132. The Great Rebirth, Part 1: The Chariot
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In this three part series, we will dive deeply into each these cards and the three lines of the Major Arcana, exploring their significance, their medicine, and how we can lean into them in times of great personal evolution and change.
Today’s episode is centered on Line One of the Major Arcana and The Chariot, and how these energies can present us with a powerful and important invitation to graduate from where we’ve been to where we are meant to travel to.
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About the Episode
There are many Tarot cards that invite us into the process of transformative rebirth, but only three represent the kind of root level change that can totally altar the structure of our being: The Chariot, Temperance, and The World, the final cards in the three respective lines of the Major Arcana.
In this three part series, we will dive deeply into each these cards and the three lines of the Major Arcana, exploring their significance, their medicine, and how we can lean into them in times of great personal evolution and change.
Today’s episode is centered on Line One of the Major Arcana and The Chariot, and how these energies can present us with a powerful and important invitation to graduate from where we’ve been to where we are meant to travel to. Ruled by Cancer, and the final card of the first line of the Major Arcana, this archetype supports us in times of big releasing, shedding, and regenerating into new incarnations of ourselves.
Land Acknowledgement
Honoring and acknowledging that this podcast episode was recorded on the unceded land of The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, currently called Portland, OR, with the deepest respect to the Kalapuya Tribe, Cowlitz Tribe, and Atfalati Tribe.
Please Note
CW Tags: birth, grief
The content in this episode contains references to birth and grief. We have done our best to identify difficult subject matter, but the labels may not be comprehensive for your personal needs. Please honor your knowing and proceed with necessary self-awareness and care.
Transcript
[Introduction]
[0:00:00]
This episode of Tarot for the Wild Soul is brought to you by my brand new upcoming course, Heart of Service, a five-week, online, intuitive, Tarot immersion for Spirit-guided service that runs from October 1 to the 29th.
This course is a powerful journey into the center of our intuitive wisdom, dedicated to empowering participants with the tools, skills, and resources to begin to deepen their trust in themselves and their knowing, even in times of contraction, uncertainty, and doubt. It is an invitation to begin to see every moment as an opportunity to be of service, to show up to whatever arises from a soul-centered place, and engage with our Tarot decks as supportive anchors for us in the process.
Whether you're a business owner, an activist, an artist, a parent, a lawyer, or all of the above, and then some, Heart of Service is for anyone who desires to become more intimate with the core of wisdom that lives within them, and co-create with Spirit in every facet of their lives.
Scholarships for Heart of Service open Monday, September 7, and enrollment for the course opens Tuesday, September 15. So to learn more about the course, what we'll be covering, dates that scholarship applications will be open — they open on Monday September 7. They close on Friday, September 11, at midnight Eastern, 9pm Pacific — to learn more and see everything about the course, including FAQs, you can visit lindsaymack.com/heartofservice.
Thanks for listening, Loves.
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(Instrumental intro music)
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Hello Loves. Welcome to a brand new episode of Tarot for the Wild Soul. I’m your host, Lindsay Mack, and I'm wishing everybody listening to this lots of gentle, compassionate, loving care after this insane Full Moon. I have literally not slept for three days (Lindsay Laughs). So hopefully you're faring a bit better than I am, but I know a lot of folks who really haven't been sleeping because of how potent this moon is. So just bowing to everybody and so grateful as always to be greeting you in this virtual space.
I am so excited to kick off this three-part series on the podcast. I'm not sure as to whether it'll take place over the next three months, or the next three weeks so we'll see. But this series is called “The Great Rebirth”, and it explores — for the next three weeks, respectively — the final cards in the three lines of the Major Arcana. So in Line One, that's The Chariot. In Line Two, it's Temperance. And in Line Three, it's The World.
So in each of these episodes, we're going to discuss the function and, again, the medicine of the particular line of Major Arcana cards in question, what they're here to teach us, and the seasons of life that they typically show up in. Like, when are we in lLine One? When are we in Line Two? And then we'll discuss the significance of the actual card in question, the card that acts as a threshold, that not only completes and represents kind of the death of our time in this line, but the rebirth into the next line, the next evolutionary cycle, that we're meant to walk through, explore, and experience.
And I think that this is a super relevant topic right now because we're in this time of Great Rebirth, as a planet, as a collective, together, interpersonally, personally. There is no escaping the enormity of the waking up, the rebirthing, that's happening.
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And rebirth, I think, is a really powerful word to meditate on, right? Because we all have kind of a soul sense of rebirth. Something that I think is really important, at least for myself, to remember is that I have to die in order to be rebirthed.
And what is it to navigate an energetic death process skillfully?
The Tarot can help with that. It doesn't mean it's easy. Nobody ever promised us easy, but it does mean that we can begin to bow to the discomforts and the contractions that very naturally, and appropriately, arise when we are ready to rebirth in some way.
Rebirth is so powerful because it is death and life in one. It's the knowing, the honoring, the blessing, the statement of completion, the releasing, the shedding of what has served us so beautifully, what's gotten us so far, but cannot actually get us any further. We have to burn it away in order to meet and greet what is ready to rise in our lives. We are being asked to clear and expand in order to meet that.
And we're always going through these processes. Sometimes we're in different places on the spectrum. Sometimes we're in a gestation period, where we're kind of building to that death place. Sometimes we're in total births. Sometimes we're in total death. Sometimes we're in ecstatic or horrified rebirth (Lindsay Laughs).
But the Major Arcana are so special for a myriad of reasons, but one is that they represent that large macrocosmic energy that asks us to surrender. We don't have any control over the Majors. There's a lot of stuff — we can call it an act of God, whatever — a lot of stuff in this life, we have zero control over. We can only control our response to it, right?
So the Majors are where we get to learn that. And right now, one of the… something that is a cornerstone of my teachings, the way I practice, is that you don't need to read traditionally to work with your cards; you can live them, you can just be in them, call upon them.
You don't have to pull a card to acknowledge that you're moving through a card. If you're moving through Judgement, I trust you know you're moving through Judgement, if you're really intimate with that feeling and that experience. I have been in a Death card cycle, along with probably everybody else on the planet, for sure, since July, certainly. Pretty much since July 1. And I pull Death card pretty often. I was pulling it every single day for about two months, but I don't need to pull it every day to understand that I'm still in it.
[0:07:56]
The Tarot is spiralic, and one of the beautiful things about kind of beginning to rewild our understanding of the Tarot is that we can take that understanding out of kind of — and I have great respect for this, by the way. This is not a knock — but kind of this scholarly, distant, mythos that Tarot is kind of held in, that like it's higher than you. It's Earth. It's earthy. It's in the ground with you. It wants to be there. It wants to be by your side. It's a caretaker. It’s a doula. It wants to be with you. Like, it's a midwife. It doesn't want you to wait until you feel calm and collected and then you go to your deck. It wants you to go to your deck when you feel like a fucking mess.
And so, again, part of why we're talking about this right now is Tarot is no good to us unless we can contextualize it in our daily life. What good is it, ultimately, to learn about the Major Arcana, to learn about the three lines, to learn about the the final cards in the line, in each line, if we don't understand what to do with them when they come up, why they're allies for us, why they are anchors and teachers that want to help us move through these extraordinary times, extraordinary, that we're in, horrible and incredible and so painful, that are asking everything of us and providing us with almost no respite, you know, in terms of the intensity of it all? So very, very powerful. Right?
And I think that this could be potentially really useful for folks who are seeking some anchoring in their Tarot practice and some witnessing around going through such a big time of transformative rebirth. There are lots of ways to work with the Major Arcana and this is a nice one to begin to reflect on.
What does each line teach us? What does it represent? What does it bring forward as a whole? And what does that final card symbolize?
The one that allows us to A) honor what the line has taught us, what we learned in that line, 2) really bow to and celebrate the fact that we made it through the line, we made it through all those lessons and all that intensity, 3) naturally, because it's not a bad thing to go through an energetic death process to a beautiful thing, a very natural thing, to release and shed and grieve, really bow to and lovingly place on the fire what's ready to be burned, and make the choice to walk over that threshold and enter into the new line.
And that's a lot of potency, you know, that's contained in that little card. And I think it can be really powerful, especially now, to reflect on how those cards are really wanting to help us out. Really, really wanting to help us out right now.
[0:11:47]
Let's just start with the basics. What are the three lines of the Major Arcana?
So Major Arcana are comprised of 22 cards, moving from The Fool to The World, and really, ultimately, represent the big picture, macrocosmic, huge, full-scale, soul-level invitations of the Tarot, that are meant to accelerate, meant to evolve us, from one state of being in our soul-kind of growth process to another.
Really, all cards do this, but none of them do it quite like the Majors. They're all accelerators. And we can think of them as, again, these kind of cosmic forces that are out of our control. We don't need to be frightened of that.
An ocean wave is a Major Arcana energy. You didn't make the wave, but you have choices, right? You can, you know, rise up to meet it and splash and play in it. You can, you know, ride it in to the shore, you can duck under it. All of them are perfectly lovely, and sometimes it crashes us out (Lindsay Laughs), you know, but you didn't make the wave. The job that we have when waves come in the ocean — if we feel, you know, safe and secure enough to be in the ocean — is to respond to it with wisdom.
And that is the attitude that we can take with every single Major Arcana energy. You can't make yourself be in The Magician. And I wish you could, right? When The Magician comes up, that's the wave, that you have the opportunity to say, “Okay, what is this inviting me to pay attention to? What is the breeze, the wind, the current, the weather, the wave, that's coming with this? Where am I being asked to bow, to surrender? What, how can I respond? You know, how can I respond to this? What is this asking of me? How is this asking me to respond?”
It's a co-creative energy. And again, very macrocosmic. Very, very.
[0:14:14]
Now we respond in invitation to every card. But again, the Majors are different because of the potency, the pull, the magnitude of what they represent. And I want to also say that the Majors can often… it can be really, there can be a weird dissonance, right? Because we can look at a lot of the Majors and just think, “Oh my God, this card is so huge. It's so esoteric, like, I don't know how to ground this into my life.” And you don't have to. You know, when a wave comes, you don't necessarily have to do much with it.
We learn through the response to it. If you duck under the wave and come up, you'll learn something from that. If you ride the wave into shore, we all know that, like, I love being in the ocean, and there are times where I'll ride a wave in and get, like, destroyed — in a fun way — with a wave I didn't think was that big of a deal (Lindsay Laughs). And then sometimes, there are huge waves, and the ride is actually quite smooth, and there's no crash out, and some waves don't take you so far. Some we’re meant to learn from the response. You don't have to wait for the wave to tell you. We work with the wave and learn through what we discover.
We have freewill on this planet. We're not meant to sit on poofs and just wait for the answer. We learned through work, through experience, through co-creation. We learn through conversation. That's a conversation. For anybody who's kind of like, “I can't hear my guides. I don't get how to like tune in with Spirit,” you're doing it. Have you ever had an experience or something you totally were not expecting either a thought or feeling or a situation or circumstance that you were absolutely not expecting at all, be it lovely and radically beautiful, or utterly unwelcome, and you responded to that, and it taught you something.
It also taught you something about that card. That's what we do with the Major Arcana. And that's why — although I believe in my profession. I've learned so much from listening to the Tarot myself. — that's why, ultimately, I teach what I hear from my guides and from the Tarot itself, because basically,
whatever any teacher tells you about a card is wonderful. And again, I love teaching Tarot. I bow to those who've come before me. I bow to those doing the work. But it's never going to matter as much as what you experience about a card. Never.
And that's why if we're really showing up and doing our work with the Tarot we’ll never really have the same interps as others. And when we do kind of fly, you know, kind of together as a flock and really see like, “Oh yeah, this card is so universally experienced and felt,” there's still a sense of individual understanding of it, because we've actually paid attention. We've done field study with our own response to the waves.
So that's sort of a long-winded way of saying, your personal experience with the card is the key to you actually understanding it. As much as you study, listen to this podcast, read the incredibly wise and worthy words of other teachers and interpreters of the Tarot, it's, it can help, of course. You're here for a reason, but it's not gonna be…. Ultimately it's just like the kickoff point that gets you started on your own wave journey. So I really believe in that.
Tarot belongs to everybody and we learn everything we do through actually paying attention to what comes up for us while we are surfing the wave, getting crashed out by the wave. It's just all information and that's, you know, again, it's really beautiful. So, that's sort of a tiny view of the majors.
[0:18:31]
Now the three lines are something that Rachel Pollack began to teach about in Tarot Wisdom in 78 Degrees of Wisdom. Rachel Pollack removed The Fool from the 22 cards and split the rest into three lines of seven.
So The Fool doesn't go away. The Fool is just kind of separate and lives sort of at the top of those three lines. And Line One runs from The Magician to The Chariot. Line Two runs from either Strength or Justice — depending on what card, you know, what deck you work with, what school of thought you come from — to Temperance. And Line Three is The Devil to The World.
And The Fool, other people have said much the same as this, but I really believe you know, The Fool initiates us. We have to say “yes” to The Fool to kick off the journey, period.
Everything in the nervous system in your reptilian brain, in your ego, wants and longs for comfort, security, what's familiar, wants to stay away from the things that feel uncomfortable. The Fool wants to leap and fly, values discomfort for evolutionary’s sake, for the sake of deep evolution, deep growth. And that is... it mirrors the same dissonance that we have within each of us, all of us have that kind of reptilian thinking brain, thinking mind piece. And all of us have souls that long, want, to be free. So we all have a part of us that goes, “No, I don't want to grow, I want to like stay where I am.” And all of us have parts of us that are like, “I have to leave. I have to go.”
And so The Fool is actually the little cord, the little bell that weaves itself through every single one of these Major Arcana cards and actually moves us from one to the other.
So we move from The Fool to The Magician. We spend time in The Magician. That Fool energy comes in, and we leap from The Magician to the High Priestess. That is what I believe because it matches really with how the soul moves us from one state of experience to another in life.
It's not always so linear like that. Tarot is so spiralic. We can be here, we can be there, we can be Emperor, Death, Judgement, World, you know, it's like, we don't have to ever go in order. But if we're looking at just kind of the larger view, that's the function of The Fool, and that's the role it plays in moving us from one card to the other, and especially in one line to the other. And The Fool plays a very important role with each of the final cards of the three lines of the majors.
[0:21:45]
So what is the medicine of Line One? What does this line actually teach us? You know, what does it bring forward?
The phrase in Soul Tarot for Line One of Major Arcana is the phrase “I am.”
So, Line One of the Majors is the line where we are welcomed, called, encouraged, to actually feel into who we believe we are, our identity, our labels, who we define ourselves as. It's a line that wants us to essentially be like, sweet babies, you know, discovering our toes and our fingers. It essentially says, on a much larger scale, who are you? I am. Who do you define yourself, you know, who do you believe yourself to be?
It's ego in the highest form, who we identify ourselves as. It's building structure. It's building systems for ourselves of understanding. It's personal inquiry. You know, we're really spending quite a bit of time. This is the line where we get to know us.
And if we look at a more, you know, if we look at the Melanted Classic Tarot or the Smith Rider-Waite, we can see that the archetypes in the Line One cards are pretty visually homogenous. They're human beings who are pretty much seated in the exact same way in the forefront, all of which have a title or an identity that is the name of the card: The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot. The Chariot is really the only one that doesn't include the person. It's not called “The Charioteer”, but there's a point to that, and that has to do with the unique magic of The Chariot card and what it represents, which we'll get to.
The Majors, you know, again, it's… when we are in a place whether — you know, we've all experienced Line One of the Majors because probably, if you're listening to this, you're grown to a certain extent, you're probably — very youngest I imagine — like a teenager, some younger folks might be listening with their their parents or not. I don't know. I love everybody (Lindsay Laughs). But if you're over, like, seven years old, you've been in Line One of the Major Arcana when you learn to crawl, when you learn to say “I want,” when you learn to identify your parents or a caregiver, or when you learned how to take your first steps. This is all Line One stuff, actually. You know, we are meant to discover ourselves. We're meant to embody these archetypes and discover the magic that lives within our beings.
So again, it is ego and self-exploration in the most sacred and important of ways. And in fact, I often teach that the kind of the age range of Line One, if we were to kind of contextualized in that way is roughly one years old to around 18 years old, a really crucial, foundational time to come into our own and know who we are.
Now, if you have changed your name, transitioned, come out, totally and radically altered your identity, you have… maybe you were in a relationship or you were in a situation where once you got out, you’re like “Holy shit. I feel like I'm a new person. Like I'm a baby again,” you've been in Line One.
[0:26:00]
We've all repeated Line One in our adult years, and it's a very, very, very... it can be really intense, but it is a very special, specific time where we're discovering like, “Wow, like, I get to play in the playground of me.” Like that's really what we learn to do.
So in Line One, we flow from Magician to High Priestess to Empress to Emperor to Hierophant to Lovers to Chariot. In The Magician, we're learning that we have the ability to be a vessel for something greater than us, and we learn right away that when we are open to this magic, when we are open to the medicine of Mercury, when we're open to that energy that wants to come through our being that specifically chooses and says yes to us, that we can channel down what was once in the invisible realm and make it visible. Very powerful, huge, huge thing. “I create. I allow. I am a vessel. I am connected to something larger than myself.”
In High Priestess, we learn what it is to be receptive in a different way. We learn what it is to move in a lunar rhythm, that it's not so cut and dried. We learn to become still and quiet in new ways. We learn that we actually are moons in and of ourselves, always changing, always regenerating, that those sides are in us, those deep rich tidal pulls happen inside of us, and we get to bow to a totally new thing.
And The Magician is very powerful and very much about receptivity, but it's focused on actually bringing it down but out. The function of The Magician is to be a receptor but to bring it out of us. The High Priestess is about really letting something drop in and having there be a deep, internal process that is initiated by that receptivity. So essentially we learn to go out in The Magician, we learn to go in in the High Priestess. Very important foundational functional pieces.
[0:28:53]
With The Empress we are invited. I don't know if we ever learn this (Lindsay Laughs) in like a flat way. We’re invited to receive. We open. We learn what it is to to cut our hands and open. Receiving is really hard.
High Priestess gets us some of the way there. We learned how to actually receive information wisdom through being aligned with lunar rhythms, but Empress invites us to receive from the external world. It invites us to be open to fruit and flowers and sun and massages and abundance and care from ourselves, from others. It could be very, very small, it could be very, very big, but it will generally… this card really wants to radically expand our threshold of receiving in the external world.
The Emperor teaches us how to rise up like mountains. It teaches us how to take up sacred space, that we have a right, a birthright, to speak. There's space for us here. The Emperor, when we're really in touch with the truth of it, also teaches us when to listen. So it's a very powerful, aligned energy of deep, radical giving.
You know, I'm in — I often have used this example before — I'm in Emperor right now, talking to you, and, you know, I'm not taking away space from anybody by existing on my podcast. Like you can tune in, you can not, there's no control.
We learn from the mountain. We learn from the douglas fir. We learn from the mighty redwood. We learned from the eagle. We learned from anything that expands without apology, that exists in space without an apology. A mountain doesn't take up space, and when we're in true alignment with the Emperor, neither do we. Emperor reverse, then we have to, we want to bring some reflection to it right?
[0:31:20]
The Hierophant: we learn how to become our own source of wisdom. We learn to confront the belief systems that we inherited, that we were taught, that we gained, or even unconsciously inherited from our caregivers, from where we lived, from our community, from a religion that we were raised in.
The Hierophant is a belief, you know. It brings into our attention a belief that doesn't actually align with our truth, and that is a moment where we get to radically begin to trust our own knowing, where we don't have to look to anybody else, actually. Hierophant's always been spoken about as a card that has to do with a teacher, somebody else that’s not… I think if it has to do with a teacher, it actually has to do with us remembering that our teachers are human and are not above us. Right?
It really invites us to even out power structures and to just deeply question and to say, “Okay, great, this person can say this. I don't have to agree, or if I think it's a big problem, I can bring it to their attention, you know, but can I question it? Why am I believing what I’m believing?”So the Hierophant is where we reclaim our power. That's really what's true.
In The Lovers, we learn how to actually give ourselves what we tend to externalize out on others. It's kind of bringing a transference into our bodies. It teaches us that you know The Lovers is a huge mirror, you know. Where are we looking outside of ourselves for love, for affection, for approval? Where are we comparing ourselves? Where are we telling ourselves stories? Where are we assigning so much meaning and significance to an other when it's really the other that is just reflecting back to us our own magnificence? It's a pretty wild thing, The Lovers, and can kind of like short circuit people's brains, but we do this all the time. We do this all the time.
We all have people, you know, that we hope will give us what we're unwilling to kind of give ourselves. And The Lovers, we can't really move into Chariot without really recognizing the places where we do that, where we kind of want other people to be our source.
It's a really important step after Hierophant to clear out other people needing to give us anything, because from that point on in the journey of the Major Arcana, it doesn't ever come up again. Line One, that foundational line is where we're asked to clear it up, really early in the journey, which is pretty wild (Lindsay Laughs).
[0:34:40]
And finally, we arrive in The Chariot. And I teach in my course that Line One is the line of the caterpillar. Its life, its birth, its new feeling. The caterpillar has to, is meant to, eat, is meant to get, like, rich and robust in size, it's meant to take everything in. We learn so much about creation, about our own inner rhythms, we learn about our relationship to receiving. Most of us feel completely unworthy to receive and our medicine around that about actually taking up space.
Believe it or not, like doing podcasts, you know, I don't seem shy, but I am (Lindsay Laughs). Like, you know, it's hard. It's confronting, it’s a vulnerable thing to do a podcast. Once they get going, it's great. But, you know, that's scary. So, but it can be scary to be an Emperor.
Hierophant is often very uncomfortable, because beliefs feel so true. You know, we don't even think they’re beliefs, we just think like, “Well, this is what it is.”
So it's a huge piece because Hierophant represents a being who is a deep channeler, and channelers have human brains that are subject to all kinds of biases and human filters and belief systems, and it's part of our job to be really aware of that, you know. It's where we get to look at our relationship to authority, to celebrity culture, to making teachers gurus and gods in our eyes, and Hierophant actually invites us to divest from all that, to reclaim. It's a very important card for right now, and we'll be moving through it next year, which I am really looking forward to, even though it's gonna be really intense.
Yeah, The Lovers like who are you? It takes it a step further, like where are you making other people your source? Where are you unable to take in your own magnificence? The Lovers is a lifelong lesson. We do all of this work in The Lovers in the course of our life. It's very intense, you know, can pull a lot of stuff up for us, but is ultimately so freeing, and so beautiful.
[0:37:14]
So then we click over into The Chariot.
So I teach The Chariot from a very, very different perspective than anyone, and even than I used to. I used to really teach it more of the classic sense, that it's like a wonderful omen of victory and success, and you can congratulate yourself — and I don't want to take that away from anybody. I think that's perfectly lovely. And we're so fucking bad at celebrating ourselves, human beings, that I think any excuse to do so is great — but The Chariot goes way further.
And the fact that it's ruled by Cancer really speaks to that. Because with Cancer, you have the crab shell, and then you have the flesh of the crab that is so tender and protected. And really, I believe that kind of simplistic victory, great job interpretation is only… we've only gone so far with that as the crab shell. Like we don't... that's it, you know? How can we go further? You know, how do we work with the medicine of Cancer and of the crab, you know. The Chariot is lunar, because Cancer is ruled by the moon.
So The Chariot, at its core, is not just a symbol of victory. It is because we made it through Line One. We learned, we walked through the fires of these six cards that came before us, and really, shit looks pretty good in Line One. Like, you've got your power, you've got your ability to kind of connect with yourself, you've got an ability to receive to the point where you can, you have your sense of power and spaciousness and in taking up space. You may, in the Hierophant, have a healthy relationship with looking to yourself as your source. You may also only be looking to other people as your source.
There's always dualistic sides to these cards. You know, are we really leaning into them in a way that's ultimately super, super integral, like the best we can do? Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. That’s the whole point is that we're reflecting, we're learning, always, always.
Are we really connected with ourselves in The Lovers? Are we devoted to beginning to try to do the deep work of internalizing the places where we tend to lay on others love, importance, like trying to get them to approve of us, love us? Typically not. Some of us are doing that work, right. Some of us aren't. Some of us do it during certain times. Some of us don't.
You know, it's really easy with The Chariot to stay there forever. Because the whole thing with The Chariot is that it looks so good. The Chariot looks so good. The Charioteer is so good looking. It looks like they've got it all figured out, right? It's all perfect on the outside, picture perfect.
But when we look a little closer we notice that The Chariot kind of has, like, doesn't look super sturdy, you know. On the Smith Rider-Waite, like, it's got concrete wheels. It doesn't have horses drawing it but sphinxes, and it looks a little bit like it's cardboard. It doesn't look like it would take you very far.
Does that Chariot look like it could take you through the fires of The Tower and stay strong? Does it look like it could ride with you on the Wheel of Fortune? Does it look like it could work with you, travel with you through the waters, through the fires of the Death card?
No. No, it doesn't. It looks good, but it's very flimsy.
[0:42:04]
And that is, ultimately, in a much larger sense, like we're seeing the Earth from space, what Line One teaches us; that the “I am” is really the little “I”. It's the ego “I”. You aren't anything. Of course we have the identity and the way we self identify is so crucial. It's crucial, you know, in this life, in these bodies, and yet you are way beyond any label, any identity.
The Chariot is about victory that you made it here, but a lot of people get it confused. And they think, “Well, this looks so good. Why would I ever mess with it? I can't let people know that I'm, like, on thin ice in this way. I can’t let people know I'm not sure. I can't let people know that I don't want to do this anymore, but everybody thinks I'm so happy. Everybody thinks that this is so successful, that this is going so great. I can't let people know this.” That's very Chariot, right? Very Chariot.
There's huge protection. There's a desire to kind of… there's a grappling. Is the ego going to win out? Are we going to let things kind of look good, but ultimately not really be serving us? Are we going to hold on to the structure that we can't go forward with it? We can't, it's impossible.
Or are we going to do the most radical thing possible and bow with the fullest heart to that Chariot, step out of it and walk away? Are we going to stay locked, hidden, in this crab shell? Or are we going to metaphorically shed and release it and allow ourselves to be reborn
[0:44:17]
The Chariot is not ultimately a symbol of the kind of victory that the ego values, but is a representation of the endless cycle of life, death, and rebirth that we are asked to go through all the time. It is one of the most important thresholds that we will ever face in our life.
Do I continue to do this thing that does not work, but looks really good? Or do I make the choice to walk away? Do I leave behind on purpose? Do I choose to release this armor? Do I stay in this relationship? Because like they're there it's working? Or do we leave and become evolved into who we're ready to be? Are we willing to face being by ourselves? Are we willing to face the stuff that maybe we're not, we haven't been ready to face?
When The Chariot comes, it's letting us know that we have a bright, beautiful, and wholly transformative choice at hand. We can hold on to those old structures, or we can shift. We can wait until Tower to be kicked out of them, or we can drop in and really allow that to unfold in a really powerful way. You know?
We are always moving through Chariots. We've moved through Chariots over and over again. Chariot medicine is a card that walks with us from birth to death. It's an endless, beautiful, constant threshold that we walk through again and again in this life. We move through countless Chariots in our lifetime. We are in relationships until we're ready not to be. We're in homes that hold us until we're ready to leave them behind. The placenta that we grew as babies in is your first chariot. Your baby teeth, you know, your old shoes, your old shoe size, your identities that the gender that some of us were born into, we leave that behind because we were not born in the gender that aligns with us. We can change our name.
All of nature understands the medicine of Chariots. We’re meant to leave them behind. We constantly leave things behind. We grow out of them. We step away. Anything that holds us, that cradles us lovingly, knowing it's the way of things for us to grow out of them, so it holds us until we're ready to acknowledge that we can't ultimately go forward without leaving it behind.
[0:47:34]
The womb is an amazing Chariot metaphor and fits quite perfectly with this sense of cancer and, you know, that the divine birth giver, and this idea that we have to, ultimately, we get too big for that space and we have to squeeze our way out into a much larger world, and when we get to the end of Line One we are exactly there.
We've grown too big for it. The womb is a great space. It's a great space (Lindsay Laughs), good bones. We’re too big. We've expanded too much. We have too much to do. We want to go forward. The ego doesn't want to. The egos like, “Let’s fucking stay. Like man we got this figured out here.”
That's our first experience, right, with that dissonance of discomfort, when labor starts we all go, “What the fuck?” you know. And that's that's really where this duet starts of the ego going, “My God. Don't get me out of this comfy space. No!” And the soul saying, “I'm ready.”
And that's what happens when The Fool meets The Chariot and asks us. “Do you want to stay here? Do you want to stay stuck? Or do you want to walk out of this, choosing this growth process, honoring and bowing to the cycles that are, and allow yourself to move into the forest of Line Two, where you will completely clear, shed, and undo everything you thought you knew about yourself, and move into a co-creation with Spirit once you get to Temperance.” It'll give you everything, but you'll have to clear out everything that you thought you were to do it. That's what happens when we get to Chariot.
Again, we get to make that choice. But it is so significant. Because we all we can think of somebody on our mind right now, who's never left their chariot. Right? Who's never left. They didn't want to. They just said, “No, no, thank you. No, I would not prefer, actually, to move into Line Two.” And that's fine.
It's not really any more because the planet can't continue to support that, but people are waking up at the rate they're waking up, some more intensely and harshly than others. It's very, very powerful.
[0:50:34]
So there's many facets with Chariot. There's celebration. You made it through a line. Let's fucking celebrate. Let's reflect and review. What have we learned? Let's bow to and honor. You built this Chariot from all that you learned. Like let's… It brings up deep emotion for me in the heart space.
We don't give ourselves enough credit for how hard we work to do our best to build things, and — in spite of our best efforts (Lindsay Laughs) — not because we make mistakes, you know, or if we do, like, they're not necessarily wrong, we're meant to learn from them. But when we reach a Chariot point, we can just say, “Wow, man, did that take me far. And now I'm being asked to clear this and walk away from it in the hope of building something even better. My god, I don't know.” But it's the same as losing your baby teeth. If you allow it to be, it'll just… they'll fall out. And then new ones will grow in, and that's as simple as that.
And we are in The Chariot as a collective right now. Whoa, boy, are we ever (Lindsay Laughs), because we're in a culture of like, social media, and everything looks so good, and, you know, it's really intense. Right? It's really intense to be honest.
I made an announcement on my newsletter that I'm likely never going to do my Tarot course again, and I will do a Tarot course. It may be called Tarot for the Wild Soul, but it's going to be totally different. But that's a huge Chariot. Huge Chariot.
I just don't want to teach the foundations of Tarot anymore. I want to teach people how to live it. I want to take people further, and I can't do it in the old structure, and it took everything I had to leave that Chariot. I love that course. I loved what I built. Like, it took everything I had to build that course, you know. And it just doesn't want to be anymore in the way that it did. It asked me, don't… were complete, you know.
And something, as soon as it got cleared, something new started to bloom once that was gone, once my crab shell got released, once my story of, “Well what kind of a Tarot teacher would I be if I didn't teach people kind of like, if I didn't start with the older paradigms of Tarot? Like, if I didn't teach the three lines of the Majors what would I be?” To be even admitting that is so big, and it's because I moved through my Chariot around that.
So Chariot isn't bad. It just says if you've gone this far, like, it's a natural process. This tooth wants to fall out? Just let it. Don't hold on to it. You'll get to eat so many more cool things (Lindsay Laughs) once your tooth isn’t, like, loose in your head.
[0:53:58]
So we also bow to the grief of it. I grieved when I knew that my course didn't want to happen again in the same way. Oh my God did I grieve that? And there was also deep joy, deep joy, and excitement for what could be, that could only be if I was willing to walk away.
In order to become who you really are, you have to leave behind who you think you are. So The Chariot is a profound ally for us in these times and for honoring and ritualizing the deep letting go of what just doesn't… of what just doesn't serve us anymore, you know. Where are you currently like a little being that is getting squeezed through the birth canal of life right now, leaving one space for another? That is truly what moving from Chariot to Line Two is. It really is, you know.
And it births us into these new landscapes and levels of growth and tremendous energies. And so that is the Great Rebirth of Line One. We have to allow who we thought we were, what looks good, but ultimately doesn't nurture us, doesn't make us happy. It might look really good, but like a telltale Chariot is if it doesn't, if it's not making you like the dream job you've worked your whole life to get once you get it, you're like, “Wow, didn't give me what I thought it would,” you know, that kind of energy. It's a big part of Chariot, too. So it is the Great Rebirth, the Great Rebirth, the death of who we thought we were.
The Chariot is as far as the ego can get you. That's it. A cardboard box that can't really take you anywhere other than probably through kind of like a parade route (Lindsay Laughs). Like, very simple ground. Very solid, no bumps, no spirals, just a straight line. That's it. Not meant to take us too, too far, right?
[0:56:36]
Again, it's not an insult. That doesn't mean that if you pull The Chariot, I'm suggesting that what all that you've dreamed of is just a flimsy thing. It isn't. These are fucking sacred, like, it's beautiful. It's just your baby teeth aren't going to take you very far. If you kept trying to squeeze your adult feet into your baby shoes, it would really hurt. We’re growing. You're growing. Compared to who you were a month ago, I'm sure that you've radically shifted. I know that's true for me.
So that is the great reverse of The Chariot, is that we learn to shed that crab shell and exist as the flesh underneath it. And this is different than kind of internalizing The Chariot in a reading.
In a reading, I would say like, a lot of the time when we get The Chariot, we're being invited open and become a little bit more willing to be seen. And we have to kind of shed pieces of ourselves that don't match, don't serve, but it's important to recognize that when we're looking at it just kind of in a standard reading — that doesn't really have to do with like our whole soul process — we don't have to let go of the whole Chariot. There are times when we kind of step out for a little bit. We go back in, you know, it really depends.
So yeah, we are so in this energy as a collective. We're really leaving, collectively, Line One, period. I don't think we've ever been. We're, like, we dance into Line Two as a collective, and, of course, that doesn't mean we're not going through Line Three cards. We're in The Tower as a collective.
That’s why Tarot is totally spiralic. It doesn't… can't really be confined with the lines or anything, or even the order of the Majors, even though it's a wonderful way to learn. It's not how it exists in space if we’re really kind of living the Tarot.
[0:58:48]
So, yeah, if you can reflect, when have you been in Line One? How are you in Line One now? When has there been a time when you've awoken to, “Wow, this has been so important for my growth and evolution, and now it's time to let go of it. It's time to walk out of it because where I want to go, this won't take me there,” you know?
A confrontation of our belief systems, our values, our ethics, what we stand for, acknowledging that maybe who we've been collaborating with, or working with, or engaging with, they don't share the same thing. That's a big Chariot, too. Really, ultimately, anything that we step away from that shrinks us in order to be freer doesn't need to be bad. It just took us as far as we needed to go. And now we're going to go further on our own two feet.
Whew. Well, thank you for listening, Wild Souls. I hope that this resonated with you. I loved teaching it to you. As always, this is just my teaching. You don't have to agree with it, doesn't need to resonate with you. If it does, that's great. You keep it. If not, you, you don't have to take it in.
And I encourage you to do your own meditating about The Chariot. You know, what does it mean to you? You know, where have you, again, experienced this? And how can you correlate it to experiences in your life where you've really allowed that Chariot medicine to move through you? We've all been through it, all of us. So sometimes it's just about tracking, again, and laying your life down next to it, so that we can become a little bit more clarified about what it's bringing.
(Instrumental exit music)
Have an absolutely beautiful week, and I will catch you at the next episode. Until then, please take care of yourselves.
[Conclusion]
[1:00:56]
Thank you so much for listening to Tarot for the Wild Soul.
This podcast was edited by Chase Voorhees. The podcast art is by Chelsea Iris Granger and it is hosted by me, Lindsay Mack. For more about the podcast, visit wildsoulpodcast.com or follow us on Instagram, @wildsoulhealing. For more about me and my work, please visit lindsaymack.com.
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Thank you so much for being here.
[1:01:42]