Major Arcana · 14
Temperance
Tempérance (Tarot de Marseille) · La Temperanza (Italian tarocchi) · Daughter of the Reconcilers; Bringer-Forth of Life (Golden Dawn) · Art (Thoth Tarot)
A winged angel pouring water between two cups, one foot on land and one in a pool. In the Waite–Smith tradition Temperance stands for balance, moderation and the patient blending of opposites.
Upright balance · moderation · patience · harmony · blending · healing · purpose
Reversed imbalance · excess · impatience · discord · overreaching · lack of long-term vision
- Astrology
- Sagittarius
- Element
- Fire
- Hebrew letter
- Samekh
- Number
- 14
- Golden Dawn title
- Daughter of the Reconcilers; Bringer-Forth of Life
- Yes or no
- Yes
Upright
Temperance is the art of the right measure. In the Waite–Smith tradition the card signifies moderation, patience, harmony and the skill of combining different elements into something whole. It belongs to the slow work of healing and integration rather than dramatic change.
Love and relationships: compromise, mutual adjustment and a calm, steady bond. It can describe two people learning to blend their lives, or a reconciliation after strain.
Work and money: cooperation, sensible pacing and finding a middle way between competing demands. Readers favour it for long projects, negotiations and any work that requires mixing skills or people.
Advice: avoid extremes and give things time. The angel pours carefully, without spilling; readers take this as a lesson in proportion — enough effort, enough rest, enough of each ingredient — and in trusting a gradual process to produce a lasting result.
Reversed
Upside down, Temperance points to a mixture that has gone wrong. Readers name excess — too much work, spending, indulgence or emotion — and its swing into the opposite extreme. They also describe impatience, quarrels from incompatible demands, and a loss of the long view.
In relationships it can show friction from unequal effort or a failure to compromise. At work it may suggest overcommitment or a team that cannot pull together.
Many readers avoid reversals altogether, preferring to read imbalance from the company the card keeps in a spread.
The image
Smith's Temperance is a winged angel in a long white robe, with red wings and a golden disc on the forehead. On the breast of the robe is a square containing a triangle. The angel pours a stream of water from one golden cup into another, the flow running at an impossible slant. One foot rests in a pool, the other on the grassy bank, where yellow irises bloom. Behind, a path winds up toward distant mountains, over which a crown of light glows.
History
Temperance is the third of the cardinal virtues in the trump sequence, and in medieval and Renaissance art she was commonly shown diluting wine with water by pouring between two jugs — the classical image of moderation. The Visconti-Sforza card and the Tarot de Marseille's Tempérance both show a woman pouring between vessels; the Marseille figure already has wings.
The Golden Dawn attributed the card to Sagittarius and the Hebrew letter Samekh, and its rituals linked the image with alchemical mixing. Waite's Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910) describes the angel as pouring the essences of life from one chalice to another. Aleister Crowley, in the Thoth deck, renamed the card Art and turned it into an alchemical wedding of fire and water.
Symbolism
The pouring between cups signifies the blending of opposites and the flow of life between states — conscious and unconscious, spirit and matter. One foot in water and one on land shows balance between feeling and the practical world. The square with the triangle within is read as spirit housed in matter, three within four, adding to seven. The irises recall Iris, the rainbow messenger of the Greek gods, and the path to the crown suggests a long journey toward fulfilment. Readers often identify the angel with the archangel Michael or Raphael, though Waite does not name one.
Fourteen reduces to five, and Waite's sequence places Temperance immediately after Death, as healing follows loss. Sagittarius, ruled by Jupiter, is the archer aiming at a distant goal. Samekh, "prop" or "support", lies on the central path between Tiphareth and Yesod on the Tree of Life, traditionally a path of balance.
In a reading
Temperance usually softens a spread and counsels patience. With the Lovers it suggests harmony in partnership; with the Two of Pentacles, the juggling of commitments; with the Devil, the struggle between moderation and excess. As an outcome it points to a gradual, stable resolution.
Sources and further reading
- The Pictorial Key to the Tarot — A. E. Waite, 1910
- The Book of Thoth — Aleister Crowley, 1944
- The Tarot: History, Symbolism, and Divination — Robert M. Place, 2005
- Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom — Rachel Pollack, 1980