The Chariot

The Chariot is the card that most clearly betrays where the trump sequence came from. A triumphal chariot is not a random image: it is the central device of the Roman triumph as the Italian Renaissance imagined it, and above all of Petrarch's Trionfi, a poem in which Love is conquered by Chastity, Chastity by Death, Death by Fame, Fame by Time, and Time by Eternity, each victor riding in procession over the last.

That structure, a series of allegorical figures each defeating the one before, is exactly the structure of a trump sequence, and the word for the cards in the earliest records, carte da trionfi, is the same word. The tarot trumps are not identical to Petrarch's six, and no direct derivation has been demonstrated, so the relationship is best stated as a shared visual and literary culture rather than a source. But it explains why the trumps are ordered and hierarchical at all, which no Egyptian or Kabbalistic theory does.

It also explains why the order varied. Fifteenth-century Italian cities did not agree on the sequence, and scholarship distinguishes several regional orderings that differ over where the virtues and the celestial cards sit. There was no canonical order to be encoded, because there was no single order. Any reading of the Major Arcana as a fixed journey with fixed stations is working from a sequence that was standardised comparatively late, largely through the French pattern, and is treating a printer's convention as revelation. That does not make the journey reading useless, it is a genuinely productive way to work with the cards, but it makes it a modern interpretive achievement rather than a recovered secret.

The Golden Dawn gave the seventh trump the letter Cheth, the sign Cancer, and the eighteenth path from Binah to Geburah. Cheth means a fence or an enclosure, and the pairing with a chariot, an enclosed thing that moves, is one of the neater fits in the system. Cancer, the sign of the shell, carries the same idea. As always the assignment is a late nineteenth-century construction and no fifteenth-century card-maker had it in view.

The card is read for directed force, and the readings divide on how confident that force is. The optimistic reading is victory, momentum, travel, and a will strong enough to hold a difficult course. The sceptical reading notices that the two animals drawing the chariot pull in different directions in most versions of the image, that they are not reined in any obvious way, and that the driver's control is therefore assumed rather than demonstrated. On that reading the card is about a person holding together, by force of will alone, something that would come apart if they relaxed.

Both readings are in general use and neither is a reversal of the other. Waite's reversed meanings run to defeat and to a collapse of the effort; readers working without reversals tend to read the strain into the upright card and let the surrounding cards say whether it holds.

The travel reading, incidentally, is old and stubborn, and cartomancers were giving it long before anyone attached a Hebrew letter to the card. It survives because it works often enough to keep being reported, which is how most divinatory conventions actually get established: not by derivation from a system, but by readers noticing what tends to happen and telling each other.