A quick search on google reveals several tellings of "The Fool's Journey," though a quick glance through the 1st three shows that none seem to agree with Xaa's interpretation (or re-imagining) of the Chariot card.
Short Answer (Read if you're in a rush):
That's a matter of interpretation. The symbology agrees with Joan Bunning on the Chariot's role in the Fool's Journey, as well as most of the other commonly accepted interpretations. The visual imagery, however, does not.
Long Answer (get a cup of coffee and sit down):
Well, that's the thing - the Fool's Journey is hard to explain because it's interpretation varies so widely. Generally speaking, it's the same thing I mentioned in a previous post - back when I was a kid, I was taking the tarot cards and trying to organize a story out of them. Well, basically, that's what's happening with the Fool's Journey - it's an attempt to string the archetypes shown in each card in a logical progression from beginning to end.
Most of the discussion of the Fool's Journey dates from the 1913 publication of "The Symbolism of the Tarot" by P.D. Ouspensky. You can find a copy of it at this URL:
www.sacred-texts.com/tarot/sot/index.htmOuspensky was a Russian philosopher-cum-mystic who, having gotten hold of one of the early RWS decks, was inspired by it to concieve of the Major Arcana as a journey of spiritual growth. You'll notice that he doesn't string the cards together in numerical order - he instead arranges them in an order of a journey that makes sense to him.
Other authors that followed, however, have written the Fool's Journey strictly following the order of the major arcana, and attempting to describe each step of spiritual progression in order, following Arthur Waite's order of the Major Arcana (which, incidentally, varies from the order given in earlier decks, such as the Tarot of Marseilles of the 15th century). The most commonly repeated version of this can be found here:
www.learntarot.com/journey.htm This is Joan Bunning's version, and copyright be damned, you can find it everywhere on the web. Still, she lifted much of what she wrote from Stuart Kaplan's essay on the subject, who in turn lifted much of what he wrote from Eden Gray, who got much of her ideas from Ouspensky, so there we are.
Note, however, that in all the above cases, this is still an attempt to string together archetypal images into something that makes sense as a sort of story of a metaphysical journey of self-discovery and maturation. And, as I mentioned before, the interpretations of the images seen in the cards varies from person to person - what one person sees isn't necessarily what another person sees.
This difference in viewpoint is also seen in literature. George Lucas viewed Luke Skywalker as the archetypal hero of John W. Campbell's "Hero With A Thousand Faces." Literally every step of the action and plot in the first movie (now called "Episode Four") follow's Campbell's outline of the Universal Myth. Others, however, see the movie and see something completely different in the character. Many deride him as hotheaded, immature, and at the end of the story, he really hasn't changed much from that. It's the same character - but, interpretations vary based on who is looking at him.
Similarly, interpretations of the imagery in Tarot cards vary, based on who is looking at them. When we look at any piece of artwork, we bring to our viewing experience our background, our cultural mindset, our personal beliefs, and our understanding (or lack of understanding) of human nature. Is the Mona Lisa smiling because she is happy, or is she smiling because she has a secret? How we interpret her enigmatic expression varies based on who we are, and how each of us got to be the way we are.
So, what I'm trying to do is stick with the generally agreed-upon "divinatory meanings." And, in the case of the Chariot, the divinatory meaning is "Perseverance, a journey, a rushed decision, adversity, turmoil, vengeance."
Now, here's where we get into something interesting. Prior to the US Games publication of the RWS deck in the 1970's (they very literally built their company on it), the interpretations of the cards varied slightly. Around the turn of the century, Arthur Waite tried to draw together all the varying interpretations into an essay on each card, which Pamela Coleman Smith then drew for him. These interpretations then became the "official" interptetations generally accepted by everyone for the next sixty years or so - until US Games picked up the art and publishing rights to the RWS deck, and began sticking a little tiny pamphlet with each one that was Arthur Waite's "Pictorial Guide to the Tarot", heavily abridged. Realizing that many people weren't going to have the patience to plough through Waite's turn-of-the-century prose, Stuart Kaplan printed a brief summary for each card at the top of it's entry in their little booklet. For the Chariot, that interpretation was "Perseverance, a journey, a rushed decision, adversity, turmoil, vengeance."
Boom - that brief synopsis suddenly becomes written in stone for an entire generation during the 70's, and for those to follow.
Not that Stuart Kaplan wasn't properly equipped to do the job of synopsizing the cards, however. Kaplan has written a (so far) three-volume series on the Tarot, covering it's history and earliest origins, the meanings given to each of the cards over time, how they changed, and why.
Interestingly enough, the whole idea of using Tarot cards as tools of divination appears to date from about the 18th century. The earliest sets of Tarot cards were rich with Christian symbols and christian allegory, to the point where the Catholic Church in the 16th century actually approved of the images as being appropriate teaching tools. Yet, at the same time, it's been argued that the originators of the cards, Romany Gypsies, had altered the images to be more acceptable to the Church sometime in the 15th century. The "non-catholic" interpretation that Arthur Waite gave to the images was, in his day, an attempt to return to the "original" - yet, at the same time, Waite took the opportunity to insert quite a bit of Masonic, Khabbalic and Rosicrucian symbology into each image that hadn't been there before - again, his attempt to gather all that had been before, and put it all together.
In essence, what we have is a database of interpretations which grew wider and wider and wider prior to the turn of the century - they all generally agreed in the broadest of terms, but disagreed on specifics. Then Arthur Waite comes along, gathers all these opinions together, inserts his own, and codifies it. Waite had a view of the Tarot deck as being a sort of "esoteric filing cabinet" for a whole host of ideas, symbols and archetypes - a filing cabinet to which he added his own ideas and thoughts, as well.
Well, then in 1949, Joseph W. Campbell publishes "Hero With A Thousand Faces." Now, this had absolutely nothing to do with the Tarot. Nothing at all. Campbell was writing about literature, subconscious archetypes, and how all the greatest stories that had ever been told were really repeats of the same basic story, the Universal Myth he called "The Hero's Journey." It was, in short, a book on mythology and storytelling as common to all of humanity.
But, following the publication of "Hero With A Thousand Faces", people began applying the same notion to the images of the Tarot cards, trying to see the underlying hero-myth that they contained. Authors such as Eden Gray went into great detail on the Fool's Journey, trying to come up with what is essentially a story for each of the major arcana cards in numerical order, explaining a story of overall metaphysical enlightenment. Thus, the notion of the "Fool's Journey," originally concieved by P.D. Ouspensky around the turn of the century, was reborn in the 50's and 60's to a new generation, and codified in the 1970's in Stuart Kaplan's writings which were included with the RWS deck, the most commonly used deck today.
Seventy years after the publication of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, Stuart Kaplan at US Games repeated Arthur Waite's explanations for each of the cards in a little insert that went along with each deck that US Games published - but, he provided a terse summary at the top for each one. The information in the random, esoteric filing cabinet filtered again, down to the core data. Modern interpretations are expanding again, but they tend to follow along with the terse summaries provided by US Games.
It's this "core data" element that, to me, makes the cards the most interesting. The most basic, the most raw of archetypal information. Human experience and knowledge boiled down to a series of short descriptions, just as each simple image was originally meant to have meaning to the original viewers - a picture being worth a thousand words, yet those words being ones that resonate with our communal subconscious, as universally recognized archetypes of experience. And I do mean "universal" - check out this page on a Chinese tarot deck.
www.learntarot.com/chdesc.htmSo, in essence, the "modern" boiled-down meanings that are today generally accepted all come from Stuart Kaplan. The "Fool's Journey" idea began to take off, thanks to the embrace of Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" in 1949, and it's acceptance was only accellerated by Kaplan's writings. Together with popular understandings of Jungian psychology, the Fool's Journey and the notion of personal analysis through Tarot have today overshadowed the "esoteric filing cabinet" concept that had existed back in Arthur Waite's day.
So, in getting back to the Chariot, the basic meaning is "Perseverance, a journey, a rushed decision, adversity, turmoil, vengeance." The image carries that. The basic "journey" and "hasty decisions" meanings of the traditional interpretation are easily carried by the image - when you're riding on a jet engine, you're going somewhere pretty fast, and your decision to ride a jet engine with grips wasn't necessarily a wise one. Where this fits in with the Fool's Journey should be fairly easy to see. In The Chariot, we see the Fool as an adult, with a strong identity and a degree of mastery over themselves. Through willpower and perhaps a bit of discipline, the Fool has developed the control necessary for them to, for the present, triumph over their immediate environment - an environment that is often quite risky, and is risky as a direct consequence of the Fool's choices. One *chooses* to get on a ride like that, it doesn't just happen. In short, the Chariot represents the strong (perhaps even headstrong) ego that is the Fool's greatest achievement at this point. Here, we see the Fool as a proud, commanding figure, riding victoriously over their world. They are, for the moment, in complete control of both themselves and all they command, and ready to engage any difficulty or enemy that may come in the future. The Fool's self-confidence is at it's peak, as it is the assured and wide-eyed confidence of the young. In the reversed card, we see the folly of headstrong self-confidence and rash exuberance - the Fool, out of control, zooms towards the ground and an immenent crash. Conflicts faced by the Fool were not overcome victoriously, defeat and ignominy await.
There - not so different after all, you see? It's mostly a matter of interpretation.