The Chariot in Love

When The Chariot appears in a love reading, the archetype suggests forward motion in your relationship, but motion that requires your conscious direction. Arthur Edward Waite describes the charioteer as one who rules through will. Rachel Pollack reads the card as the marriage of opposing forces under conscious command. What's being revealed here is that the relationship can move powerfully if you take the reins. The two sphinxes pulling the chariot, one black, one white, are the contradictory forces in any partnership (attraction and fear, desire and restraint), and the charioteer's task is to hold them aligned.

The Chariot in love often appears when a relationship needs leadership, someone willing to plan the date, define the commitment, schedule the difficult conversation. Mary K. Greer notes that the chariot can only go forward if both sphinxes are directed in the same direction; in a partnership, this often means having the shared-direction conversation that's been avoided.

In the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, this context reading is triangulated against three reference works. According to Rachel Pollack in Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980), The Chariot in Love questions is best read as one station in the archetype’s broader narrative. Arthur Edward Waite in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) describes the symbolism Pamela Colman Smith painted. Mary K. Greer in 21 Ways to Read a Tarot Card (2006) describes context-specific reading as the practice of letting the archetype speak in the language of the question.