Walking the path of Temperance

Editor’s Note: If you want to experiment with tarot cards and don’t have any, we provide a free tarot spread generator using the Celtic Wings spread, which is based on the traditional Celtic Cross spread. This article tells you how to use the spread. You can visit Sarah’s website here. –efc

By Sarah Taylor

It seems that, in spite of its appearance in an earlier article (Symbolic Alchemy — A view of The Lovers and Art), Temperance has been tapping me lightly on the shoulder for a few weeks, each time I come to choose a card to study in the major arcana. So I shall ignore it no longer. It feels fitting that today it has its own stage, and with slightly different lighting which should throw up a few more angles.

Both of the cards here — from the Rider-Waite Smith and Xultun Tarot decks, respectively — express the idea of Temperance quite similarly, their different styles notwithstanding. Both of them give me a sense of gentle calmness, of focus and forbearance. I find them very peaceful to look at. Here, between the endings of Death and before the onslaught of energy from The Devil, lies the middle path.

Let’s look at each card and see if we can get a better idea of just what it is to tread this middle path.

Temperance – Rider-Waite Smith

An angel stands in the foreground, clothed in white, its wings outstretched, their tips disappearing off either side of the card. In contrast to the robe, the wings are a deep, blood red. There is a skin-coloured triangle over the angel’s heart, which I take to be a hole rather than appliquéd material, which would make sense: the heart of the angel takes on the form of flesh. Both wings and triangle demonstrate the melding of spirit and matter, held, images of physicality that they are, in the form of a creature that is otherwise viewed as heavenly.

A golden disc with a single dot sits above the angel’s face, as yellow as its hair, and its head radiates light, mirroring the Sun that sits above a distant blue mountain range. In each hand it holds a cup, one slightly raised, linked by a ribbon of water. One of its feet rests lightly on a green bank; the other is submerged in the water, which is clear and calm. To its left grow two yellow flowers — perhaps irises — which reflect the formation of the cups. All of these images to me convey the same idea in different ways: body and soul; the visceral and the transcendent; below and above. And here there is a smooth, continuous, balanced flow between each, denoted by the double stream of water that passes from cup to cup.

The angel is focussed on its hands, but its expression is of calm contemplation rather than frowning concentration. This is meditation rather than manipulation. It is a process of allowing, while holding the balance between the earth and the heavens. The term “state of grace” comes to me here, where “grace” refers to the expression of a form of beingness: one has to be necessarily graceful in order to walk that middle line without faltering or wobbling, resisting the urge to dance off one way or the other.

Temperate Man – Xultun

In the second card, a man stands on the grass (his feet almost mirroring the angel’s), holding a staff in his left hand and a three-legged urn in his right. The staff has a single leaf growing from it, and from the urn pours a stream of water mixed with stars. To me, the staff represents life, to which the figure is holding very firmly — all the while allowing the heavens to flow into the ground before him.

Like the angel in the RWS version, the figure is observer rather than fully involved in the physicality of the process of pouring the water. Control has been relinquished to the natural flow of life that can be found at that point of balance between two worlds.

Arching over him, as the man is arched over the ground, a rainbow seems to spring from a flower on the small shrub behind him, its end resting in the Sun. Again, spirit and matter are moving in unison. The Xultun Tarot’s major arcana are unique in that they join together to form a large picture. The red, swirling cloud above the Temperate Man dominates the sky in the previous card (the Dead Man, or Death). Here, however, it gradually gives way to blue sky, before darkening again in the Bound Man (The Devil). The Temperate Man is a visual fulcrum halfway between its neighbours.

Finally, I find it interesting that there is not only balance within each of the two cards, but between them too. As I mentioned in the first paragraph to this section, the Temperate Man’s feet are in a very similar position to those of the angel. In addition, if you line the cards up side-by-side — RWS on the left, Xultun on the right — the angel’s wing seems to transform into red cloud at the point where both cards meet. The idea of equilibrium takes form even outside the limits of their four edges. Its quality is one of transcendence.

A tale of Temperance

According to dictionary.com, the first definition of “temperance” is “moderation or self-restraint in action, statement, etc.; self-control.” I would say that this is Temperance’s surface meaning, which could refer to something as simple as creating a work-life balance, or of giving up a habit that is slipping into an addiction.

However, there is a depth to this card that is perhaps not noticed at first glance, and I hinted at it when I referred to “the middle path” at the beginning of the article. This is because Temperance isn’t simply about doing: it is also about being. In The Tarot Codex, a book that I refer to quite often here on Planet Waves, writer and psychotherapist Michael Owen explains:

The Temperate Man represents the renewal of life through a continuous exchange between conscious and unconscious, substance and spirit. The word temperance comes from the Latin, temperare, which means to mix or blend, and also to restrain.

He goes on:

Now conscious unites with unconscious, not as sought-after experiences from above, nor a striving for “enlightenment,” but as a part of everyday life where dreams and dailiness are interwoven.

This particular passage jumped out of the page at me, because it is an experience that I know well. I hope you don’t mind my sharing it with you here because, until I applied it to my own life, I found the complexity of Temperance hard to grasp.

Several years ago, I was fully primed for my own version of enlightenment. I loved my then-husband, but our marriage was crumbling. I was trapped in my own story of the past, and its themes played out in my relationship and in my health. I identified so strongly with who it was that I felt I should be, and all that was unacceptable about me, that I reached a point of collapse — which I did, unceremoniously on the floor of the study, my husband at a loss as to what to do with me. I picked myself up, enrolled myself in various therapies, went to yoga, and thought that I had reached that balance Temperance tells us about, in spite of feeling estranged from my husband and from the world around me.

A few months later, the real storm struck: the re-appearance in my life of a man on whom I pinned all of my hopes of salvation coincided with the death of my father. I discarded everything: my marriage, my home, my job, about 35lb, my country of residence. I thought that I was free in the truest sense of the word. And then I found God. Not the God of the bible or of any identifiable religion, but God nonetheless. He didn’t just walk up and nudge me gently. He burst into the room singing and dancing. Everything seemed to dance in unison: there were synchronicities everywhere; I felt complete, unutterable joy; I didn’t walk, I damn-well floated.

I thought that was it: that I was enlightened, that I was self-actualised. Stick a fork in me, I’m done. I felt I was obviously reaching a point where I needed no further therapy. I was nonplussed by my therapist’s comment that perhaps, when I was forty, I would be ready to deal with myself, but I managed to gloss over my misgivings quite effectively. So, yes, I had experienced God — of that I am still sure. I was also completely without an anchor, soaring as I was on clouds of ecstasy. I was, to all intents and purposes, unhinged.

I refused to look at my own darkness, and continued to refuse to do so — until such time as the darkness came to visit me, and I was flung into the night. And here I am, several years down the line, seemingly in the same place as I started. My second marriage is ending, I can feel my story around me, I can feel expectations and condemnations about who I am nipping at my ankles, and gnawing on my consciousness.

But things are different. I committed myself to a process of therapy that has put me through the mill; and that is as it should be. As Lily Tomlin so eloquently put it, “It gets a lot worse before it gets worse.” I am more sure of who I am, and who I am not, than I have been at any other time in my life. There is no knight in shining armour coming to whisk me away — and that goes for God too. I miss those moments of ecstasy, but this time I’m going to bloody well keep my feet on the ground.

I am learning that Temperance is the act of being able to marry spirit and matter in such a way that we don’t lose ourselves in either realm. If we forget that we are spiritual beings, we can become so caught up in our experience that we become stuck — often in a place that becomes hellish to us. If we forget that we are human, we run the risk of sacrificing our experience of life in all its richness — including our feelings, many of which we find to some degree unacceptable — on the altar of spirituality; we use spirit as a means to run away from the reality of what it is to be human.

The Temperance card may be subtle, but the archetype it holds is powerful. It is a reminder that extremes may be compelling, but the other extreme will have its day. What comes out of Temperance is a path that travels between both worlds: the edge of the coin, where you can witness both sides while belonging fully to neither.

There is greater trust in oneself and one’s thoughts and feelings, and anxiety about being one’s own worst enemy lessens. Confusion is replaced by order and one has a greater sense of inner authority and self-containment. Just as steel is tempered to make it stronger there is a firmness of will, and the capacity to face reality “as it is” is strengthened. This card is the beginning of sobriety. [Michael Owen, The Tarot Codex]