Riding with the Chariot
Finding New Inspiration in Old Guides
When I was younger, and just learning Tarot from my mother with her Rider Waite deck, one of my favorite parts was when she’d lay out the significator. In my case, she’d always use The Star — a placement that came with her declaration that I would always be her shining star. As I grew and began reading cards on my own, I learned that I could use any significator — and so began the lifelong process of unpacking and relating to each card over time, determining whether it fits, why not, and when it might.
Most recently, I’ve found the Chariot card to be particularly powerful at this point in my life — and, in the greater sense, in the cycle of the world itself.
The evolution of the Chariot
When I was first interpreting the cards, I saw the Chariot as indicative of a journey, or of travel. It meant change, but not like the Tower — it might be planned travel, or even a dramatic shifting of perspective that lets you see the same place with new eyes.
As an adventurous young person, I met the Chariot warmly when it appeared, as it usually meant I would get to go someplace new. It might be an as-yet unexplored field or beach that my naturalist parents would take me to. Sometimes we took family trips to faraway states, a journey that could incorporate cars, planes, trains, or boats.
But the Chariot wasn’t a card that I used as a significator at the time, as it lacked the depth of connotation that I was looking for. It wasn’t glowing, glorious, or glamorous. It wasn’t indicative of someone with intense intellectual capacities, humble wisdom, or Herculean fortitude.
It wasn’t until the past few years that the Chariot emerged as a leader in my energetic life. Not unironically, the process did involve travel, as it was three years ago that my partner and I uprooted our lives in northern New England to move south and live with my terminally ill father on the coast of North Carolina. But it wasn’t just the travel that turned me on to the influence of the Chariot.
As someone raised to be the Star — to always be shining, to be focused on light, to be dazzling — I am characteristically upbeat. Left to my own devices, I would always rather be expounding upon and emphasizing the most joyful and bright concepts in the world. That viewpoint, however, can be just as blinding as the sun.
It took me a long time to see how “always looking on the bright side” can be a damaging perspective. I didn’t get there alone — I have been graced with a companion who is very familiar with exploring and understanding the “dark side”, as it were. Through borrowing his lens as someone recovering from PTSD, and through myriad conversations about the struggles we were going through in my father’s home and a world contending with climate disaster, war, and pandemic, I saw the Chariot in its full power.
The Chariot as a stabilizing force
What drives the motion of the world? Energetically and spiritually, it is the movement of opposites. Black and white, good and evil, it is the push and pull of counterbalances, leading to a dance of atoms and chi repeated at every metaphysical level — though it gets strange at the quantum state.
Even there, though, even in the quantum realm, two things are true: 0 and 1. We are inextricably bound to this truth: you cannot have one without the other.
Philosophically, we can look at this somewhat simply — you cannot have good in the world without evil. There cannot be light without darkness. They are defining features that, without one another, do not exist. That was helpful for me to understand as I contemplated the sordid behavior shown so casually on the news.
The relationship between opposites is readily depicted in popular culture with a yin yang. One side is black, one side is white, and, importantly, both sides have a bit of one another in them. This small circle of black in the white half (and vice versa) symbolizes the close (and unchanging) relationship between the two. Appropriately, it is through the lens of Daoism that the Chariot took on its new form for me.
The Chariot is not just a card of journey, or of change. It does not simply represent moving oneself physically or mentally from one place to another. In fact, in the Rider Waite, the human-headed lions pulling the chariot are fully at rest. They’re not even going anywhere!
What matters most, then, is the depiction of the lions. One is black, one is white, and they both share elements of one another with their headdresses. They are inseparable halves, directly in front of the charioteer and in full view.
That’s the message of the Chariot that now strikes me so compellingly. As charioteers in our own lives, no matter where we are going (or if we are going nowhere at all), our best path forward is one kept in balance.
By keeping both the darkness and the light in our minds, and by understanding and accepting the full necessity of each in the cycle of life, we can attain a harmonistic neutrality that allows us to purposefully and knowingly guide ourselves through any situation.
Doing the opposite and favoring light or dark in our outlooks will cause our chariots to be unstable — and perhaps to even veer off course — through the force of that untruth.
It hasn’t been easy for me to turn away from the Star — but it helps that every time I do when I turn back to her, she is shining all the brighter still. When that happens, I know it’s the shadows that give the best seasoning to light.
