The Chariot as a Birth Card

A birth on 12 December 1972 adds to 1 + 2 + 1 + 2 + 1 + 9 + 7 + 2 = 25, then 2 + 5 = 7, The Chariot alone. A birth on 1 January 2003 gets there in one step: 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 3 = 7. A total of exactly 16 gives The Tower first and The Chariot second, as with 6 July 2001: 0 + 6 + 0 + 7 + 2 + 0 + 0 + 1 = 16, then 1 + 6 = 7. The Tower only ever arrives as the raw total before any reducing, so the pairing is rarer than the single card.

Your life's archetype

If The Chariot is your birth card, you are here to move. Forward, mostly, and at a pace that makes other people reach for the handrail. You learned early that a wall is a thing you go through, over or around.

A figure stands in a chariot drawn by two sphinxes, one black and one white, and there are no reins in his hands. He steers by will alone. That is the card. The two animals pull in different directions, as the two halves of anyone do, and the art is keeping them moving the same way long enough to arrive. In my experience the people who carry this card have a grip on their own life that others envy, and a harder time than anyone letting go of it.

You are here to show that what looks fixed and immovable will shift under steady, directed effort.

Who you are

You have drive. Serious, sustained, get out of the way drive, and the ability to narrow your focus down to a point. You are competitive by nature and you like a challenge. You face things head on, and avoidance is a language you never learned.

Setbacks knock you down and you get up with an almost unreasonable resilience. You believe you can shape your circumstances through effort, and the evidence of your life mostly agrees with you. Your physical energy is often high and you need somewhere to put it, a sport, a build, a long walk.

Movement, achievement, mastery and the win that comes from refusing to stop. That is the theme.

The shadow

The shadow of The Chariot is momentum with nobody watching the road. You can push through warning signs and through your own exhaustion, because stopping feels like losing.

Control is the central struggle. You may need to run the situation to feel safe, and you can turn short when things will not move at your pace. There is a flatness risk too, where achievement swallows the rest of life and relationships, rest and reflection get the leftovers. Determination can hide plain aggression. When winning becomes everything, losing feels like the end of the world instead of a Tuesday.

The work is to learn the difference between pushing and forcing, and to accept that some forces are bigger than your will.

In love and at work

In love you are exciting, the partner who brings energy and momentum into a life and makes things happen. The difficulty is slowing down. Intimacy asks you to stop and be seen without your armour, and a partner who does not share your drive can feel like a passenger you are dragging. The relationships that work for you are with people who do not read your ambition as selfishness, and who can get you to pull over now and then.

At work you want a goal, a clock and something in the way. Business for yourself, sales, sport, the emergency services, project work, anything with fast change and a finish line. Your satisfaction comes from the mountain moved, the odds beaten, the thing everyone said could not be done.

What you are here to learn

That not everything can be forced, and that some of the most important victories look like surrender.

You are learning that strength sometimes looks like patience and power sometimes looks like yielding, and that the obstacles were teachers all along. You are learning that who you become on the road matters more than the destination, and that an achievement that costs you your relationships is a loss with a trophy, and that other people are allies to work with rather than terrain to drive across. The achievement is a formidable will put in service of something larger than you, pushing forward and staying open to guidance at the same time, winning without losing yourself.

The cards that share your number

The Chariot shares the number 7 with The Tower. In the way I count, which every page here uses, a total that lands on 7 gives The Chariot alone, and a total of 16 gives The Tower first and then The Chariot. Other books count differently and some add a companion card to a single Chariot where I do not.

If you have both, let me say plainly what The Tower is in a birth card, because the picture frightens people. The Tower is the structure built on a wrong foundation coming down so a right one can go up. In a life it is the pattern of sudden clearings, the job or belief that falls in a day after years of standing, and it is a mirror and a piece of work you are here to do. My rule for lessons is that they start as a whisper and, if ignored, end up thermonuclear. Tower people have usually met the thermonuclear version and are learning to hear the whisper. The Chariot beneath The Tower is the drive that rebuilds.

The cards either side

In the deck The Chariot sits between The Lovers and Strength, and the library pairs it with both: the real choice that sets the direction, and the inner mastery that keeps the animals pulling together. Those are the neighbours in the deck, a way of reading the card, and your birth cards are the ones under The cards that share your number above.

Across the traditions

The Chariot has its own page in The 78 Cards, which reads it as a card in a spread. In numerology its number is the 7, the number of the thinker and the seeker, and The Number 7 page covers how it reads as a Life Path, a Destiny and a Personal Year. In Western astrology the card belongs to Cancer, cardinal water ruled by the Moon, the sign that carries its home on its back the way the charioteer carries his armour, and the Cancer page in the Western Astrology section describes it in full. The Tarot Card of the Week post is a shorter companion read when this card comes round.

What are you driving toward, and have you checked lately that you still want to arrive?

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.

Related pages
The Tower as a Birth Card