MAJOR ARCANA · TRUMP XIV
Temperance
Tarot card meaning
UPRIGHT
Balance, moderation, alchemy, patience.
REVERSED
Excess, imbalance, lack of long-term vision.
The card
A winged angel with one foot on land and one in water pours liquid between two cups. A path leads to a glowing crown on distant mountains.
Temperance is trump XIV of the twenty-two trumps of the Major Arcana.
In the Golden Dawn's attributions it carries the Hebrew letter Samekh (ס), “prop, support”, and the sign of Sagittarius. On the Tree of Life it is path 25, joining Tiphareth and Yesod.
In Aleister Crowley's Thoth tarot: Art, XIV.
In Waite's words
Arthur Edward Waite designed the deck that Pamela Colman Smith drew, and explained it in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911). His text, with his spelling:
DIVINATORY MEANINGS Economy, moderation, frugality, management, accommodation.
REVERSED Things connected with churches, religions, sects, the priesthood, sometimes even the priest who will marry the Querent; also disunion, unfortunate combinations, competing interests.
The picture and its symbolism
A winged angel, with the sign of the sun upon his forehead and on his breast the square and triangle of the septenary. I speak of him in the masculine sense, but the figure is neither male nor female. It is held to be pouring the essences of life from chalice to chalice. It has one foot upon the earth and one upon waters, thus illustrating the nature of the essences. A direct path goes up to certain heights on the verge of the horizon, and above there is a great light, through which a crown is seen vaguely. Hereof is some part of the Secret of Eternal Life, as it is possible to man in his incarnation. All the conventional emblems are renounced herein.
So also are the conventional meanings, which refer to changes in the seasons, perpetual movement of life and even the combination of ideas. It is, moreover, untrue to say that the figure symbolizes the genius of the sun, though it is the analogy of solar
light, realized in the third part of our human triplicity. It is called Temperance fantastically, because, when the rule of it obtains in our consciousness, it tempers, combines and harmonises the psychic and material natures. Under that rule we know in our rational part something of whence we came and whither we are going.
A. E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (London: William Rider & Son, 1911), Part II § 2 and Part III § 3. Public domain; text from the 1922 printing on Wikisource.
Related cards
The numbered cards it governs
Eight of Wands: a decan of Sagittarius · Nine of Wands: a decan of Sagittarius · Ten of Wands: a decan of Sagittarius
In three historical decks
The same card as it was painted in fifteenth-century Milan, printed in the French pattern of the Tarot de Marseille, and drawn by Pamela Colman Smith for the Rider–Waite–Smith deck.
In the Tarot de Marseille: Tempérance, XIV.
Learn more in the lessons
- The Twenty-Two Paths & the Tarot · 18 min
- The Major Arcana Journey · 18 min
- The Thoth Tarot · 12 min
Images: Pamela Colman Smith, 1909 (public domain); the RWS1909 scans on Wikimedia Commons. Lequart, Paris, c. 1890 (public domain); scans from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica), via Wikimedia Commons. Attributed to Bonifacio Bembo, mid-15th century (public domain); scans by David Madore, via Wikimedia Commons.