VII The Chariot

The earliest versions of the Chariot are much different from what came later. In both the Cary-Yale Visconti deck and the Visconti-Sforza, the car is pulled by prancing horses, and the driver is a female. These are obviously not war chariots, and possibly the patrons, who were at least partially responsible for the content of the packs they would use for gaming, specified that they wanted no overt references to war in their cards. So both of these pictures show a chariot in a triumphal celebration or parade, of a type common in Italy since Roman times. "Triumph" is the root of the word we use to designate the 22 cards under study here ("trump"), and while the elements of the picture changed within the first 200 years of tarocchi, the theme of "victory" remained. In fact, some of the early versions of this card are called Victory.

Unfortunately, there are very few chariot cards remaining on the uncut decks that give us most of our information about early Italian woodblock packs, but the one I've referred to several times before (Kaplan, V. II, p. 286) has the bottom half of this card, showing only two tiny horses. There's no way of telling whether the driver is male or female.

The crowned, male warrior appears in the earlist Marseilles decks. In the mid-17th-century Noblet Tarot, the card has already taken on all the characterisitics it will possess in the classic Marseilles tradition, including the horses whose bodies seem to emanate from the same point of origin, due to woodblock artists' difficulties in handling perspective representation in a very tight space.

However, the possibly slightly earlier Jacques Vieville deck's chariot is drawn not by horses, but by the two sphinxes that would not appear in tarot again for 150 years. This is an extremely significant detail, and whether the French occultists of the 19th century knew of it is anybody's guess. I've always assumed that E. Levi transformed the horses into sphinxes on his own initiative, in a lame attempt to ascribe an Egyptian origin to the cards. The Vieville deck is an extremely interesting study, and it may be the most important known link between the Italian and French tarot traditions. There are important details of it that I have never seen in any other deck, and some of the cards, such as trump XVI, appear to follow an Italian rather than classical French pattern which, as such, didn't exist yet at that time.

I always think of this card as representing victory, but victory is a somewhat vague term embracing such ideas as "victory over caffeine addiction." I believe this card implies serious conflict, even though the earliest patrons of tarot creation tried to soft-peddle the fact that a chariot is a war weapon. It may or may not be referring to a physical conflict, but I most often interpret this card as "a chance to triumph over one's adversaries."

Dave B

attaching the carey-yale visconti

kaz

and the visconti sforza......

kaz

and the soprafino.....

indeed in the older decks you see horses instead of sphinxes, although in a lot of modern decks there is just a chariot pulled by whatever they think fit as a pulling force. and, it doesn't really matter i think, as it's about the idea behind it. the concept is most of the times a contrast between the two animals puling the cart, like the black/white sphinxes, or the direction they face. they stand for our senses pulling us in different directions, the charioteer holds all of this together so you don't just drift on the input of your senses alone. and he is victorious in all cards, not by using force, but by guiding.
the warrior looking armor has nothing to do with a fight he has to deliver in my opinion, this has to do with a means of protection, keeping distance, holding off. this whole card is very much about yourself and how you "stand" in the world, all things in the cards refer to you and your interaction with the world around you, but not so much on a physical level for me, although that can be true in some situations yes.
just my 0.02 about the chariot.....

kaz

Kaz:

I really appreciate your providing links to the images from the two Visconti decks. I'm just now learning how to manipulate graphics in a computer and on the web, so it'll be awhile before I can move this stuff around the way the rest of you folks manage to do.

(cb)

It may be that some early depictions, as represented on the Visconti type decks, are quite different to Marseilles representations (and thank you, again, for posting these, Kaz), but early textual reference is clearly far more in line with Marseilles depictions.

What follows consists of part of a much earlier e.mail I sent MeeWah, in discussing my version of VII The Chariot in the Aeclectic Tarot project.

Plato discusses the 'three parts of the Soul' in both the Phaedrus and the Republic. Here is a 'short' quote from the Phaedrus (Great Books of the Western World, p124 §246)

Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the figure be composite - a pair of winged horses and a charioteer [...]

the human character 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 [...]

The soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing: - when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and orders the world order; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and drooping in her flight as last settles on the solid ground - there, finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be self-moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal creature [...]

[p128, §253] As I said at the beginning of this tale, I divided each soul into three - two horses and a charioteer; and one of the horses was good and the other bad: the division may remain, but I have not yet explained in what the goodness or badness of either consists, and to that I will proceed. 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 gray eyes and blood-red complexion [alternative translation: 'with gray and blood-shot eyes']; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur. Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full of the prickings and ticklings of desire, [§254] the obedient steed, then always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the beloved; but the other, heedless of the pricks and of the blows of the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer, whom he forces to approach the beloved and to remember the joys of love[...]

Click to expand...

In the Republic, Plato mentions that there are three parts to the soul: Reason, or the thinking part; Emotions, or the feeling part; and the appetitive body (or the Willing part)

I'll leave this for now, and attach my Aeclectic version, as it was quite influenced by the Marseilles... and it gives me an excuse to post a rarety (ie, my own work!).

jmd:

That's an extremely original conception of the chariot -- the soul's eye view. I'll bet there's never been anything else like it, and for people who are into the classic chariot metaphor it's highly appropriate.

The metaphor by Plato was very...well, Platonic, and full of his usual gnostic implications. It was preceded by a similar, but much more succinct and simplified version of the same concept by the Katha Unpanishad of about 1500 BCE:

"Know that the self is the rider, and the body the chariot; that the intellect is the charioteer, and the mind the reins.
"The senses, say the wise, are the horses; the roads they travel are the mazes of desire. The wise call the self the enjoyer when he is united with the body, the senses, and the mind.
"When a man lacks discrimination and his mind is uncontrolled, his senses are unmanageable, like the restive horses of a charioteer. But when a man has discrimination and his mind is controlled, his senses, like the well-broken horses of a charioteer, lightly obey the rein."

A much different sort of metaphor is Ezekiel's vision of God in his chariot, as laid out in chapters one and two in the book of Ezekiel.

http://bibles.datasegment.com/web/Ezekiel/1

This is the foundation document of Kabbalah, and if there is a historical connection between Kabbalah and tarot that predates Eliphas Levi, the key to the connection would lie with this card. My own feeling is that there was no such connection, and that the chariot as a symbol of both war and triumph was so universally recognized throughout ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times that it was only natural it should find its way into the trumps.

My own card is much more traditional than years, and I have to confess it's partly plagiarized. I'll see if I can create the link without my wife's help.

(catboxer)

Here it is.

edited

Thanks for all those contributions! I am personally finding it very enriching to read and see such exquisite work on this site, from ancient sources of possible connection and personal understandings and exegesis, to rich metaphors!

I've had little time to make posts these last few days, and thought I had better re-check the Vieville illustration and the dating of the Upanishads before putting my foot in the wrong place.

Catboxer, you mention that the Vieville deck's Chariot card is not drawn by horses, but sphinxes. Personally, I just do not see those Vieville depictions as sphinxes at all, though one can, since their later depiction as such, presume that this is what they were meant to represent. The Vieville deck has many very poor representations, and I would think it more likely that those heads on horses' bodies are more human-like than horse-like either because of the artist's lack of skills - or maybe even because he may have been influenced by the Platonic view (which I doubt)!.

Thank you for providing that quote from the Vedas, or that later portion of the Vedas termed the Upanishads. From memory, I had thought that quote you gave originated around the same time, or a little later, than the time during which Plato wrote. The text I have gives the dating of the Upanishads as between 700 BCE and 300 BCE, with that specific text probably from the middle period.

I am not a philologist, and am only thereby reliant on scanty information I have, but it may very well also be the case that (in addition to assuming an antecedence for the Upanishad source) either a) both Plato and the author(s)/redactors of the Upanishad drew from a common oral tradition, b) both drew the metaphor independently, or c) the Upanishads actually drew from Plato's text or tradition. As I said, I am no philologist, and I personally have no clear view on which possibility is the correct one. Having horse-drawn chariots as part of their everyday life, the moral to be derived from the contemplation of these would very well have given rise to common metaphors or similes. In addition, one may also question whether people incarnating during that period were faced with certain common problems or tasks, despite their separate geographical locations... I am not going to argue this here, by the way, just mentioning another consideration.

In the Hermetica, there is also a textual reference to Chariot imagery, but I think that this latter is more appropriate when we get to XVIIII the Sun... someone please remind me if I forget!
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I too was going to mention Ezekiel's vision, and Merkabah (Chariot) mysticism, which Scholem and others certainly see, and I would have to personally agree, as proto-Kabbalah.

It is also interesting, in this connection, that one of the three central Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, also makes mention of three parts of the Soul, with some echo of similarity to Plato's nuances - the nefesh, the ruah, and the neshamah.
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Again, thank you Diana, Kaz and Catboxer for enriching my passion for Tarot with your posts, comments and attachments... and by the way, catboxer, you have fine drawing skills and obviously a lot of quiet perseverence, as exemplified in the various cards I have already seen!

Attached is the Conver 1760 version.