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
The Morgan Library & Museum in New York has a Chariot among its Visconti-Sforza tarot cards, painted in Milan about 1450–1480 and attributed to Bonifacio Bembo. A nineteenth-century Milanese pack in the British Museum titles the card Il Carro. Most packs print the titles in French, the museum's 1876 catalogue notes, and spell them badly; the usual form of this one is Le charior. Papus joined it to the seventh Hebrew letter, Zain.
Horses, sphinxes, a lion and a leopard
Court de Gébelin's Osiris advances "sceptre in hand and crown on head". Waite wrote that sphinxes were not the card's original form: they were invented "to support a particular historical hypothesis". Other packs, he noted, harnessed "a lion and a leopard". On his reading the charioteer is "really the King in his triumph".
The Mars card
Romain Merlin, quoted in the British Museum's catalogue, traced the Chariot to Mars in the engraved Italian series called the Mantegna cards: a warrior on a car, sword in hand, seen full face, under a dais on columns, as the tarot charioteer is. Waite pointed out that the Mars card has no horses, and did not believe the tarot came from that series.
Read next
- Next in Tarot cardsStrengthTrump VIII in Waite's deck and XI in older ones: a woman closing a lion's jaws. A. E. Waite read it as power, energy and courage.
- The same shape in Angel numbers000 angel numberThree zeros, read by angel-number writers as a message about God and wholeness. Doreen Virtue’s 1999 list called 000 a reminder that “you are one with God” and a sign that a situation has come full circle.
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
- The Chariot (Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards), The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (Wayback Machine copy, 4 January 2026), MS M.630 (no. 6)
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles, letters and numbers or squares and rectangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 3, 2026. How we research
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