Temperance

Temperance began as one of the four cardinal virtues and ended up as something considerably stranger, and the change is traceable.

The fifteenth-century card is a straightforward personification: a figure, usually winged, pouring liquid between two vessels. Temperance in the medieval sense is not moderation in the modern weak sense of doing less; it is the correct mixing of things, and the standard image for it is diluting wine with water. That is what the vessels are for. The virtue is proportion.

The occult tradition read the pouring differently. Once the tarot had been attached to alchemy, a nineteenth-century move, not a fifteenth-century one, the two vessels became the combination of opposed substances, the figure became an angel presiding over a work, and the card became about synthesis rather than restraint. The Golden Dawn assigned it the letter Samekh, the sign Sagittarius, and the twenty-fifth path from Tiphareth to Yesod, which in that system is the path of the arrow shot upward through the middle of the Tree, and gave it the alchemical title Art. Crowley kept that title for his own version.

So the card carries two readings that are almost opposites in emphasis. One counsels not overdoing it. The other counsels combining two things that do not obviously go together and standing over the mixture while it works. Both are in use, and a reader who knows only the first will find the card oddly weak in spreads where the second is what is happening.

The historical point worth holding onto is that the alchemical reading was applied to the card rather than found in it. Nothing connects the fifteenth-century virtue to the laboratory except the shared image of pouring, and the connection was made by nineteenth-century writers who were reading both traditions at once and were pleased to find them agreeing.

In practice this card is read for patience, for the correct proportion of two things, and for a process that cannot be hurried without ruining it. Its most reliable single sense is rate: the card frequently turns up when the querent is doing the right thing at the wrong speed.

The second common reading is reconciliation, either between people or between two commitments inside one person. This follows from the vessels: what the card describes is not choosing between two things but finding the ratio at which both survive. That distinguishes it usefully from the Lovers, which is about choosing, and from Justice, which is about weighing.

The third, from the alchemical layer, is the work itself, a long combination whose product is not yet visible and cannot be judged from its current state. This reading is much less common in popular books and is often the one that actually fits.

Waite's reversed meanings for the card run to conflict of interests, competing demands and things that will not combine, which is a coherent negation for once. Readers who do not use reversals get the same reading from an upright Temperance among cards of disorder, and it is worth noting how often the reversal debate resolves this way: the two schools identify the same meanings and disagree only about which mechanism surfaces them. That is a smaller disagreement than the volume of argument about it suggests.

One practical note. Because Temperance so often reads as rate, it is among the most useful cards in the deck for timing questions, and among the least useful for yes-or-no ones. A querent who wants to know whether something will happen and draws this card has usually been told when, and the answer is not soon.