Temperance

Origin and iconography

In the Visconti-Sforza Tarocchi of c. 1450 Temperance is shown as a standing female figure pouring liquid from one vessel to another, the classical Roman virtue of temperantia personified. The Tarot de Marseille of the 17th century gives her angelic wings and places her in profile, pouring water from a red vessel into a blue one in a continuous stream. A flower or star appears in her hair. The trump bears the title Temperance consistently across editions and sits in the deck as the antidote to the harshness of the preceding card.

Pamela Colman Smith's 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith Temperance depicts the angel Michael with red wings and the solar disk on the brow, dressed in a long white robe bearing the Hebrew tetragrammaton on the chest and the square-and-triangle alchemical symbol over the heart. The angel stands with one foot on dry land and one in a pool of water, pouring liquid between two golden cups in a stream that paradoxically flows uphill. Yellow irises grow on the bank, and a winding path leads to a distant crown of light between two mountains. The Thoth deck of Crowley and Harris (1938-1943) renames the trump Art, depicting a double-bodied figure mixing fire and water.

Upright and reversed meaning

Upright, Temperance signals the patient blending of opposites until they form a workable whole. She marks recovery, the slow restoration of health, the gradual rebuilding of a relationship after a rupture, and creative work that requires synthesis rather than novelty. The card describes the practitioner who has learned the right proportions, the cook who tastes as she goes, the therapist who titrates intervention to the moment. She favours moderation as a discipline rather than as restraint, and she rewards small, consistent adjustments over dramatic gestures.

Reversed, Temperance can describe imbalance, excess, the loss of the right proportions, or impatience with a process that requires time. She may show a healing that has been interrupted by premature action, or a synthesis that has been forced rather than allowed. As a phase, the reversed card invites you to slow the pour, to taste before adding, and to honour the time it takes for elements to mingle. She returns upright when patience replaces urgency, and when the seeker accepts that integration is incremental rather than instant.

In readings

When Temperance appears in your spread, look at what is being slowly integrated. In love readings she favours reconciliations, the deepening of trust, blended families, and partnerships that combine very different temperaments through careful mutual adjustment. With Strength she completes a long arc of patient self-mastery; with Death she follows the ending and ushers in the rebuilding.

In professional readings Temperance favours mediation, healthcare, recovery work, hospitality, education, and any vocation that asks you to hold tension between two parties or two materials. She often appears around long-term collaborations and sustainable business models. In a Celtic Cross she may occupy positions of inner resource or near future. Spiritually she is the practitioner of the middle way, the daily practice that sustains rather than peaks. In a Rider-Waite reading the path winding to the distant crown is the cipher: the work is gradual, not sudden.

Symbolic depth

In the Golden Dawn system Temperance is assigned to the Hebrew letter Samekh, the support or prop, and to the path connecting Tiphareth to Yesod on the Tree of Life. Her astrological attribution is Sagittarius, the mutable fire sign of the philosophical archer, ruled by Jupiter, which echoes the angel's ranging gaze and the long path in the background. The number 14 is twice 7, the doubled cycle, the rhythm of fortnight and lunar phase that organises convalescent time.

Mythologically Temperance draws on Iris, the messenger goddess of the rainbow who linked heaven and earth, on the cardinal virtue of temperantia, and on the alchemical solve et coagula, the dissolving and reconstituting that produces the philosopher's stone. Carl Jung read the archetype as the integration of opposites in the transcendent function, the third that emerges from the held tension of two. In Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, Temperance is the Magic Flight or Refusal of the Return mediated, the transitional state in which the boon is being prepared for delivery into the world before the seeker meets The Devil.

Also known as

• Temperance
• Art
• La Temperance
• Key XIV
• The Alchemist