First thoughts on Temperance

The design of the Temperance card is pretty much the same from deck to deck, as can be seen in the two examples below -- one of the earliest French cards, and a not-terribly-traditional English card from two centuries later.

Pierre Madenié (1709), Rider-Waite (1909)

There's some variation, of course -- Visconti-Sforza has an ordinary woman without wings, Oswald Wirth has her pouring from a silver ewer into a golden one -- but the basic idea is pretty invariable. While it ostensibly illustrates the Greek virtue whose name it bears -- diluting the wine with water so as to make it only moderately intoxicating -- it's hard to shake the sense that its meaning goes far beyond that.

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First, the obvious

Temperance is moderation, particularly moderation in the use of alcohol, and that is surely the origin of the image we see on the card: watering the wine. Before Blake, before Baudelaire, this was considered the path of wisdom; even today it persists in the surprisingly common misconception that "All things in moderation" is in the Bible.

People don't actually dilute wine with water these days -- choosing to express temperance instead by limiting themselves to two standard drinks a day for men, one for women -- but the ancient Greeks did. If I remember correctly, one old book (Hesiod's Works and Days perhaps?) gives the accepted formula as four parts water, one part wine, corresponding to the number 14.

UPDATE: I didn't remember correctly. Works and Days, line 596, says "pour a drink that is three parts water, but make the fourth part wine." So that's three parts water, one part wine. This mixture is 1/4 wine, though, so the connection to the number 14 is preserved.

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Oddities

Non-Tarot allegories of temperance typically show the woman holding two dissimilar vessels (as different receptacles are normally used for wine and water) and decanting from the one into the other. Naturally, this latter vessel is held directly under the former, is held upright, and has a wide mouth to catch the falling liquid.

Vittore Carpaccio, Temperance (c. 1525)

The Tarot card, in contrast, typically shows two identical vessels (narrow-mouthed, except in the Rider-Waite), held some distance apart, with the liquid flowing between them at a highly improbable angle. As Whitley Strieber has said in his commentary on this card, you couldn't really do this.

Granted, the draftsmanship of the early Tarot cards was often crude, and the Medievals weren't big on physics, but I still think this marked divergence from reality, and from the universal understanding of how pouring works, requires some explanation and suggests some meaning beyond "temperance" in the narrow sense.

Also, central to the whole idea of temperance is careful measurement -- mixing the water and wine just so, aiming for the Aristotelian golden mean of intoxication -- but the angel of temperance in the Tarot of Marseille isn't being careful at all. I mean, she's not even looking at what she's doing.

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Le temps

"I understand you two had a bit of a contretemps."

"No, just a temps."

-- I know I read this somewhere, despite what the lying Internet says

The word temperance suggests the related words temporal, temporary, etc., which have to do with time. And pouring liquid (or sand) from one vessel into another -- isn't that how an hourglass works? It turns out I'm not the first person to have made that connection.

Detail from Ambrogio Lorenzetti,
Allegory of Good Government (1338)

I think one of the major meanings of this card could have to do with the flow of time -- all is flux -- with the angel perhaps representing the transcendent viewpoint of eternity.

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Reincarnation

In the Marseille ordering of the trumps, Temperance comes right after l'arcane sans nom, vulgarly yclept "Death."

Noticing the weird spelling tenperance used in most TdM decks, I thought I'd put ten perance (with a space) into Google Translate and see what came out. It suggested I add an apostrophe: "Did you mean t'en perance?" Yes, yes, that's what I meant. Now tell us, O wise Google Translate, what happens after death?

No French dictionary backs this up, but still interesting . . .

Could the Temperance card represent, among other things, the process of reincarnation, when the spirit is poured out of one tabernacle of clay and into another?

Oh, and speaking of "tabernacles of clay," isn't the underlying metaphor that the body is a temple? Temple is etymologically akin to temperance, and in the Book of Ezekiel we have the image of water flowing out of the Temple.

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Relationship to the Star

The meaning of Temperance obviously has something to do with the meaning of the similarly enigmatic Star card.

The winged angel is now a naked woman, and instead of pouring from one jug into the other, she is pouring out the contents of both jugs, one into the water and the other onto the land. In the Rider-Waite deck, it is even true that the angel of Temperance and the woman on the Star card are both standing with one foot on land and one in the water.

I'm not sure yet what to make of this parallel, but it is obviously not a coincidence. I mean, this is Tarot. Nothing is a coincidence.