The Chariot
Trump VII of the tarot: a victorious prince in a chariot. A. E. Waite read it as triumph.
Meaning
Waite's charioteer is "an erect and princely figure carrying a drawn sword", his chariot drawn by two sphinxes, a variation Waite took from Éliphas Lévi. In the eighteenth century, Waite noted, white horses drew the car, and Court de Gébelin called the card Osiris triumphing.
Waite's meanings
Waite gave the Chariot "succour, providence also war, triumph, presumption, vengeance, trouble"; reversed, "riot, quarrel, dispute, litigation, defeat".
In older decks
A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card Il Carro. Papus joined it to the seventh Hebrew letter, Zain.
See also
The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant.
Sources
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot, by A. E. Waite, William Rider & Son, London, 1910 (the sacred-texts.com transcription, on the Internet Archive), The Trumps Major; The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings
- The Tarot of the Bohemians, by Papus, Chapman & Hall, London, 1896, translated by A. P. Morton (scan on the Internet Archive), The Symbolical Tarot
- A Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards in the British Museum, by W. H. Willshire, Trustees of the British Museum, London, 1876 (scan on the Internet Archive), Italian tarots, second quarter of the nineteenth century, Milan
Last reviewed September 27, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research