In popular stereotype, drawing Card Seven, The Chariot, tends to evoke a brief cheer, because its starry canopy and triumphal composition are all too easily equated with “immediate victory” and “unstoppable momentum.”
But if you look closely at this image steeped in ancient Egyptian totems, a cold sweat will seep down your back.
Notice the power source pulling this chariot—it is two Sphinxes, one black and one white, not two tamed, docile horses. In this young knight’s hands, there are no reins whatsoever connecting him to these two beasts! Even more terrifying, the black and white sphinxes are each crouched on the ground, facing in completely opposite directions.
What kind of smooth, uneventful victory is this foretelling? This is clearly a balancing act on the brink of catastrophe, a violent internal standoff about to tear the chariot in two!
In this moment, the psychological state that The Chariot metaphorically represents is nothing short of extreme peril. Those two sphinxes of contrasting coats represent two extraordinarily powerful and diametrically opposed desires or instincts that exist simultaneously within your heart. In career, it could be the ambition to achieve great things, and its polar opposite—the fear that desperately wants to lie flat and escape. In relationships, it could be the reason telling you you must leave, while emotion, like a mad dog, desperately wants to stay.
Both are roaring. Both are trying to seize the steering wheel of your life.
This is the tarot’s highest interpretation of “willpower”: true strength is not the absence of inner conflict and fragmentation. It is that, in the midst of this pincer attack so intense it could break anyone, you use terrifying psychological dominance—invisible reins with no attachment whatsoever—to forcibly weld these two mutually sabotaging energies onto the same direction. You do not need to resolve their contradiction. You only need to ignore it and step on the gas.
Thus, if your inner strength slackens even slightly, the fall into this card’s reversal is catastrophic. Because it means “loss of control.” Once you lose focus internally, or fall into reckless, blind aggression externally, this chariot will instantly derail and be dragged into an abyss of no return by the two beasts.
The Chariot appearing in a spread means this is a one-way road that tolerates no wavering or weakness.
Stop looking around, listening to those two voices within. The next time that powerlessness—being pulled apart until you want to give up—washes over you again, recall that young man standing beneath the starry canopy, steady as a mountain with no reins in his hands. Then ask yourself:
“If I temporarily ignore the noise trying to tear me in half, where exactly is that one and only destination I originally wanted to sprint toward?”
You do not need to resolve the pain. Carry it with you and charge through the finish line together. That is the true triumph of the Chariot.