1. The Chariot of Pudicizia and Fame in Italy
In the 14th century, before the trick-taking game known as the Tarot existed, Petrarch wrote his series of poems called I Trionfi, the Triumphs, in which each of six triumphal figures triumphed over the one before. In the 1440s, when the game very definitely existed, there was a fashion in Florence for people who could afford it to commission artists to illustrate these poems, and the form used was a series of allegorical figures on chariots, even though Petrarch himself had only imagined one such charioteer, namely Love, who stood on top of a rotating platform shooting his arrows at random.
Love, in Petrarch's series of poems, was vanquished in a "Triumph of Pudicizia" (in some manuscripts the title substituted Chastity). Pudicizia is a term of Roman origin meaning proper conduct in matters related to sexuality, the subduing of the wild instinct by rational self-control. His main model of Pudicizia was his beloved Laura, who had pledged herself to eternal chastity in the sense of sexual abstinence. But there were also other forms, such as chastity before marriage and after marriage devotion to home and family, which naturally included the engendering of children, and modest dress and comportment at all times.
In Petrarch's poem, the heroine is described as locked in combat with Love (lines 49-50 at https://petrarch.petersadlon.com/read_trionfi.html?page=II-I.en)
Never was there a fencer so adeptand so on. Of special interest are lines 118-119:
At turning blows aside. ...
(ché già mai schermidor non fu sì accorto
schifar colpo, né nocchier sì presto...)
She wore, that day, a gown of white, and heldInstead of Perseus’s mirror-shield, the lady on the card carries a shield with a Visconti heraldic emblem: against Cupid; a blazing sun apparently will serve as well as the Medusa’s reflected head. Besides the shield, there are also the white horses, the color of purity. What makes the shield particularly that of Pudicizia is the psychomachia tradition in which Petrarch wrote, the battle between virtues and vices, with virtues paired with their opposing vices. Pudicizia or Castita was paired with Libido, the kind of love associated with Cupid (Adolph Katzenellenbogen Allegories of the Virtues and Vices, p. 2 and note 1, in Google Books). This is what is in the poem, and also in the placement of Cary-Yale Chariot card, situated between Love and Death.
The shield that brought Medusa to her death.
(Ell’ avea in dosso, il dì, candida gonna,
lo scudo in man che mal vide Medusa.)
The card also departs from Petrarch. There is no bound Cupid to be seen, nor does the lady hold Petrarch’s “sacred leaves” (sacre foglie, line 186) of victory laid at Pudicizia's shrine. Petrarch's poem doesn't even have a chariot, much less a male groom minding the horses. This groom resembles the man on the same deck's Love card, and the lady on top the woman on that card. So we may be seeing the triumphal entry of the prospective bride into her new city, led by her prospective husband. In the time just before the known tarot, a notable example had been the entry into Milan of Marie of Savoy in 1428, where she became the husband of Filippo Visconti. This is typical for noble weddings. If so, there is no reason to suppose it is any one marriage procession in particular - even if, as some think, this deck was made to commemorate the marriage of Bianca Maria Visconti, Filippo's daughter by another woman, and Francesco Sforza, in which case they would be entering her dowry city of Cremona, where the wedding took place (on this see Wikipedia on Bianca Maria Visconti).
We might notice that one of the horses, the one next to the groom, seems calm and docile, while the other one is agitated and perhaps a little wild. This contrast might be a reference to Plato's allegory of the charioteer, which had recently been published in Latin translation. In that allegory the charioteer of the soul has the job of managing two horses, one of which does not even need reins, but simply obeys his master's voice, while the oged horses that lead the chariot of the soul in Plato's Phaedrus, a favorite text in the Renaissance. Here is how Plato describes the souls of gods and humans as charioteers:
Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are mixed: the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him... (Plato, Phaedrus 246a-b, trans. Jowett, https://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/plato3.htm and elsewhere).
When they come in the vicinity of a beautiful living being, the unruly horse, the more powerful, rushes toward it as if to satisfy its lust. It takes the combined effort of the calm, noble horse and the charioteer to control the other horse. On the card, the presence of the groom next to the calm horse might be to say that the prospective husband knows how to keep the horse of his desire under control.
There is an outside chance that the deck wasn't made during the lifetime of Filippo Visconti, Duke of Milan, but after his death upon the commission of Francesco Sforza. In that case it might, besides commemorating the marriage, also have suggested another event, the entry into Milan by Sforza, upon being recognized as Duke by the populace he had starved into submission. In that case it would be Francesco leading his wife, the daughter of Filippo Visconti, the former duke of Milan, into the city that was rightfully theirs as Filippo's heirs. Against this dating of the card, people point to the Visconti "rearing horse" design on the horse. But Sforza would surely have used this same currency until he had time to coin his own, and in the meantime it shows the continuity of the regimes. In this interpretation the chariot would do double duty as a military victory chariot, in the manner of the old Roman victory parades.
On the other hand, wings were an attribute of Fame, to carry the name of one who had accomplished noble deeds far and wide. In that case it might be to celebrate the fame of its rider. That had been the original purpose of chariots in parades; while they were of no use to the Romans in battle, they had a ceremonial function in the parades that followed victory. Aligned with that way of thinking are the Chariot cards of the Charles VI and Alessandro Sforza decks (both probably Florence), and the Rosenwald (probably Florence-inspired) and Rothschild sheets (Bolognese designs), all with male figures in what seems like a triumphal parade.
Besides these, there was still Fame herself as an allegorical figure, typically presented as a feminine figure in a horse-drawn chariot. Such a figure, over whom was a banner that said "I am the Glory of the worldly folk" (“Io son la Gloria del popol mondano”) had been celebrated by Boccaccio in his Amorosa Visione: (Ch. VI, lines 54-63): (trans. Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton, Margherita Frankel, University Press of New England, Hanover NH, pp. 28-29)
...she sat on a triumphal chariot...
...she held in her hand a shining sword...
...she held in her left hand
a golden apple of astral splendor.
Then immediately appeared four white steeds
whiter than alpine snow, each of which urgently
burns to draw the golden chariot. ...
(...sovra triunfal carro si sedea,…
…man tenea / una lucente spada…
...e teneva nella man sinestra,
un pomo d’or di splendor siderate.
Vedeasi poi via piu che neve alpestra
quattro bianchi destrier, che ciascun forte
in trar l’aureo carro arde e s’addrestra....
These attributes, albeit with only two horses, appear on illustrations of Petrarch's "Triumph of Fame" poem (below, two left, by Pesellino and Scheggia) as well as on Chariot cards with Charioteers of either sex (above and third card from left below). As for the banner and its words, that was generally omitted. An exception is a minchiate example from the city of Lucca (far right below, source unsure but one like it is in Giobattista Monzali, "The Orfeo Conundrum, " The Playing Card, Oct.-Dec. 2017, p. 75), which proclaims fama vola, "fame has wings" - meaning both that it travels far and wide and also that it is perhaps fleeting. In most minchiate decks, the lady had a banner but without words. Her nudity does not suggest the ideal of Pudicizia.
The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made: he has a lofty neck and an aquiline nose: his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark colour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. (Plato, Phaedrus 253d-e, trans. Jowett, at https://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/plato3.htm)
This passage gives us an idea why reins are not needed (they are conspicuously absent on every historical Chariot card, although sometimes there is a groom). The first horse
responds to the words of the charioteer. Plato later describes how
the other horse is so rebellious that he can be restrained only when the
charioteer pulls on the reins so strongly that the bit brings blood to
the horse's mouth. We do not see this in the Issy card: it portrays a later stage, when the rebellious horse has been suitably trained. Both horses have riders now, acting in harmony with each other and transmitting that harmony to their respective horses.
A difficulty in separating Fama from Pudicizia in the context of Petrarch is that Fame was also what he wanted for his chaste
Laura, from his verses and precisely for her Pudicizia. So when a lady is on
top of the chariot, it could be someone famed for Pudicizia, in other words about both.
It is said (by Ross Caldwell on Tarot History Forum, but he didn't give a source) that Bianca Maria Visconti's favorite color was red. In that sense both the Issy and Visconti-Sforza cards could be celebrating that lady's Pudicizia, or in fact her virtue generally, if her four attendants are considered to represent the four cardinal virtues.
2. The Chariot in France
In France, the card's rider was male, as in the Florentine and Bolognese cards, but also continued the differentiation between the two horses seen elsewhere. This differentiation is evident already in the "Cary Sheet", of around 1500, which is either from Lombardy, Lyon, or Avignon, and is a clear predecessor of the Tarot of Marseille's version. Although the sheet has not been colored, the differentiation is in the posture of the two horses: the bodies of the two horses diverge in opposite directions, yet the heads converge: one horse looks at the other, as though wanting to follow its lead. That is the situation when the unruly horse has been tamed: he learns to follow the lead of the horse that is following the words of the charioteer.
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The unruly horse, in Plato's allegory, sees Beauty from afar and goes
toward it, to satisfy its desire upon it without respect for its
sacredness. Paradoxically, in so doing it also leads the chariot closer,
so that the charioteer comes near and "his memory is carried to the true beauty" that he had seen before birth in the heavens, whom once again "he beholds in company with Modesty like an image placed upon
a holy pedestal" (Phaedrus 254b, Jowett trans., https://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/plato3.htm. Modesty is a close approximation of the medieval Italian conception of Pudicizia, while the two together are reminiscent of the two women of the Lover card, not in opposition but in harmony. It is as when we see a
beautiful Renaissance painting: it is our senses that are attracted at
first, and then we want to understand better what is being conveyed. In this
way, the reddish horse now represents Pleasure, and the whitish one
Virtue.What then of the charioteer himself? Plato says he is the part of the
soul that stands high enough up so that once he could see absolute
Goodness, Beauty, etc., but now only discerns them dimly when he sees
their imperfect copies in the material world, whether beautiful bodies or beautiful souls, though a hazy recollection
of his life before entering matter. He "sees through a glass dimly,"
the Jowett translation has it (250b). The Greek is not so close to
St. Paul's wording, although the sense is similar: he sees through
darkened organs of perception. In the Conver version (at right, 1761, online in Gallica), he appears stupified, dazzled by the vision before him. While conveying this aspect well, it unfortunately has lost the traditional difference in coloring between the two horses. But even here it is clear that the horse on our right is watching the other closely.
All this is in accord with Christian Neoplatonism. Divine beauty is none other than God, whom we must not try to be at one with through excessive zeal but approach in holy fear as well as desire, with no care for life, possessions, or other considerations of ordinary prudence, but with a respect born of fear.
The situation on the Chariot card can be expressed in the same terms used in one interpretation of the Lover card. One horse, Virtue, pulls one way, and the other, Pleasure, pulls the other, and our charioteer, looking at Virtue, looks anxious. Has he understood the situation properly? How do his commands measure up to the standards of the ideal ruler?
In the "Marseille" model, the canopy is a leftover from the Cary-Visconti parade chariot. Yet here, it shelters a man in armor, riding at attention and wearing a ducal crown. Although the victory is his for the moment, winning the peace is another matter. Francesco's son Ludovico, for example, rode triumphantly into Milan in 1500 after being expelled by the French. Yet within months he was languishing in a French jail (see Wikipedia entry on Ludovico Sforza). To win the peace, one must curb the desire for honor as well as that for pleasure, as Francesco knew. The canopy, appropriate for a parade, makes the chariot too top-heavy for battle, and keeps the charioteer out of the light of reason.
Of relevance here is what Plato says about the charioteer traveling in the company of the god that suits him best. He observes:
Now the lover who is taken to be the attendant of Zeus is better able to bear the winged god, and can endure a heavier burden; but the attendants and companions of Ares, when under the influence of love, if they fancy that they have been at all wronged, are ready to kill and put an end to themselves and their beloved. (Phaedrus 252c, trans. Jowett, at https://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/plato3.htm).The lover attending Zeus is the philosopher, as Plato says. In describing the attendant of Ares, he has in mind the wounded pride of the warrior, quick to react without thinking out the implications. However, there is a mature side to the warrior, which Francesco Sforza exemplified. Willing to risk everything to get what he wanted, he also knew when to quit: after gaining the Duchy of Milan came the Treaty of Lodi, establishing relative peace in Italy for the next forty years.
So there is an issue here that Plato did not explore. If the charioteer is exercising his rational faculties "dimly" or "darkly" (as different translations have it) then he may communicate excessive honor to the noble horse, and the chariot is as much headed for trouble as if it were led by the other horse. It can lead the chariot into rash action, and also can draw it back in fear unnecessarily. The "Marseille" rider seems to be relying on his armor for protection--not a good sign. He stands stiffly in the upper part of the chariot, like a person operating from the upper part of his body. Perhaps he needs to get down some of the time and ride with the horses, so as to feel their own desires, of which while he is on top he may be unaware. Yet he also needs to continue to be the one in control, directing the chariot toward a goal that is ascertained by rational thought.
Some say that considering the way the wheels are pointing, against the direction of the horses, the chariot cannot move at all. However it may be that the artist is deliberately using an archaic style, one from before perspective was used. It is not that perspective techniques were too new: the Cary-Yale's artist used perspective, in the depiction of the canopy. Likewise, in the Noblet, the King of Bastons card shows the use of simple perspective in the floor. Perhaps the artist of the Marseille style, from the Cary Sheet onwards, wanted to give the cards an antique look. A similar chariot appears on a 4th century sarcophagus, perfectly preserved in a Roman house. The deceased, a former polo player, rides in his triumphal chariot, and the design is pleasing despite its ridiculousness. At the same time, the analogy to the Phaedrus would suggest that the chariot is not in fact moving. "Fear of the lord" restrains all three elements of the soul from violating Beauty's sacred space. It is enough to gaze in wonder and recollection.
One further change in going from Italy to France has to do with its number in the sequence. Whereas in the Italian orders it is invariably eighth, in France it becomes seventh, changing places with Justice. The number 7 in the Theology of Arithmetic is associated with the rational soul (p. 73). That is where the charioteer is in Plato's Phaedrus,
looking above him to the perfections he sees in heaven. If there were a
Pythagorean creation myth, the seventh day would be for creating
rational beings in the physical world, i.e. humanity. The Theology
divides life into distinct periods of seven hours, days, months, and
years, starting even before birth. At the end of each is a critical
period, which must be surmounted to reach the next. Taking life as a
whole, moreover, there were said to be seven main stages:
Seven are the seasons, which we call ages--child, boy, adolescent, youth, man, elder, old man. One is a child up to the shedding of teeth, until seven years; a boy up to puberty, until twice 7; an adolescent up to the growth of the beard, until three times 7; a youth during the general growth of the body, until four times 7; a man up to one short of fifty years, until seven times seven; an elder up to 56 years, until seven times 8; from then on one is an old man. (Theology of Arithmetic, trans. Robin Waterfield, p. 87-88, online in archive.org.)
These stages were famously pictured in the pavement of Siena Cathedral, 1470s. Unfortunately all I have is a black and white rendition that I purchased from the Cathedral's bookshop. It is also from such considerations that the melancholy Jaques in Shakespeare's As You Like It, 2.7.139ff utters his "all the world's a stage" speech:
The seven ages also correlate with the seven planets, from the Moon to Saturn, as is evident in Jaques' speech.JAQUES. All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players,
They have their exits and entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
Then, the whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice
In fair round belly, with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws, and modern instances,
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side,
His youthful hose well sav'd, a world too wide,
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again towards childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
In the Christian Kabbalah, Reuchlin (On the Art of the Kabbalah, trans. Goodman, p. 285) translated the name of the 7th sefira, Netzach
in Hebrew, as victory (Latin, Triumph); he associates it with the
"prophet's vision" and with the prophet Moses (p. 291). Reuchlin's
source, Gikatilla as translated into Latin by Paolo Ricci, called it "place of
counsel and conferring with higher powers" (p. 75 of Portae Lucis, 1516); triumph (Neza
victoria p. 76); Eye of Mercy (oculum miseracordiae p. 76). Pico says
that it is "that which converts to superior things" (11>67 of his 900 Theses, trans. Farmer). It is
victory attained by looking to what is above one, reason or God. All of
that is very much in keeping with the Chariot card in the tarot as it
would have been understood at the time.
3. The Chariot in the French cartomantic tradition
For de Court Gebelin, affirming the Egyptian origin of the tarot, the Chariot is a clear confirmation of his hypothesis, for who else but the pharaoh, charging against Moses and the Hebrews, was more clearly associated with that vehicle? For him, however, the rider is not leading his army toward its doom, but rather represented "Osiris Triumphant . . . scepter in hand, Crown upon his head, he is in his war chariot, drawn by two white horses" (Karlin, Rhapsodies of the Bizarre, p. 20, pp. 369-370 of original). He is also embodiment of the Sun, in springtime: "He had been lost in the winter, he reappeared in springtime with a fresh brilliance, having triumphed over all those who made war against him" (p. 21).
His colleague de Mellet has a different opinion (Karlin, p. 30, p. 398 of original):
Seventh, the War Chariot, in which is an armor-clad King, armed with a javelin, expresses the dissensions, the murders, the combats of the age of bronze, & he announces the crimes of the age of iron.
Etteilla, perhaps reflecting a cartomantic tradition, seems to side with de Mellet, who may be doing the same. Etteilla's card has just one keyword, "Dissension," both upright and reversed. In the word-lists of his disciples (one from an 1838 book by "Julia Orsini" and the other by d'Odoucet in vol. 2 of his Science des Signes), there are two: "Dissension" and "Arrogance," a change added to later versions of his deck. Below, those in 1838 only are in italics, those in d'Odoucet only in bold. O'Doucet's lists were published by Papus in La Tarot Divinatoire, trans. Stockman as The Divinatory Tarot):
[Dissension.] DISSENSION—War, Dispute, Disruption, Troubles, Insurrection, Sedition, Faction, Rebellion, Defection, Riots, Unrest, Battle, Fight, Combat.—Duel. Arrogance, Haughtiness, Vanity, False Glory, Pomp, Ostentation, Daring [Audacite: Audacity], Temerity.—Violence, Disorder, Anger, Injury, Abuse, Presumptuousness, Vengeance.
Reversed: [Arrogance.] ARROGANCE. Unrest [bruit; Stockman has noise], Racket, Quarrel, Disagreement, Contesting, Lawsuit, Harassment, Arguments, Debates.
These words strongly suggest that for Etteilla, the Chariot card has the sense of someone trying to dominate
but instead losing control of the situation, like Phaeton, son of the sun-god Helios, who tried to guide the chariot of the sun without understanding the magnitude of the task. Of course the two horses point their heads in opposite directions, pulling the chariot this way and that, wreaking havoc as it goes. As characteristic of a person, such an attitude is perhaps not a
one-time childish stunt like Phaeton's, but a way of life, always
heading for a fall as a consequence of endemic arrogance. Both the Ancien Regime and the Revolution itself offer examples enough.
Instead of the horses, Levi has two sphinxes (Ibid.):
they are pulling in opposite directions, but one is turning his head so that they are looking in the same direction. The sphinx with head turned is black, the other is white.This description hints that he knows the meaning of the body going one way and the head the other, even if he doesn't give it in so many words. In the Phaedrus, as already discussed, it is the dark, ignoble horse that is trained to follow the lead of the noble horse; the same will be true for sphinxes. They so far simply add an air of mystery and Egyptianism. In this thinking, Kabbalah must be something developed in an Egyptian context, fir he says that the two crescent moons on the charioteer's epaulettes represent the Gedulah and Geburah of the Kabbalah (Ibid), which are on opposite sides of the Tree of Life. The Charioteer is in balance between these two poles, as though one of the entities on the middle column (Da'at or Tifereth).
Paul Christian continues in Levi's footsteps, although restoring Gebelin's naming of the Charioteer as Osiris. It is a veritable triumph of the will:
Two sphinxes, one white, the other black, are harnessed to the chariot. The former symbolises Good, the latter Evil—the one conquered, the other vanquished—both having become the servants of the Magus who has triumphed over his ordeals. (History and Practice of Magic, trans. James Kirkup and Julian Shaw, p. 101, online in archive.org.)
What does it mean to conquer good and vanquish evil? Is the magus then above both? At the end of his presentation of the 22 images he gives a summary of the 22 "Arcanes," in which he states:
The 7th is called the Chariot of Osiris and symbolizes Victory, that is to say the choice of Good, which is the fruit of truth and justice." (This section is unaccountably missing from the English translation; it appears on p. 129 of Histoire de la Magie, in archive.org.)
That seems to clarify the matter. There is no mention of one looking at the other. In all the cards with sphinxes that follow, in fact, they merely look straight ahead. He concludes:
Remember, son of the Earth, that the empire of the world belongs to those who possess a sovereign Mind, that is to say, the light which illuminates the mysteries of life. By overcoming your obstacles you will overthrow your enemies, and all your wishes shall be realised, if you go towards the future with courage reinforced by the consciousness of doing right. (p. 102 of trans.)
It seems that for a person drawing this card, or at this stage of initiation, there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Christian claimed to have had the ear of Napoleon III himself in the heady days before the Franco-Prussian War. Earlier, Christian had correctly predicted both victory in the Crimean War and the birth of a son in the same year, and indicated in publishing some stories that he had read them to that son (Decker, Depaulis, and Dummett, A Wicked Pack of Cards, pp. 195-197). These authors also report (p. 202) that Christian's follower Mage Edmund apparently drew a deck after Christian's descriptions that has been reproduced by Grimaud. An extra card relates that "Edmond was summoned to the Tuileries [the palace] by Napoleon III, who was anxious to know his future, and that Edmond used his hand-drawn cards for his predictions." If either Christian or Edmond advised the Emperor in the days before the Franco-Prussian War, something went wrong. Bismarck suggested in a famous telegram that the French ambassador had been slighted by the Prussian king (see "the Ems telegram" on Wikipedia's site devoted to Napoleon III). On that provocation ,Napoleon III declared war. In only a few weeks thousands of French lives were lost as well as the important territory of Alsace-Lorraine; not only would the Emperor be out of a job but the stage would be set for renewed warfare in the next generation. The sovereign had apparently not possessed a "sovereign Mind." Things didn't go so badly for him personally: he simply retired to an estate in England, after the populace burned the Tuileries beyond the possibility of restoration.
In arcana 7 the white sphinx symbolizes the good constructive will powers which aspire to the general well-being to be brought about peaceably and smoothly. The black sphinx trembles with impatience and pulls strongly on the left, its efforts risk dragging the chariot into the ditch, but in reality only succeed in stimulating the white sphinx who is obliged to pull her on its side.
Wirth is clearly influenced by Plato. On the Tree of Life, Wirth associates the Chariot with Netzach, understood as meaning Triumph (p. 92).
4. Waite and Case
Waite says of the card that it depicts the victorious hero who
has led captivity captive; he is conquest on all planes--in the mind, in science, in progress, in certain trials of initiation. He has thus replied to the sphinx, and it is on this account that I have accepted the variation of Éliphas Lévi.
The "reply to the sphinx" would seem to refer to the Oedipus legend, in which the sphinx poses the hero a riddle, the answer to which is "man." But Levi perhaps had a different answer. The question, Waite tells us, "is concerned with a Mystery of Nature and not of the world of Grace, to which the charioteer could offer no answer." That is to say, perhaps, that it did not concern the world beyond this one, in which God's grace is that which transcends both good and evil. Moreover, the Charioteer's liberation is solely from externals, and not from "the bondage of the logical understanding." About the higher mysteries, represented by the scroll on the High Priestess's lap, he knows nothing, nor could he even open it, Waite says.
His charioteer seems to be somewhat lower in the supercelestial place (Hyperuranion: Phaedrus 247b) than Plato's, whose logical understanding has, thanks to the irrational within him, at least glimpsed a reminder of where reason alone cannot go. Plato's Charioteer may have realized that it was not his logic that led him there. Oedipus did not, until, in desperation, he used it only to find that he formerly had put too much faith in it.
Case has a different approach to the same image. Going back to Levi and Christian, he can say, yes, it is about the triumph of the will. But what is will? He answers:
Will is not something strong-minded people possess, while the timid are devoid of it. Will is the living, motivating power behind the entire universe. (Tarot Fundamentals, (Lesson 17, pp. 1-2, online in archive.org.)
He cites Jesus: "I have no will save to do the will of him that sent me." Our task is to be receptive to the inner guidance of the only Willpower there is.
What then is the role of the individual personality? The personality is like a field that has been set aside for a particular purpose. Willpower is then like a seed in that field, which can thrive or languish depending on how the field is cultivated.
Case says, "the chariot is a movable fence, a protection for its rider." He adds that Buddha used to liken personality to a chariot, and so did Pythagoras. He cites the Baghavad Gita (Lesson 17, p. 6):
The Self is the rider in the chariot of the body, of which the senses are the horses, and the mind the reins.
In a 2019 reissue of Tarot Fundamentals (ed. Wade Coleman, p. 161) there is a slightly different version of this quote, citing Baghavad Gita 6:34:
The Chariot of the body. The five horses represent the five senses (tongue, eyes, ears, nose, and skin). The reins, the driving instrument, symbolize the mind, the driver is the intelligence, and the passenger is the spirit soul.Then at the beginning of lesson 18, Case says that Pythagoras "probably learned it [the teaching just presented] in his sojourn in India" (Lesson 18, p. 1) For more, he cites the Kathopanishad:
"The Self is the rider in the chariot of the body, guided by the intellect as charioteer, drawn by the senses as powerful horses, controlled by the way of the mind serving for the reins. Thus runs the vehicle over the course of experience. The Self thus conditioned by the senses and the mind is called the Enjoyer by those who know. One who is forsaken by the charioteer (intelligent discrimination) and has no idea of guiding the reins--his mind--in the proper manner, has no control ever the senses, and is like a driver of restive horses. He who has the intellect for his driver and the mind for proper reins, is able to reach the other end of the course, the highest essence of the All-pervading. THAT ever concealed in all, is never manifest, but is grasped by the sharp intellect of those who are trained to minute observation."
It seems to me that the text is not saying that the personality is the chariot, but rather the body. That may not be important. What is novel in both quotations, and makes Case's point, is that the "spirit-soul," or Self, is merely a passenger, not the one guiding the horses. That job is for "the intelligence", "intellect." or "intelligent discrimination."
This idea of a passenger is not in Plato. However, in both cases it is intellect that holds the reins, which are equivalent to the mind, and at least one of Plato's horses corresponds to the senses. What Plato has that the Hindu text does not is a role for love. On the lowest, physical level it is the driving force that brings the Charioteer to apprehend the image of true Beauty, and it is then that image that is to be cultivated in his life, earning him his wings in the hereafter.
your personality is an instrument or vehicle for the expression of the same limitless Will-power which manifests itself throughout the universe as the power which marks out specific fields of concrete expression for the One Life.
According to Case, the individual personality is in the position of the chariot rather than the charioteer: "the personality is a vehicle of power, an instrument." The powers and energies of the previous six cards - focused attention, unconscious association, production of mental images, ordering of images, intuition, and the awareness of interactions among them and with superconsciousness - enable this to happen (Case of course says much more, difficult to summarize). In that way the seventh card is at the end of one cycle among the cards, of which there will be two more. He concludes (lesson 18, p. 7):
By the invisible reins of the mind, we let the Self guide the vehicle of personality. The result is that the motive-power of sensation is brought to rest, as are the sphinxes in this version, or the horses which draw the chariot, in some older Tarot designs.
The Self is apparently a trans-personal force. If we let it guide the personality, then the agitation of the senses is stilled. The sphinxes are not moving, nor is the chariot. As for why sphinxes and not horses, Case's answer is that "the sphinxes are the propounders of riddles, and so are the senses." Through the senses we experience the pairs of opposites: "what we like, what we dislike, what seems favorable to our aims and what is not." That the sphinxes are of opposite colors conveys this opposition. But both see mere appearance. When, by means of the intellect, the Self controls this vehicle, the result is "security, safety and peace."
5. Jung and the Chariot
Jung had a dream or vision of a chariot that seems quite appropriate here. His Black Book gives it the date of December 18, 1913, a time of great inner turmoil for him. He writes about it in three places, each time a little differently. One is in the book Analytical Psychology, Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, pp. 56-57. He introduces the dream by saying it is about Wagner's Siegfried, a character he never really liked.
I was in the Alps, not alone but with another man, a curious shortish man with brown skin. Both of us carried rifles. It was just before dawn, when the stars were disappearing from the sky, and we were climbing up the mountain together. Suddenly we heard Siegfried's horn sound out from above, and I knew that it was he we were to shoot. The next minute he appeared high above us, lit up by a shaft of sunlight from the rising sun. He came plunging down the mountainside in a chariot made of bones. I thought to myself, "Only Siegfried could do that." Presently, around a bend in the trail, he came upon us, and we fired full into his breast. Then I was filled with horror and disgust at myself for the cowardice of what we had done. The little man with me went forward and I knew he was going to drive the knife into his heart, but that was just a little too much for me, and I fled. I had the idea of getting away as fast as I could to a place "they" could not find me. I had the choice of going down into the valley or further up the mountains by a faint trail. I chose the latter, and as I ran there broke upon me a perfect deluge of rain, Then I awoke with a sense of great relief.
Then it occurs to him (p. 57):
I had killed my intellect, helped on to the deed by a personification of the collective unconscious, the little brown man with me. In other words, I deposed my superior function. The rain "is a symbol of the release of tension, the forces of the unconscious are loosed. ... The crime is expiated because, as soon as the main function is deposed, there is a chance for the other sides of the personality to be born into life.
In the Red Book Jung started the chapter with a historiated initial "h" for "heldenmorden, hero-murder. In this version instead of a little brown man there was a jungling, youth, with him. Jung also included a watercolor of his dream-image. We see someone rounding the bend. Facing him is another figure, apparently just one, looking more like a wild animal than a person, with either two human heads or a blank space where they would be. No chariot is in sight. The most striking thing is that neither figure dominates the scene, which is rather mostly mountains on all sides of a narrow valley.
Nonetheless, the dream specifies a chariot; we cannot eliminate it, but perhaps we are entitled to emphasize its structure as defense of the charioteer. If Siegfried represents his intellect, the chariot defines him as a victor in life, a success in the eyes of society, which for Jung is through the intellect. For someone else, it might be working with his hands, or making people comfortable, any of a thousand different strengths that different people have to offer society. It is what makes him part of society rather than someone's dependent, in a way that utilizes his natural skills and inclinations, risking failure in the process. It is the development of the independent ego, including its defenses against forces that might diffuse it. Then there is the recognition that he has developed one part of his personality at the expense of other parts to which he had not given attention. So is the sense that this part must cease to dominate. But domination was its whole reason for existence, that which carved out the person's identity. Hence it must be killed.
But what happens when the other parts are "born into life"? In Memories, Dreams and Reflections he took his analysis of the dream somewhat further (p. 221 of the upload on archive.org). He says that these thoughts are what he was thinking at the time; if so, he certainly didn't articulate them in 1925. Here are his later thoughts:
Suddenly the meaning of the dream dawned on me. “Why, that is the problem that is being played out in the world.” Siegfried, I thought, represents what the Germans want to achieve, heroically to impose their will, have their own way. “Where there is a will there is a way!” I had wanted to do the same. But now that was no longer possible. The dream showed that the attitude embodied by Siegfried, the hero, no longer suited me. Therefore it had to be killed.
After the deed I felt an overpowering compassion, as though I myself had been shot: a sign of my secret identity with Siegfried, as well as of the grief a man feels when he is forced to sacrifice his ideal and his conscious attitudes. This identity and my heroic idealism had to be abandoned, for there are higher things than the ego’s will, and to these one must bow.
Now it is not his intellect that had to be killed, but an attitude, that of the hero Siegfried. Did he kill it? Jung rather notoriously was known for his temper and angry moods when contradicted, even as an old man. Similarly, Germany was a late-comer among nations in the modern sense and felt a need to assert itself and carve its own empire among other empires, with its conscious ideal that it had the best way of organizing society, with Germans in charge. The result was to submerge other people and also other parts of itself, the "corrupted" parts. It is a one-sidedness fostered by the Christian ideal. Here Samdushani, the editor of the "reader's edition" of Jung's Red Book, has put in a note a perceptive passage from an article that Jung wrote. But first I need to give the passage he is commenting on, which has to do with the dream.
Oh that Siegfried blond and blue eyes, the German hero had to fall by my hand, the most loyal and courageous! He had everything in himself that I treasured as the greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride. I would have gone under in the same battle, and so only assassination was left to me. If I wanted to go on living it could only be through trickery and cunning.
Judge not! Think of the blond savage of the German forests, who had to betray the hammer-brandishing thunder to the pale Near-Eastern God who was nailed to the wood like a chicken marten. The courageous were overcome by a certain contempt for themselves. But their life force bade them to go on living, and they betrayed their beautiful wild Gods,their holy trees and their awe of the German forests.
What does Siegfried mean for the Germans! What does it tell us that the Germans suffer Siegfried's death! That is why I almost preferred to kill myself in order to spare him. But I wanted to go on living with a new God. (Red Book, reader's edition, p. 163)
That the Germans suffer Siegfried's death suggests to me that this part was written after the war and its humiliating peace. The whole passage is of course very Nietzschian - not the Nietzsche that would be beloved of the Nazis, who wanted to go back to the blond "savage" armed with the new tools of German society, but of Zarathustra. Here is Samdushani's interesting note, from Jung's essay "On the unconscious" found in volume 10 of his collected works:
Christianity split the Germanic barbarian into his upper and lower halves and enabled him, by expressing the dark side, to domesticate the bright half and fit it for culture. But the lower, darker half still awaits redemption and a second domestication. Until then, it will remain associated with vestiges of prehistory with the collective unconscious which must indicate a peculiar and increasing activation of the collective unconscious. (quoted in Red Book, reader's edition, p. 163, n. 122)
The lower half, of course, is the unconscious, which still needs civilizing.
Curiously, in relation to the famous Siegfried, Jung never mentions any desire for fame. Yet it may well be that he did fear he would lose his fame after the break with Freud. If so, it is well hidden. In any case, looking at the Red Book and Jung's process of active imagination there, it does not appear that he killed off his intellect. It was very much engaged in the process, civilizing the unconscious while being revitalized by it. It was merely a matter of its recognizing that there was something beyond the go, which the ego could only be conscious of indirectly, by its dialogue with other parts of the personality as equals in the conversation, including their further development.
Jung's new God was the Self, the self-regulating whole, in which the ego is just one player, and not in control even of its own domain. Is it then a matter of redefining the charioteer as the Self, or of leaving the image altogether? The problem is that of ego-inflation, of thinking that the ego, once it attains a certain level, acts on behalf of the Self. The ego is not a passenger that can tell the Self, the Charioteer, to be in charge, because it is the ego that makes choices, the individual will, not some higher entity, the Self. Yet paradoxically the ego is not in charge, even of itself. Its lack of self-knowledge can be astounding. When the ego does things, it is not the Self acting through the ego. That is inflation. But when the senses and their agitation are stilled, perhaps the Self has a chance. There is then the agitation of the mind to still, by means of the transcendent function, transcending the opposites, including opposing egos. Perhaps then the Self will be heard.
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