Temperance.
Poured across without losing any.
Upright, then reversed, as Waite gave them in 1910.
A winged figure stands with one bare foot in the water and one on the land, pouring between two cups in an arc that runs uphill. Yellow irises grow at the waterline. A path goes up between hills to a crown of light on the horizon.
Moderation is the usual word for this and it undersells it. Nothing is lost in the transfer, and both feet are committed to different ground, which is harder than picking one. Whatever you are carrying between the two sides of your life is not being spilled.
Four things people go to on this card
- the two feet
You went to the feet. One is in the water, one is on the land, and both are bare.
Standing in two states at once rather than choosing between them. Not on a bridge, not at the edge testing it: in the water and on the bank at the same time, with nothing on the feet.
The usual reading makes this sound like less of everything. The picture is doing something more difficult than that: holding two whole things without watering either down. You are standing in two of those. You have been trying to pick one, and the picking is what has been costing you.
Which two things are you standing in at once, and have you been trying to pick one?
- the pouring
The pour is what you followed. The liquid crosses between the two cups in an arc that runs uphill.
Water does not go up. It was drawn going up, in the only card where the impossible thing is the quiet one in the middle of the picture rather than the event.
So the mixing here is not compromise. Compromise loses something at every transfer and everybody involved can feel the loss. This is an exchange with nothing lost, which is rare enough that you should recognise it when you are inside one, and protect it, and not tidy it up.
Where in your life is something being exchanged with nothing lost, and what makes that work?
- the path
You looked past her to the left. A path going up between the hills to a crown of light on the horizon.
There is a destination in this card and the calm of the picture makes it easy to miss. The road is drawn, it clearly goes somewhere, and the somewhere is a long way off and up.
Which makes this the card of the practice rather than the arrival. The mixing is not the achievement. It is what gets done every day for the length of that road, in the same two cups, by the same person. Your question needs a practice and you have been looking for a decision.
What is the daily practice this needs, as against the decision?
- the irises
The flowers caught you. Yellow irises, growing at the water's edge on her right.
The messenger between the two states, named in the flower. Iris is the rainbow, the thing that goes between, and the plant has been put at the exact line where the water meets the land.
It is a small joke and a real claim. What joins two halves of a life is usually something minor growing on the boundary rather than a grand act of reconciliation: a standing arrangement, a habit, one person who talks to both sides. Find yours. It is smaller than you think and it is load-bearing.
What small ordinary thing is doing the joining between the two sides of this?
On the Tree of Life, Temperance is the twenty-fifth path, Samekh, from Tiphareth to Yesod, in the Golden Dawn's attribution (Liber 777).
Draw a card, and if this one turns, press whichever of these four you went to and the reading is written from there instead. Pulled it in a spread of your own? Read the whole spread here.