For You to See Life - 4u2c.life

The Chariot ~ symbolic meanings painted in the card.

The card of the Chariot portrays a handsome, virile man with curling auburn hair, blue eyes and ruddy complexion, driving a bronze war-chariot. He is dressed in bronze armour, bronze helmet and a blood-red tunic. At his hip is a bronze shield, and at his side is balanced a large spear. He grips the reins of two horses, one black and one white, which pull in opposite directions before him. The dusty road on which he travels winds into a reddish, desert-like landscape, while the sky lowers with an impending storm.

The desert landscape through which Ares drives lacks water - an image of the lack of feeling and relatedness in which the aggressive impulses thrive. Yet Ares and Aphrodite are drawn together, as though the instincts of strife and relatedness are in some way secretly connected.

Ares’ spear forms the traditonal symbol for the masculine - an image of phallic power and potency in both men and women. The black and white horses, like the dual columns in the card of the High Priestess, reflect the potential for both good and evil contained in the aggressive instinct.

Major Arcana ~ The Chariot

Here we meet the war-god Ares, who was said in myth to have been conceived by Hera, queen of the gods, without male seed. As god of war, Ares revelled in fighting. His two squires, Deimos (Fear) and Phobos (Terror) - sometimes said to be his sons - accompanied him on the battlefield. Unlike the goddess Athene, who as a war-deity represented cool strategy and foresight, Ares was in love with the heat and glory of battle itself, and with the exultant unleashing of his strength to challenge the foe.

Ares was in many ways an unappealing god because he was associated with conflict and bloodshed, and Olympian Zeus and Athene disliked him for his brute strength and lack of refinement. But the love-goddess Aphrodite had different tastes. Impressed by the vigour of the handsome warrior whom she doubtless compared with her ill-favoured husband, the smith-god Hephaistos, she fell in love with Ares. The sentiment was quickly reciprocated.

Ares took unscrupulous advantage of Hephaistos’ absence to dishonour the marital couch. But the husband discovered the adulterous affair, and planned a witty revenge. Secretly he forged a net so fine that it could not be seen, but so strong that it could not be broken. He arranged this net above the couch where the lovers normally frolicked. When next the couple met and later fell asleep, the invisible net spread over them, and Hephaistos called all the gods to witness the shame of his wife and her lover. But Ares’ ardour was unquenched by his embarrassment, and later, from his union with Aphrodite, a daughter was bom - Harmonia, whose quality, as her name suggests, was a harmonious balancing of love and strife.

On an inner level, Ares, the driver of the Chariot, is an image of the aggressive instincts guided and directed by the will of consciousness. The horses which pull the Chariot in opposite directions are portrayals of the conflicting animal urges within ourselves, full of vitality yet unwilling to work in harmony. They must be handled with strength and firmness, yet not repressed or broken, or we lose the power and potency to survive and make our way in life.

Ares, the fatherless god, is in some ways an image of the natural aggressive and competitive instincts of the body itself, for he lacks the archetypal spiritual father who might provide him with vision and meaning. But his iron will and great courage are a necessary dimension of human character, for spiritual vision alone is not sufficient to survive in a competitive, difficult world.

Having invoked conflict as a result of his choices in love, the Fool must now confront the second of life’s great lessons: the creative harnessing of the violent, turbulent urges of the instinctual nature. Thus, through the figure of Ares, the driver of the Chariot, he arrives at maturity. In the card of the Lovers, the Fool is still an adolescent, compelled by romantic dreams and the desire to possess a beautiful object. But through the Chariot he leams to take the consequences of his actions like a man, and faces the anger and conflict which he has invoked both inside and outside himself. Like the Fool, we - men and women both - must learn to struggle with the warring opposites and warlike urges within ourselves, if we are to survive in the jungle of life.

In myth, Ares is forever getting into trouble, either through an angry quarrel with someone or through the ruthless pursuit of a love-object. But he survives all his humiliations and defeats, and emerges stronger.

Ultimately he fathers a child who embodies the serenity which can be found at the end of a conflict which has been creatively handled. The strife which Ares embodies is a necessary experience. No matter how spiritually committed or selflessly loving we attempt to become, the aggressive drives within us do not die. They can be disowned and forced into the unconscious, where they re-emerge as illness or are projected upon others who then unleash aggression upon us. But if we can meet the challenge of Ares, then we can be more honest about this vital force within, and the struggle of learning to contain and direct it fosters development of the whole personality.

On a divinatory level, the card of the Chariot appearing in a spread augurs conflict and struggle which can result in a stronger personality. One may come face to face not only with aggression in others, but with one’s own competitive and aggressive drives. This conflict cannot be avoided, but needs to be faced with strength and containment. Thus the Fool comes to harmony through learning to handle his own contradic- tions, and passes from the world of adolescence to the next stage of his journey.

I will explain in my readings what each card means, this is a general interpritation taken from the Mythic Tarot Deck

Information Source: Mythic Tarot Deck
[published in 1986 by Juliet Sharman-Burke and Liz Greene and Illustrated by Tricia Newell (not the New Mythic Tarot)]