Today the fool reaches the end of the second line of cards. Here is card 14, temperance. After the sights, sounds and smells of death, and the initial fear it imposed, the fool is relieved.
The second line has encouraged him to come face-to-face with the unconscious layer of his personality. He’s tired, verging on exhaustion but hopes this card will bring a moment of respite.
The temperance angel seems calm and assured. With one foot on the land and the other foot in water, with water being poured from one cup to another.
The card seems to offer balance and comfort which the fools feels in need of.
A. E. Waite described temperance as a winged angel… neither male or female.
Some say this angel is Cassiel, while others believe it’s the archangel Michael.
The exact name doesn’t really matter.
Labelling is a human tradition.
The fool appreciates the convenience of names but when it comes to the universal, they often belong to different, sometimes contradictory, belief systems.
Tarot works on the intuitive level of the high priestess. She was the second archetype the fool met on his walk through the tarot, but it’s taken another 12 cards to begin to understand this.
True knowledge through meaningful experience is less likely to be found on the surface. It relates more to what’s been learned underneath.
Definitive names can be practical but have less importance in the inner world of unconscious thought and action.
At the end of his journey through his unconscious self, the fool realises the angel doesn’t need to be named.
What the card represents matters more.
Temperance comes from the latin temperare which means to combine or blend and in early tarot decks temperance was a portrayal of the virtue representing moderation and balance.
You can too much of a good thing.
Delayed gratification is often more pleasurable than an instant response to desire.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, temperance of character was seen as a virtuous trait.
In renaissance Italy where the tarot first appeared, temperance blended wine with water, an action which was often necessary because undiluted wine was strong, quickly leading to drunkenness.
When the tarot arrived in France, wings were added to the angel who often wore a red rose on their forehead.
Some designs like the Jacques Vievil Tarot and the Vandenborre tarot showed water being poured from a cup into a bowl placed on the ground, arguably harder than pouring it from cup to cup without spilling.
It continued to represent the need for balance, not just a demonstrable skill but also on a broader level of contradictory forces or dualities, such as body and mind or extreme oppositional emotions.
Some Marseilles-style tarots coloured the cups blue and red, or gold and silver, to emphasise the binary of the conscious and unconscious self.
French occultist Eliphas Levi described the angel as balancing the essences which made the elixir of life or immortality.
This guaranteed the curing of disease and promised eternal life. According to Levi the four-sided square and three-sided triangle represented the septenary whereby the number seven had a particular esoteric significance in natural cycles and taxonomies.
The angel also had the sign of the sun on their forehead.
The Waite/Coleman Smith temperance has one foot on the land and the other in water, mirroring the transfer between the two cups.
The occultists had introduced the idea of merging two opposing parts, such as the psychic and the material, to create a third substance like the philosophers stone, which was another way of speaking about the elixir of life.
Waite also introduced yellow irises which represent the ancient Greek goddess Iris. She took water from the river Styx in the underworld and it was used by Zeus to ensure the keeping of promises.
Her symbol was a rainbow, made from light and water and the symbol of new beginnings. Rainbows also link sky and earth.
On the Waite/Coleman Smith card the top of the angel’s gown has the hebrew letters י-ה-ו-ה which the fool remembers seeing on the wheel of fortune and spell yhwh or yahweh, a Jewish name for god.
He’s getting better at seeing connections between the cards and recalls the square on the armour in the chariot. It had symbolised the elements and the chariot represented success in the physical world but without inner knowledge no further progress could be made.
On temperance the square contains a triangle.
This shows the fool the inner world of the mind and outf the body were now both visible and balanced.
The fool has made progress
In the distance, the light of the sun is rising between two mountains. He’s reminded of the death card where the sun emerged between two pillars.
This sun is higher in the sky and a direct path leads towards it. Both the angel and the rising sun have halos, suggesting spirituality or divinity.
The fool remembers the hanged man who also had a halo to represent his divine enlightenment.
In the Key to the Tarot Waite writes the sun’s rays contain a crown which is a symbol for power and achievement. He calls circle in the angel’s hair the sign of the sun and the dot in the centre the alchemist’s symbol for gold, a common non-esoteric interpretation of the philosophers stone.
The third row of the subconscious self still lies ahead but the way forward is clear.
Water in the tarot is symbolic of emotions and inner awareness. It represents the world of the unconscious and temperance stands astride water and earth, one foot on each. The emotional and spiritual potential of water and the physical reality of earth have combined.
Guidance from the hermit and the serenity of the hanged man are now manifest.
Temperance has absorbed the rainbow and become the promise. The lessons of death have been understood and incorporated.
The fool has learned death represents transitions. The old patterns loved by the ego have been abandoned so the inner self or light can appear.
Rainbows are symbolic of new beginnings and the temperance angel is the fool’s new day. He’s been reborn in the physical world and will not forget how this feels.
Everything about temperance relates to integration and wholeness.
In the Thoth tarot, Aleister Crowley renamed temperance as art which stood for the art of alchemy. The ultimate goal of alchemy was the transmutation of base metal to gold, which can be interpreted as finding divinity within the physical material body.
The two cups contain water which flows between them and many people have pointed out the slant of the water is impossible to achieve.
The angel shows it can be done.
The two sides of the self are combined.
Previous lessons have now been integrated.
Nothing will ever be the same.
When the fool began he was naive. Not foolish but innocent.
The tarot has been a walk of discovery.
There’s so much more to life than he realised.
Clues and symbols were all around him, but without a guide he had no awareness of their secrets.
The fool had to withdraw from the world of conscious thought and action.
He’s passed through the first line of archetypes which represented his consciousness as shaped by social structures.
These had to be seen differently in order to be understood, not to change them but to become more self-aware.
The fool had to step away to find what really matters,.
The spark of divine life within.
The shallowness and deception of desire.
How the fun-loving ego disguises these as meaningful experiences.
He has learned how the ego fiercely guards access to inner awareness lest its power is diminished.
Death required the fool to put ego to one side, to transform the energy of physical desire into a greater spiritual awareness. Not one without the other but together, combined.
The fool is ready to begin the final row of cards which represent his subconscious self. All he has learned so far will be needed.
The next card he meets is the devil, the card of desires and chains.
Join us for the next step on the walk through the tarot.
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