How Can You Make Your Life Flow?
Reconcile, integrate, unite.
Temperance is an old-fashioned word meaning moderation or restraint. It sounds boring. Passionless. Neither one thing nor the other. Fence-sitting.
But Temperance is powerful.
Why?
Because Temperance reconciles, integrates and unites.
If we had two large boxes, one labelled Emotional and the other labelled Factual, most people would fit into one or the other. But the ideal person would fit into neither. They’d have a leg in both.
The angel pictured in the Temperance card of Tarot has one foot in water (emotion) and the other on firm land (facts). She holds a cup in each hand and pours a liquid (life) between the two of them. Backwards and forwards she pours, endlessly combining and blending elements we usually consider as opposites, like give and take, dark and light, new and old, male and female, death and life.
These seeming dualities usually churn up either emotions or facts in us because we see them as opposites. We don’t see that they each contain part of the other, that they are deeply connected.
With Temperance in charge, the power in their unity is released.