The Point of No Return
Or, how a preschool recital broke the Chariot wide open for me
My nephew received four tickets to his preschool graduation last week. He chose to honor me - his one and only aunt - and my husband as two of the lucky recipients to this venerated event.
Like fools, we timed our arrival on the assurance of ample street parking surrounding the Evangelical Armenian preschool. Little did we know that the high school a few blocks away was holding their graduation that morning as well. So by the time we ducked into the cafegymatorium and into the seats my brother-in-law had saved for us, the audience was hushed and waiting for the festivities to begin.
I looked up at the stage and admired the ornate rainbow-colored balloon arch.
“Ooh, a rainbow? And right in time for Pride! Loves itttt,” I remarked as I slung the strap of my purse over the back of my folding chair.
My husband shot me a look like, “Dude, we just got here.”
I pursed my lips together dramatically and sat back in a promise to behave.
This darling, exuberant, barely comprehensible recital, dear friends, was - alas - not Pride-themed. Rather, we were told the story of Noah’s Ark over and over again - in song, in dance, in memorized recitations in languages I can safely guess were Armenian and English - by four different preschool classes dressed as animals, angels, and I want to say vegetables carrying umbrellas.
(And not to keep harping on the Pride theme, but I’m fairly certain the bunnies were identical twin sisters and the elephants were both definitely boys. Now, I’m no Bible expert, but God gave Noah some fairly explicit instructions on how to repopulate the planet, and I’m not not here for this reinterpretation is all I’m saying.)
The myth of Noah’s ark is one of obedience. God tells Noah in Genesis 7,
“Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate, and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth. Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.”
And Noah did all that the Lord commanded him.
Did you know that flood myths are so prevalent in mythologies from all over the world that historians and scholars pretty much agree that they’re probably rooted in a real prehistoric event? A flood so massive that it left a mark on the collective memory and imagination of humankind?
Of course, as I always tell my mythology students on the very first day of class, I’m not interested in verifying the veracity of any sacred myth, even though it is beyond fascinating when such overlaps occur across hundreds and thousands of years, not to mention multiple continents and seas.
But what this means for us in the context of this, my humble newsletter, is that if you, like me, break out into hives at the thought of taking Bible lessons about obedience to heart, you’re in luck. Because I have other flood myths for you to consider as well.
In Hindu mythology, for example, the God Vishnu comes to the good and devout Manu in the form of a fish and (after the fish grows and grows and grows not unlike Clifford the Big Red Dog) tells him to build an ark because a devastating flood is coming. Manu, of course, obeys and survives and is charged with repopulating the planet, just like Noah.
The Aztecs have a similar flood myth as well, except the human couple in that story disobeys. They follow the rain god Tlaloc’s initial instructions to hollow out the trunk of a cypress tree in order to make a vessel that will allow them to survive a global flood. Unfortunately, the couple gets hungry and catches a fish to eat during the rains, which goes against Tlaloc’s follow-up instructions not to eat anything during the flood. Their punishment? The couple is turned into dogs and the gods start the new era of humanity from scratch. (Gods getting things wrong and trying again and again until they get it right is a recurring theme in Aztec mythology - one I quite like actually.)
And while obedience is a strong theme in these flood myths, what strikes me is the unshakeable trust and faith that is required for such obedience.
Noah, Manu, and plenty of other protagonists of flood myths trusted God and went straight to work. They followed their commands until there was no turning back.
In tarot, this threshold moment is represented by the Chariot.
Both Sallie Nichols, author of Tarot and the Archetypal Journey, and Rachel Pollack, author of Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, organize the Major Arcana of the tarot into three sections. Taking the roaming Fool (card 0) out of the sequence, we get three groups of seven cards each. The Chariot (card 7) ends the first leg of this heroic journey of self-discovery. As such, it is the threshold moment that takes us into the second leg of the journey.
Nichols’ first mention of the Chariot in Tarot and the Archetypal Journey observes:
In card seven, called THE CHARIOT, we see that the hero has found a vehicle to carry him on his journey.
A vehicle.
A vessel.
Even an ark, perhaps?
A threshold, by definition, marks the crossing over from one thing to another. The most common threshold ritual that comes to my mind is that of a newly minted husband carrying his new wife over the threshold the first time they return home after being wed. This small step for man but potentially giant leap for the couple’s psyches marks their crossing over from unmarried life to married life.
[Read more about the Roman God Janus and what tarot has to say about the threshold of January 1st here.]
As I stated above, the Chariot acts as the threshold that takes us from the first row, or stage, of the tarot’s Major Arcana to the second. Nichols elaborates:
This row we are calling the Realm of the Gods because it pictures many of the major characters enthroned in the heavenly constellation of archetypes. Now the hero’s chariot [or ark] carries him down into the second row of cards, which we will call the Realm of Earthly Reality and Ego Consciousness because here the young man [or old man, in Noah’s case] sets forth to seek his fortune and establish his identity in the outer world….[H]e sets out to find his vocation, establish a family of his own [or reestablish the entire human race, in Noah’s case], and assume his place in the social order.
At my nephew’s recital, as one of the cows had a total meltdown on stage (“Don’t have a cow!” I wanted to shout so badly) and his parents - apparently seated behind me - contemplated whether they should go grab him or see if he could recover, I thought more about what we could take from Noah beyond simply “Obey God or else.”
Nobody else knew what Noah knew about the oncoming flood. We can assume that nobody believed Noah since nobody else got on the ark. Nobody else seemed to be worried. It would have been fairly easy for his friends and neighbors to talk Noah down and convince him that he was being crazy. But Noah wasn’t talked down and thus, was probably ostracized from his community. (In fact, the flood myth quite literally and dramatically separates Noah from the rest of humanity!)
Aside from the risk of potential alienation, the command wasn’t easy to follow. Another fantastic reason to ignore this divine message if you ask me! Remember that Noah had seven days to do the impossible. I don’t know what a productive seven days looks like for you, but for me it involves teaching two days a week, grading probably a maximum of 20 essays before I wilt, and getting a Substack newsletter out if I’m lucky!
But Noah wasn’t worried that he was pretty much on his own in this quest. He didn’t let what I’m assuming included real terror about what was to come paralyze him. And he didn’t burst into guffaws at the sheer impossibility of the task ahead of him.
Whether you characterize such divine messages as the word of God, Source, spirit guides, or intuition (my personal choice), the point is that Noah trusted it and obeyed it until the point of no return.
As Michelle Tea describes in Modern Tarot,
Even if you’re chewing your cheeks, you’re biting your nails, and butterflies are swarming in your stomach, the Chariot will not take no for an answer, and it demands that you refuse to take no for an answer too.”
The Chariot asks us to trust our divine vision and intuitive messages even if nobody else does, even if there is no evidence that things will work out, and even when we have no idea what the next stage looks like!
In fact, I’d argue that’s why the tarot Chariot is pulled by sphinxes rather than horses. Sphinxes represent unsolvable riddles and the utter unknown. A Dictionary of Symbols defines the sphinx as "the supreme embodiment of the enigma” and explains that “the sphinx keeps watch over an ultimate meaning which must remain forever beyond the understanding of man.”
The Chariot tarot card represents strong will, determined focus, and - above all - trust in our divine and intuitive knowing, as fuzzy and incomplete as it may be.
We don’t trust our intuition because it lays out every step of the way for us.
We don’t trust our intuition because it leads us down the safest and least risky path.
We don’t even trust our intuition because it makes sense all the time!
We trust our intuition because what else can we do if we are to live a life that is our own? A life that will not always turn out perfectly, to be sure, but a life that we can never look back on and regret or resent. A life that we can be confident we lived by our own terms and the best we knew how.
Have a beautiful and intuitively guided week, tarot bestie.
Always,
Annie
This is SUCH an incredible post! I have been thinking about the chariot a lot of late and, I have been contemplating what it means to trust one's intution despite the doubt, fear and complete lack of evidence. And sometimes even in the face of synchronicities one wishes to doubt as coincidences/ attempts to intellectualise. This practice of 'faith' or faith in pratice, despite all of the above has been a new journey. Especially the ability to distinguish between feeling, thinking and intuition. Thank you for this post!