Tarot Card Meanings: Temperance

‘Try to realise it’s all within yourself
No one else can make you change
And to see you’re really only very small
And life flows on within you and without you

When you’ve seen beyond yourself then you may find
Peace of mind is waiting there
And the time will come when you see we’re all one
And life flows on within you and without you’

(Within You Without You’ by The Beatles (Harrison)

Welcome to my temperate flow! Temperance is the fourteenth card of the Major Arcana, and traditionally represents balance, moderation, patience, harmony, and the blending of opposites.

When I first started learning the Tarot, I didn’t really like the Temperance card. I simultaneously found it a bit confronting (my little ADHD brain is not temperate! I am a person of chaotic, and often distressing, extremes, and this card calls me out), and also a bit wishy-washy (be virtuous, take the middle path, everything in moderation, blah blah blah 😴).

However, having done a deep dive, I am now much more pro-Temperance, lol.

I also know I am not alone in my dislike! I attended Maddy Elruna‘s Tarot course (it’s fab, you should do it!) and she said it’s one of her least favourite cards, while Jen Cownie and Fiona Lensvelt also write about how they used to view the card with foreboding. In Wild Card, they point out that Temperance is a card of balance and moderation and, “for most people… that’s not familiar territory. A healthy medium is not the default condition of modern living. Our culture pushes us towards productivity and excess: we’re repeatedly told we can do more and achieve more, work harder, jump higher, consume better, and optimise ourselves to achieve the dream.” MORE MORE MORE! So perhaps part of the problem with Temperance isn’t that it’s boring, but that what it’s asking of us is actually really blimmin’ difficult.

But the key here is that Temperance isn’t even really about moderation. It’s about modulation. It’s not about reducing power, holding back, becoming something lesser and weaker, making ourselves all neat and polite and acceptable and within the middle range. Rather it’s about making changes and adjustments to create something new, something better. It’s about optimising our potency, not reducing it. This is what finally made Temperance click for me. The card isn’t really saying, calm down, you’re being too much (triggered, lol). It’s asking: how can you take all these different, perhaps even contradictory, parts of yourself and work with them? How can you adjust the proportions, the pressure, the flow? What happens when you learn not to suppress those forces, but to combine them differently?

Temperance asks us for an alchemic change in the self. And that isn’t bland or passive at all. It’s a skill: learning to handle volatile and opposing forces, to bring them together without extinguishing either of them, and in doing so to create something that didn’t exist before. It’s actually kinda a magic card. And we could all do with a little more magic in our lives!

So my new key takeway for Temperance is: you don’t need to become less; you need to learn what to do with all that you are.

Symbolism in the Temperance Card

In many Temperance cards, the frame is dominated by an angel, often with wings so enormous they barely seem to fit within the confines of the card. And these aren’t delicate, decorative little Halloween party wings: they’re powerful old albatross jobbies! You genuinely believe this angel can achieve flight! In the RWS, the feathers are almost like tongues of flame, bringing a flash of fire into a card that, at first glance, seems to be v. watery.

Wings themselves are also a rather lovely metaphor for Temperance. Flight is only possible because the downward effort of the wing is met by an upward force from the air: two forces working in opposition and, simultaneously, in perfect union. Neither cancels the other out. Instead, their interaction produces something neither could achieve alone: lift. Once again, Temperance isn’t about diminishing opposing forces, but bringing them into the right relationship with one another so that something new (and seemingly magical!) becomes possible.

Despite their great big tracts of wings, however, the RWS Temperance angel appears remarkably chilled. They’re just relaxing by the riverside, minding their own business, pouring their cups, lol. Sallie Nichols contrasts them with the Angel of Judgement, who makes much more of a song and dance about his appearance, bursting through the clouds with trumpets blasting. Temperance, meanwhile, “stages no dramatic entrance”. In fact, Nichols observes, they seem not to have arrived at all: the angel is simply there, quietly absorbed in their pouring, as if they have been patiently waiting all along for us to notice them.

And it is a ‘them’. Waite said of the angel, “I speak of him in the masculine sense, but the figure is neither male nor female.” Temperance is all about the non-binary! As Charlie Claire Burgess explains, while as a species humans might like “labels and categories in which we try to place people and things so they stay put and behave, so they become quantifiable and understandable,” Temperance “shows us that nothing in this life is so tidy and docile.” When the card shows up in a reading it may be asking us to “release our stranglehold on ‘either/or’ and ease into the hammock of ‘both/and’, rocking gently between the forest’s trees… May we have wings but not forget the ground.”

Iris: Temperance’s Angel As A Literal Rainbow Bridge

And who is this angel?

They’ve often been linked to Iris, the Greek personification of the rainbow (which we also see in the Ten of Cups) and messenger of the gods. In ancient Greek art, Iris appears as a winged young woman, sometimes carrying a caduceus – the snakey winged staff that’s the symbol of the messenger – and a pitcher or cup of water. (Interestingly, the Greek iris, ‘rainbow’, is very close to eiris, ‘messenger’, and it’s a bit murky as to which root/role her name actually comes from).

The Greeks imagined that Iris filled her golden pitcher with water from the seas in order to re-supply the clouds, stimulating the rains that brought growth and fertility to the earth. The reasoning makes sense; a rainbow often appears to end with its feet in the water, so it isn’t difficult to imagine it as a kind of celestial aqueduct, drawing water up from the sea and carrying it into the sky. Already, then, Iris looks suspiciously Temperance-y 😂. This also makes Iris a very in-betweeny kind of figure. She connects sea and sky, heaven and earth, gods and mortals. She’s simultaneously a rainbow – quite literally a bridge between realms – and a messenger, someone whose entire purpose is to move between one place and another. As Labyrinthia Mythweaver writes, Iris is “a traveller that crosses divides”, a goddess who “truly lives in the between”.

And that works beautifully for Temperance. Because Temperance isn’t really interested in keeping things neatly separated, rather it’s about creating movement between them: finding the point at which one thing can flow into another, where apparent opposites can meet without either losing its essential nature. Like Iris carrying water between sea and sky, Temperance occupies the space between – not just as some sort of bland, theoretical midpoint, but as a place of connection, exchange, and transformation.

There are a couple of other rather lovely Iris-y details worth mentioning here (the magpie brain will NOT be contained!) Firstly, although rainbows appear to us as bows or arches, they’re actually full circles – it’s just that we can only see the upper part because the rest disappears below the horizon. The complete circle is always there, though, even when we can’t perceive it, the Great Round, just like wisdom, hidden behind the veil.

And, incidentally, if Iris’s name is from ‘messenger’ and thus connected to eiris (from eiro, ‘to speak’), this also brings it into the orbit of the Greek eirēnē, meaning peace (disclaimer: not an etymologist 😂). Which is almost suspiciously Temperance-y too! Not peace as passivity or the absence of force, but peace as the successful reconciliation of forces which might otherwise pull against one another. As such, Dusty White describes Temperance as “a gentle card – its message ‘know thyself’ is whispered rather than shouted… by stating it softly the voice may go unheard by many, but it is still more effective than shouting, where it will only gain resistance among those who do not understand the message.”

The connection between Iris and Temperance becomes even more interesting when we think about where the card sits in the Major Arcana. Rachel Pollack points out that the rainbow appears after a storm, just as Temperance follows the upheaval of Death. In Jewish and Christian tradition, too, the rainbow appears after the Flood as a promise of renewal: destruction has happened, the old world has been swept away, but life will continue in a new form – and, crucially, God promises not to send any more wanton destruction down, at least for a while, lol (though I see you, Tower, looming up ahead…) For Pollack, Temperance similarly shows “the personality released by the fearful experience of Death”: what was dark, chaotic and frightening hasn’t simply disappeared: it has been transformed. Death has broken apart the old form; Temperance takes what remains and begins the work of making something new.

And Iris has another really interesting connection to Death. As Zeus’s messenger, she could travel between worlds, including down into the Underworld, where she filled her golden cup with water from the River Styx and brought it back to the heavens (this was basically holy water for the gods to swear oaths on, if you broke your death-river oath Zeus would pour the water over you, plunging you into a year long coma – never change, Zeus, you mad old bastard!) As Pollack puts it, “only a descent into the underworld of the self can renew life.” So the figure who greets us immediately after Death is associated not with avoiding death or darkness, but with going down into it, filling her cup, and bringing something back. Again, she doesn’t overcome one realm by choosing the other: she moves between them, carrying something from one state into another. Very Temperance.

I’ve Seen Fire and I’ve Seen Rain: Water and Fire on the Temperance Card

Water is, obviously, pretty hard to miss on the RWS Temperance card. The angel is standing with one foot paddling in a lake, while an apparently impossible stream of the stuff flows continuously between their two cups. But fire is all over the card too, it’s just taking a backseat, for once! We find it in the solar glyph blazing on the angel’s forehead; in the upright triangle on their chest; in those great flame-like red wings; and in the glowing sun rising (or perhaps setting) between the mountain peaks in the distance.

So once again, we’re dealing with apparent opposites: fire and water, hot and cold, active and receptive, dry and wet. But they’re not fighting each other: the water is not trying to extinguish the fire, and the fire is not trying to evaporate the water. They’re just peacefully co-existing.

It’s very Walt Whitman: Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.) Temperance allows for contradiction; opposing qualities don’t have to be resolved by choosing one over the other. We can contain them both. And, indeed, the opening of that same stanza is scarily Temperancey too: The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them, / And proceed to fill my next fold of the future. Filling, emptying, flowing from one vessel into the next, while carrying the past and present forward into something new? Given my big schoolgirl crush* back in the 90s on everyone’s favourite chaotic bisexual poet Walt Whitman, this has warmed me up to the Temperance card no end.

*I did also fancy Jason Priestley and Vanessa Paradis, my youthful desire was not exclusively aimed at hairy, slightly stinky, long-dead poets 😂.

Although they’re far from traditional, I’ve included these cards here because they really lean into the song-of-ice-and-fire theme that’s more subtly implied in classic versions of the card. Temperance as volcano works really well: in several cards we can see molten magma dripping into a steamy, churning sea, capturing that precise moment when two volatile forces meet and instead of ‘fighting’ each other, something new is forged. Jonathan Rice, creator of the MindScapes Tarot, notes that this isn’t just a pretty elemental clash, but a moment of “fundamental transformation”, where volcanic rock and obsidian glass are created. That’s alchemy, baby! Temperance isn’t always gentle, sometimes it’s about heat, pressure, timing, and patience; letting opposites collide and trusting that something strong and precious will emerge.

Meg Jones Wall explains that when Temperance comes up in a reading it can be asking us to embrace the disparate elements that shape us: “the water of deep emotion and intuitive connection, alongside the fire of primal passion and intense desire.”

My Cup Runneth Over: What do the (impossible!) cups mean in the Temperance card?

The central ‘action’ of the Temperance card is the angel’s endless pouring from one cup to another. Waite rather grandly describes them as “pouring the essences of life from chalice to chalice” (pretentious? moi?), and, despite being a bit wanky, this gets to the heart of Temperance as modulation rather than moderation. The aim isn’t necessarily to have less of anything, but to find the right proportions. The ‘magical’ life is created by blending its various ingredients in the right measure.

And we do this constantly. Mixing work and play, solitude and company, security and adventure; the right ‘balanced’ diet, a partner that ‘balances’ us out, a job with a good work/life ‘balance’, dreams that acutally might come true. When we stumble upon a combination that really works, life can suddenly feel almost effortless. But, of course, we’re ever-changing beings, so there is no single perfect recipe. What is ‘right’ for us now may not be right next year, next week, or even tomorrow. This isn’t a static cup, like the one we see in the Ace of Cups, because Temperance isn’t a state of perfect balance that we achieve and then smugly remain in forever: it’s the continual act of pouring and adjusting.

And this pouring is distinctly odd (and purposefully odd, I’m assuming an artist of Pamela Colman Smith‘s calibre understood how gravity works, lol). Rachel Pollack points out that the lower cup in the RWS isn’t directly beneath the upper one, making the flow of water between them physically impossible. Indeed, it’s not entirely clear which way the water is travelling at all. Is it pouring downwards as it should do, or somehow flowing up from the lower cup to the higher? ARE THEY MAGIC CUPS?! Well, maybe. Pollack suggests that to other people, the Temperate person’s ability to handle life’s problems with apparent ease can similarly look almost magical.

The two cups have also been interpreted as consciousness and the unconscious, with the water flowing between them representing their reconciliation. In the Tarot de Marseille, one cup is gold and the other is silver, a joining together (or ‘coniunctio’ to use its Harry Potter-esque Jungian alchemy term) of the sun (consciousness) and the moon (subconsciousness). Again, the important thing isn’t that one conquers or replaces the other, but that there is movement between the two. What is buried can rise into consciousness; what we consciously experience can sink down and become part of that deeper self. The cups aren’t two sealed containers: they’re in constant conversation.

In the Bonestone & Earthflesh Tarot, Avalon Cameron and Ana Tourian make the association between Temperance and time very explicit. For them, the card represents balance through duration rather than stasis, symbolised by the hourglass – life and death held in suspension, continually transforming one another. As Cameron puts it: “It’s life, it’s death, it’s above and below, it’s within and without. It’s all and nothing, and a combination of each. A timeless tug-of-war that eventually, organically, creates an authentic fusion of ideals and attributes, powers and emotion.”

Testing The Waters: The Positioning of Temperance’s Feet

The Temperance angel famously stands with one foot on the land and one foot in the water. Water is traditionally associated with the unconscious, imagination, emotion, and fluid possibility, while solid earth gives us the material world: reality, practicality, the here and now. Temperance needs both. It’s no good dreaming up some fantastical new life we theoretically could be living if we never actually do anything to make it happen! But equally, a life concerned only with practical realities gets real stale real quick (all work & no play & c.) We need to ground our hopes and plans in the real world without losing touch with the watery realm of possibility.

There’s also something pleasingly tentative about the angel’s pose. They’re quite literally testing the waters. While Temperance might ask that we don’t stay safely on dry land forever, it doesn’t require us to fling ourselves headlong into every new experience. We can dip a toe in, see how it feels, adjust, and decide how far we want to wade out. Once again, balance isn’t a fixed position: it’s responsive.

Some animal decks take this symbolism wonderfully literally by depicting Temperance as a newt. As amphibians, newts are creatures of both land and water, moving between aquatic and terrestrial environments during their lives. They don’t simply place one foot in each world: they genuinely belong to both. It’s hard to imagine more naturally Temperance-y little chaps! (Also: Mr TarotCake has a Newt License so I am bizarrely well-informed about newts, as it goes…)

Rachel Pollack provides another reason for why folks like me might find the card a bit uncomfortable: it asks us to be OK with being neither/nor and either/or, and we don’t always like that. She connects our tendency towards either/or thinking with our difficulty in trusting ourselves to navigate life’s uncertainties. It’s reassuring to divide the world neatly into this or that, right or wrong, land or water – the in-between, the liminal, is much messier. But Temperance suggests that we can learn to place our feet in both worlds without slipping into either one. #BeMoreNewt

And perhaps that’s the real trick. We can take something from this and that, hold apparently contradictory ideas simultaneously, and allow more than one truth to exist within the same situation. Rather than demanding a single, neat answer, Temperance encourages us to seek out alternative viewpoints and “thicken our narratives wherever possible”. Holding a paradox doesn’t mean we’ve failed to resolve it. Sometimes the paradox is the truth.

As such Temperance can also come up when a situation in our lives requires diplomacy. Not necessarily concessions, or some milquetoast centrist position that pleases no one, or both-sides-ing everything. But actually listening: balancing and weighing different views and arguments, rather than jumping in head first before we’ve tested the waters. As Burgess explains, “Temperance asks us to look for sites of connection and confluence instead of separation and division, offering opportunities for dialogue, understanding, and mediation.”

It reminds me a bit of the feminist philosopher María Lugones‘ idea of ‘loving perception’, an idea I use when studying people who commit violent and sexual offences with my students. As I explain to them, it may seem counterintuitive to be asked to discuss violent crimes like child sexual abuse or sadistic homicide with love, and the suggestion is emphatically not that they should love those crimes. Instead, loving perception is a tool for understanding why they happen, so that from this position of understanding we can better act against them. Lugones contrasts loving perception with arrogant perception – one that refuses to ‘travel’ to the perspective of another person or try to see a situation or understand a concept from their perspective.

And that feels incredibly Temperance-y to me. Understanding something is not the same as agreeing with, excusing, or surrendering to it. We can move towards another perspective without abandoning our own; hold different ways of seeing in the same cup without pretending they’re morally equivalent. Temperance is a traveller, a being unafraid to move beyond their own element: a lover, a peacemaker, an empath.

It’s Written All Over Them: The Angel’s Symbols in the Temperance Card

The Temperance angel is also wearing some fairly conspicuous symbols (and I’ve gotta say, this really deep level Golden Dawn stuff is not really my bag of tea, but I’ll try my best to unpack these symbols for y’all!) On their forehead is a solar glyph – a circle with a dot at its centre – linking our angel back to fire again, while their white robe bears a red upward-pointing triangle enclosed within a square. Waite describes this, rather cryptically, as “the square and triangle of the septenary” (good old Arthur E. once again doing his I know something you don’t know, peasants routine 😂). What he means here is: it’s really seven-ish. Put the triangle’s three sides together with the square’s four and you get seven: 3 + 4. The triangle and square can in turn represent spirit and matter, so their combination brings the two realms together.

And obvs there’s also seven (visible) colours in the rainbow! Though ‘visible’ is doing some heavy lifting here: a rainbow is actually a continuous spectrum, with no neat boundaries separating one colour from the next. Our familiar seven-colour rainbow is essentially an attempt to divide that flowing continuum into discrete categories. Which is rather perfect for Temperance: the boundaries are something we impose; in reality, one state is constantly flowing into another.

In the Golden Dawn tradition that influenced Waite, the septenary has been linked to Yesod (the Kabbalistic sphere associated with the unconscious and the meeting of spiritual and material reality) and the purified mind: the point at which divine or spiritual insight can be received and understood within ordinary human consciousness. This fits well with Waite’s own description of Temperance as something that “tempers, combines and harmonizes the psychic and material natures”. Once again, the card brings above and below, spiritual and material, divine and human into relationship. (If you want to read more on this, Abrac has written this great explainer. I’m afraid my brain is melting out my ears at this point, lol).

The sun nestled between the mountain peaks also forms the outline of a crown. You guessed it: more weird esoteric culty stuff! The crown has been associated with attainment, mastery and the ‘secret of eternal life’ (Waite, need you ask). Paul Foster Case interprets the two mountains as Wisdom and Understanding, suggesting that these are what we must acquire if we are ultimately to be ‘crowned’ with successful balance in life. And ofc the crown isn’t sitting on the angel’s head; it’s waiting in the distance. Temperance isn’t presenting us with something we’ve permanently mastered. There’s still a path to walk, and wisdom and understanding are things we acquire along the way. We’re not at the World yet, I’m afraid!

Finally, worked into the neckline of the angel’s robe, are Hebrew letters representing the divine name YHWH (the Tetragrammaton). So the angel is quite literally clothed in divinity: another point of contact between the earthly figure standing before us and the divine realm they represent.

Where the Irises Grow: Flowers on the Temperance Card

At the angel’s feet, we often seen a cluster of golden irises. This obvs lends even more weight to the idea that the angel themself is meant to represent the goddess Iris (a symbol so nice they gave it to us twice!) Just like the goddess, the flower takes its name from the Greek word for rainbow, supposedly because they come in a multitude of colours and have a short blooming period, like a rainbow.

And look where the flowers are growing: right at the meeting point between earth and water. Like so much else on this card, they belong to the borderlands. There’s also a cool bit of folklore associated with the yellow iris. The flower famously grows in the shallows of the Lys river, and was adopted as the royal emblem by the Kings of France. Known as the fleur-de-lis, it is traditionally depicted in gold against blue: the yellow flower against the river water. One legend connects the flower with the fifth-century Frankish king Clovis. According to the story, Clovis and his army were badly outnumbered and had been pushed back into marshland, where they seemed certain to be slaughtered. Then they spotted yellow irises growing in the water. Knowing that the flowers flourished in the shallows, they realised that the irises were effectively marking a safe place to cross, allowing the army to escape. Whether or not we want to take the legend literally, it’s a wonderfully Temperance-y image: a flower growing between land and water showing us how to move safely from one to the other.

And the iris itself is created through precisely the sort of elemental collaboration Temperance celebrates: earth, water and sunlight working together to produce something new. The elements don’t cancel one another out; their combination creates life.

The Long & Winding Road: Rivers, Paths, and Mountains in the Temperance Card

Behind the angel, a winding path (sometimes a river) leads away from the water and towards some distant blue mountains on the horizon, the sun rising/setting between their peaks. I think this is an important final detail, because Temperance isn’t asking us to achieve some perfect state of balance and then simply stay there forever. The path leads onwards.

Rachel Pollack sees the road particularly as a path of return. In Death, we’ve descended into the underworld of the self; Temperance shows us emerging again, carrying whatever we’ve discovered back into the big wide world with us. And she makes a neat observation about those distant mountains: the two pillars that crop up time and time again throughout the Major Arcana (the High Priestess, the Hierophant, Justice, Death, the Moon) here become part of the landscape. What was previously abstract or symbolic is becoming real. Temperance, Pollack argues, is ultimately about behaviour rather than concepts. It’s no good understanding integration intellectually; we have to actually live it.

Maddy Elruna similarly describes Temperance as “a perfect moment”, but one in which we’re not supposed to linger for too long. Perfect integration isn’t a permanent human state. Life changes; we change; the proportions need adjusting and the cups need pouring all over again. Which brings us right back to modulation: balance isn’t something we finally achieve, but something we continually do.

And perhaps it’s just as well that the path keeps moving, because Elruna points out that once we’ve experienced this lovely state of integration, once we’ve “tasted the enjoyment of it, it is hard to lose it (and can too easily lead to addictions). The fall from grace is clearly illustrated in the next card.”

Which is… the Devil.

Well. That escalated quickly. 😂

Temperance As The Cosmic Bartender

The word ‘temperance’ is derived from the Latin temperare, which means to moderate, blend, or mix together harmoniously – to “bring to a proper strength or consistency by mixing.” This leads me to one of my favourite descriptions of Temperance: the cosmic bartender. As a former barkeep myself (for many, many years!) this metaphor has always pleased me. Because perfecting – and then consistently making – the perfect cocktail is an art! You need to get the proportions just right. There’s even a so-called ‘golden ratio‘: 2 parts spirit, 1 part sweet, 1 part tart. You make the best drinks by understanding that different ingredients require different proportions to produce the desired whole.

There are lots of examples of this kind of temperance in real life as well as bartenders: chefs, chemists, and of course the smith who tempers (makes hard) the steel by heating it then cooling it with water. But all these things take time. In the same way, if we want to commit to the alchemy of the self this card calls for, we have to patiently experiment and work on ourselves to achieve transformation. We have to be prepared to learn from our mistakes – not to repeat the same failed formulas, or keep using ingredients that aren’t working! The temperate person’s ability to handle all of life’s problems with joy may appear magical (the magic flow of the suit of Cups), but it actually takes a lot of self-work to achieve this kind of internal harmony. The real magic is all the work we don’t see: knowing ourselves well enough to keep adjusting the mixture; to find our own golden ratio.

The wonderful Thirteen over on Aeclectic Tarot notes that Temperance has also been linked to the ancient practice of mixing wine with water so you can enjoy it without getting pissed [NB irl though wine with water is grim, lol]. The message isn’t one of total abstinence or self-denial: you don’t have to give up the wine, but perhaps don’t neck the entire amphora either 😂. Temperance allows us pleasure but asks us not to be consumed by it. We can still have a cocktail or two, but not so many we have a stinking hangover, and certainly not so many we end up dependent on cocktails to numb the pain or just to get through the day. The card’s message is that life’s pleasures can (and indeed should!) be enjoyed, but just not to excess or to the point they start to harm us. As Robert M. Place says of Temperance, “she does not represent the denial of desires but the satisfaction of desires in a way that is healthy and beautiful.”

Thirteen describes the angel as our “guiding spirit, [our] compass, [our] ‘why’ we should create”. And perhaps we need that reminder, because Temperance isn’t easy. It takes patience and self-awareness to keep adjusting the mixture when simply surrendering to one ingredient would be so much easier. Eventually, it’s tempting to think: “‘why am I bothering to add water to the wine? I’ll just have the wine…'” And, as Thirteen puts it, “there you go, the Devil!”

Relatedly, some decks have framed Temperance explicitly as a form of harm reduction, and I LOVE this. As a criminologist, I’m all about harm reduction: rather than imagining we can eradicate potentially dangerous things – drink, drugs, sex work – through outright bans, we ask how we can make the reality that already exists safer. In the Delta Enduring Tarot, Temperance is literally renamed Harm Reduction, with naloxone sitting on the table in front of two people holding one another. The philosophy is pure Temperance: we don’t demand a hard reset for the system when someone is addicted to drugs, or insist that anything short of complete abstinence represents failure. We work with where people are, adjusting the conditions to reduce harm.

The Alleyway Tarot, meanwhile, depicts Temperance as amitriptyline, bringing the idea of modulation right back into the body. Medication can help regulate systems that aren’t quite regulating themselves, changing the balance enough to make life more manageable. And what I really love about both cards, as well as Hefford’s card from the Divine Channels, is that they make something else explicit: this shit is tough, and it’s OK to to ask for help with it. Temperance has their cups out and ready to pour. And they’re a card not only of giving, but of receiving: sometimes achieving balance means allowing somebody – or something – else to help us find it.

The Artist and The Alchemist: The Magic of the Temperance Card

One of the phrases associated with the Temperance card is ‘solve et coagula’ (dissolve and bind) which refers to breaking a substance down into its basic elements before reforming it into something new (aka alchemy). I like this phrase because I think takes us beyond the idea of Temperance as simply maintaining balance. The angel isn’t endlessly shuffling the same ingredients between two cups: they’re making something.

Geronimo offers the brilliantly simple example of mixing red and blue paint. At first, the two colours are clearly distinct. But add a little of one to the other, mix, adjust, add some more and, gradually, purple emerges. As Geronimo puts it, “THAT’S what Temperance is.” They make a similar comparison with fertilisation: two different cells, the sperm and the egg, meet and exchange information, ultimately creating something that is neither one nor the other (a whole new being!) As they explain, “I find [this] particularly helpful in understanding [Temperance] because you really see how [two] different cells morph into something else.” Temperance is generative. The meeting of opposites produces a third possibility.

As a related aside, this deep dive has led me to discover that scientists have observed what looks like a flash of light at the moment of fertilisation!! WTAF! I’m having a little geek-asm here. (And, OK, it’s not *actual* light, but still, it’s v v v cool). It turns out that when a mammalian egg is activated by a sperm, it releases billions of zinc ions in what scientists genuinely call a ‘zinc spark’. Under fluorescence microscopy, this release appears as a burst of light around the egg. So at the precise moment two different sets of biological material come together to begin creating something new, we get this extraordinary spark-like eruption. That’s pretty damn alchemic! (I have the water, you bring the fire, indeed).

The DruidCraft Tarot makes the alchemical connection explicit. Here Temperance becomes the Fferyllt, a Druid alchemist deliberately bringing together elemental Fire and Water. Again, the point isn’t to make Fire less fiery or Water less watery. The magic happens in the interaction between them.

In the Tarot Arthurien, Temperance features the OG Magician, Merlin, getting his alchemy on. He’s a particularly appropriate figure for the card because Merlin himself is a creature of apparently incompatible worlds: traditionally born of a human woman and a demon or incubus, he straddles mortal and supernatural realms, while later versions of his story also bring together Pagan magic and Christianity. As the co-creator Clare Duval observes, “this card brings healing via its ability to reconcile opposites and reactivate energy flows”.

And, indeed, as an alchemist, Temperance is also a healer. The card has long been associated with the ancient and medieval theory of the four humours – blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm – which held that our physical and mental health depended upon their relative proportions. Our temperament, or characteristic mood and disposition, was similarly thought to arise from the particular mixture of humours within us. Too much or too little of one could tip us into illness or emotional disturbance; health required the mixture to be properly tempered. The healer’s job was therefore to identify what had fallen out of proportion and adjust the mixture accordingly. Temperance as medicine is, once again, about modulation: working with what’s already there to restore a healthy relationship between the parts.

A more contemporary way of thinking about Temperance-as-healer is through the nervous system. Burrington’s Temperance, for example, depicts two line-drawn figures whose branching forms resemble the nervous system and the body’s network of blood vessels: two distinct, vital systems working alongside one another to keep us alive. And nervous-system regulation is itself v. Temperance-y. Being regulated doesn’t mean remaining permanently calm; our bodies need to move between activation and rest, responding to danger when necessary and settling again when it has passed. The aim isn’t to suppress intensity, but to be able to modulate it. Burrington describes Temperance as being “slow and gentle, mindful, to make a custard without splitting”.

In the Thoth Tarot, Temperance is renamed ‘Art’, a name choice that arises from much the same philosophy. And check it outtttttt!!! The entire scene depicted on Crowley and Harris‘ card takes place within an Orphic Egg: the great pearlescent oval you can see behind the alchemist. The egg has appeared previously in both the Lovers and the Hermit, but Mary K. Greer describes Art as the moment when its hidden potential is finally realised: “Art is the content of the Egg fulfilled.”

This is particularly interesting alongside all our talk of fertilisation. Greer offers an interpretation of the Thoth Art card in which the separate strands of DNA carried by sperm and egg fuse to create new DNA: an “assimilation of its equal and opposite”. In the Lovers, two separate beings strive to become one; in Art, that process is completed. Greer characterises the movement between the cards as one from analysis and choice to synthesis and transformation, pointing out that the little globular forms multiplying in background can be read as dividing cells.

And there’s another weird little womb-y detail here. The Latin motto disappearing into the background – Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem – instructs us to “visit the interior of the earth” in order to discover the hidden stone. In its traditional alchemical context, that’s about descent, purification, and discovering the Philosopher’s Stone (a substance that would turn base metals into gold). But within this enormous cosmic egg, it’s difficult not to see another possible ‘interior’: the womb, the hidden space in which separate biological materials combine, divide, and transform into new life.

So Art makes explicit what the RWS Temperance only hints at. This isn’t some wishy washy compromise card. It’s creation. It’s practically the Big Bang! It’s life itself! Two things aren’t being watered down until they’re sufficiently alike; they’re being brought into relationship so that they can produce something that neither could produce alone, and, moreover, something that’s just awe-inspiringly WOWsers (words fail me at this point tbh; must get better at writing 😂😂😂).

And, for once, I am completely on board with Crowley being a bit of a sex-obsessed perv!

And obvs the metaphor of art itself also really works for this card. There’s a commenter on Reddit, 9ofDiscs, who’s take on Temperance-as-art I absolutely love. Essentially, whatever shit has happened to us is now part of us. We can’t simply extract difficult experiences from our emotional and psychological make-up any more than we can take the orange juice back out of the vodka, or the flour back out of the cake. Our shadow is always part of us. But Temperance asks us what we can make now with the shadow (as well as our light). As 9ofDiscs rather wonderfully puts it, it asks us to take the shit and make it into fertilizer, “mix it with some newly turned soil, plant a seed, and create something better.” They continue, “In some decks Temperance is called Art. Consider mixing up a paint palette. You mix yellow and blue to create green. Maybe you want more of a chartreuse shade of green, so you add more yellow. Maybe you want more of a teal shade, so you add more blue. But… you can’t cry and say ‘No! I don’t want green! Take out the yellow, and make it go back to way it was before!’ Like it or not, you’ve got green. Now, figure out how to best work with it.”

And I love that! Temperance might be a healing card, but it doesn’t promise to restore us to some pristine version of ourselves from before The Bad Thing happened. Alchemy doesn’t work backwards like that. Instead, we take everything that’s in the mixture now – the beautiful bits, the painful bits, the mistakes, the scars, the fucking orange juice, lol – and work with it. Add something, adjust something, make art from the pain. Grow something in it. We cannot always choose our ingredients, but we can have some say in what we create with them. For as Bakara Wintner writes, in the Temperance card we “faced Death and are standing in its afterglow – where fire and water blend – where the pain has burned off, and we are left only with the healing and lightness of what we’ve made room for”.

I lift my heart as spring lifts up
A yellow daisy to the rain;
My heart will be a lovely cup
Altho’ it holds but pain.

For I shall learn from flower and leaf
That colour every drop they hold,
To change the lifeless wine of grief
To living gold.

‘Alchemy’ by Sara Teasdale

‘Where Justice Cuts, Temperance Melts’: Balance and Shadow in the Temperance Card

One of the things I struggled with early on in my Tarot journey with the Temperance card is that at first glance it seems super similar to Justice. Both emphasise the idea of adjustment and weighing things up, and of the importance of living a well-balanced life. Same, same.

However, the kind of balance we see in Temperance is rather different from the balance we see in Justice. Bakara Wintner points out that Justice wields her sword to pare things down, whereas Temperance calls for adding, mixing and combining ingredients to achieve harmony: “perhaps where Justice cuts, Temperance melts”. Justice separates and distinguishes: this or that; right or wrong; cause and consequence. Temperance is much more interested in what happens when we allow things to flow into one another.

While Justice asks us to make decisions based on rational thought, Temperance asks us to look inside ourselves, at our emotional wellbeing. How balanced do we feel? Nor is Temperance necessarily concerned with being ‘fair’, or ensuring that everyone receives equal treatment, like Justice can be at times. Its balance doesn’t even require equal quantities – as we’ve seen with our cocktails, our paint mixing, and our alchemy, sometimes the right balance requires more of one thing and less of another. What matters is the relationship between the ingredients, and whether their combination allows something new to emerge from the tired old stalemate of polar opposites.

Perhaps, then, Justice is the balance of the scales; Temperance is the balance of the tightrope walker. The scales strive towards a static, unequivocal equilibrium: once the two sides balance, their work is done. The tightrope walker, by contrast, is never truly still. They’re making thousands of tiny corrections – shifting their weight, responding to the rope, compensating for each wobble as it happens. Their balance is dynamic, responsive and alive.

In Tarot for Change, Jessica Dore writes that “the ways that seeing the world in pairs of opposites – as either good or bad, black or white, this or that – affects our lives are endless”. But this kind of all-or-nothing thinking can be deeply unhelpful. Dore makes a super interesting (from this psychologist’s perspective!) connection with dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), which teaches us to challenge this tendency and think in ways that can “synthesize opposites rather than exacerbate stark divisions”.

So, for example, we can acknowledge that we’re doing our best while also knowing we need to do better. We can accept that skilful people sometimes make mistakes, and that good people can behave in hurtful ways. As Dore writes, “Too often, when we view things as cut-and-dried, we discount important information that could help us make better choices for ourselves and those around us”. Nothing, she reminds us, is “only beautiful, or only flawed”. Temperance asks us to tolerate the uncomfortable and: to experience the good, the bad and the ugly simultaneously, without requiring one to erase the others.

I see the importance of this all the time in Criminology, particularly with students who want to go into offender rehabilitation. People can really struggle with the idea that someone who has committed a terrible act might nevertheless behave kindly, lovingly, or generously in other areas of their life. A man who has committed rape might also look after his children when they’re sick, help his elderly neighbour carry in her shopping every week, and remember to bring his wife flowers on her birthday. There’s a powerful urge to say, No. If he was capable of doing that, he must be a monster. He must be bad in every aspect of his life. And its inverse is also common: I don’t believe he could have done that bad thing, because he’s done so many good things. (I also see this a lot when people try to reconcile beloved celebrity creative icons who genuinely have done a lot of good, with some of their… questionable past behaviour).

But people are messy, complex, contradictory beings. Understanding that someone did something thoroughly shitty does not require us to minimise the times they did something selfless or loving. Indeed, if we want to understand offending well enough to prevent it, treating people who cause serious harm as an entirely separate species of ‘monster’ can actively get in our way. Temperance asks us to hold those uncomfortable truths in the same cup. Good people do bad things. Bad people do good things. We do both good and bad things, and in the future we’ll fuck up again, most likely, BUT we’ll also do more things that will make us proud of who we are.

“Life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis.”

William Empson, from ‘Bacchus’

And of course, we don’t need to look to extreme behaviours to find these contradictions, our everyday lives are full of them. As Meg Jones Wall observes, many things can be true at the same time. We can be “eager and also terrified, can be wildly creative and also doubt our own vision, can be restless to move and also desperate for stillness.” But Temperance doesn’t ask us to pick a side, or to chop off whichever part of ourselves seems inconsistent with the person we think we’re supposed to be. Instead, Jones Wall writes, the card encourages us to “find wonder in our own wanderings, to see how our various desires, fears, and interests overlap and intertwine”.

I really love this. Temperance doesn’t ask us to abandon the pieces of ourselves that don’t seem to fit. It asks us to become curious about how they might fit together. Perhaps I can desperately want something and be frightened of it. Perhaps I can love my life and want it to change. Perhaps I can be confident and insecure, independent and needy, joyful and grieving. One truth doesn’t necessarily invalidate the other. We contain multitudes. <Hi again, Walt>

This also helps me make a lot more sense of Temperance’s traditional astrological association with Sagittarius. Jones Wall describes Sagittarius as offering “freedom, a chance to follow our whims and desires”, using its magnetic, charismatic energy to discover new purpose in the world. Both Sagittarius and Temperance, she argues, share a sense of luck and an ability to find the sublime in everyday life, inviting us to approach the world with wonder and curiosity. That feels particularly fitting here: rather than being frightened by our contradictions, perhaps Temperance asks us to get curious about them.

And the symbolism of Sagittarius itself is wonderfully Temperance-y. The centaur is another of those fabulous hybrid creatures, human and beast merged into something that is simultaneously both and neither. And outside of myth, humans and horses have genuienly been forming this kind of composite creature for millennia: horse and rider moving together as a single unit. Even the Sagittarian bow and arrow requires apparent opposites to cooperate: one remains under tension while the other flies; one provides resistance so that the other can move. Neither achieves the purpose alone.

So perhaps the Sagittarius connection gives us another reason to rethink Temperance’s apparently rather dreary instruction to temper yourself. Its message may be much closer to: don’t assume that the things which seem irreconcilable actually are. Sometimes the strangest combinations are precisely the ones that allow us to move somewhere new.

There is, however, a shadow side to all this lovely flexibility and adaptability. Cownie and Lensvelt warn that there’s “a fine line between being adaptable and open to growth, and being so malleable that you end up sacrificing yourself on the altar of other people’s opinions”. We cannot be all things to all people. Being a chameleon may be an art, they tell us, but constantly changing colour to suit our surroundings is also fucking exhausting. As they put it, Temperance can ask whether we’re “wearing too many masks, or flitting through too many selves in order to please others”.

And this feels like an important qualification to everything I’ve just said. Integration is not the same thing as self-erasure. Temperance can travel into somebody else’s world without permanently moving there. We can listen to another person’s perspective without abandoning our own; adapt to our environment without allowing it to dictate who we become; add new ingredients to the mixture without endlessly diluting ourselves to make us more palatable to everybody else.

Perhaps this is where Temperance’s much-maligned call for moderation comes back in. We can have too much of everything, even adaptability! If we’re constantly adjusting ourselves around everybody else, perhaps the mixture needs recalibrating in our direction for once. Cownie and Lensvelt suggest dropping the “grand gestures and quick costume changes” and instead drawing on Temperance’s quieter gifts of “patience, care, and authenticity”. Sometimes the thing that needs bringing back into the mixture is ourselves.

No More Mr Nice Guy: Temperance, Relationship, and Reciprocity

Some of my favourite contemporary Temperance cards take this idea of relationship in some v. unexpected directions. The Eros Tarot offers a rather more, ahem, hands-on (mouths-on?) interpretation of Temperance’s reciprocal flow, depicting the card as a sixty-nine. Both partners are simultaneously giving and receiving, each responding and adjusting to the other. Pleasure isn’t flowing in a single direction from one person to another: it’s circulating between them. Like the water passing mysteriously between Temperance’s cups, it’s almost beside the point to ask where giving ends and receiving begins. Though it’s also certainly tricky to maintain, just like Temperance is as a state (and, lol, maybe this is why I struggle with the card, as the 69 has to be one of my least favourite positions, it’s too distracting, I just like to be able to concentrate on the job in hand, lol).

The Ostara Tarot takes this idea of interdependence somewhere rather less ‘fun’. Its Temperance is the source of both predator and prey, which is one of my favourite depictions of the card. These seem like the most fundamental of opposites – the hunter and the hunted, one surviving through the death of the other – and yet they’re also parts of the same ecological system. Neither exists in isolation from the other. As the LWB explains, “everything in the world hinges on balance”, and it takes “a special thoughtfulness to understand the duality of the world and to accept your place within it”.

And I think there’s something important here about Temperance not always being nice. Balance in nature isn’t necessarily peaceful, fair, or painless. Ecosystems contain birth and death, abundance and scarcity, consumption and decay; the prey feeds the predator and death itself becomes nourishment for further life. Temperance doesn’t erase those tensions, it holds them within a larger system in which each affects the other.

Temperance FAQs

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Works Cited

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