However, the sign of Cancer shares many similarities to The Chariot. It is a sign that can easily adapt to its surroundings, taking on challenges and obstacles with ease. More than anything though, Cancer symbolises the rawness that comes with taking that first step out on your own.
The Chariot Archetype
The Chariot is always a hard one for me to place when it comes to archetypes, but if I had to put a pin in it, I would say that it is more of the explorer than anything else.
It shares the unbridled freedom that comes with the explorer archetype. There’s a curiousness to The Chariot that compliments a more adventuress outlook on life. Explorers are on a journey and that is exactly what The Chariot represents, the first movement of a new journey.