Tarot del Fuego - Temperance - 14

There are 3 suns and 4 eyeballs/moons in this card. This adds up to 7 celestial bodies. Thus, this card represents the culmination of a cycle that started with 7, the Chariot. The Sun and the Moon are opposites, and Temperance is very much about opposites and their interaction.

The backdrop is very cloud-forward, with a lot of stars. The overall feel is very celestial, and also airy-feeling. This is appropriate because this archetype is a faculty of the mind. More on that to follow. The central figure of the card, too, has only stars and night sky where their face should be. The figure is obviously some sort of divinity or angel. In fact, it is the witness/I-am consciousness/Purusha symbolized by the Hanged Man. The message here is that Consciousness is the real doer. Consciousness is the sole actor in this drama. Consciousness is the animator, even of the mind and the intellect.

The angel has four arms. The upper right hand is shooting water into a cornucopia held by the lower right. The upper left hand is holding its finger in a large flame bursting form the cornucopia held in the lower right, receiving its heat and energy. On each lower arm, there is a large red bird with its wings outstretched. This leaves the impression of the figure itself having outstretched red wings. The constellation corresponding to Temperance is Sagittarius, the archer (also a centaur!). Sagittarius is a mutable fire sign, which is ruled by Jupiter. the rainbow at the top and the crescent moon at the bottom of the card are evocative of his bow. There is a flaming hummingbird in the foreground penetrating a pink flower. Natives of the sign of the archer and the humming bird are both notorious for going, going, going. They find something that's interesting for whatever reason, examine it for a moment, and then flit on to the next thing. They're all about experience. And that's what Temperance is about. Mutable signs, like Sagittarius, are all about receptivity. They feel their way through things. They have a fluidity about them and will yield to external forces for the sake of ease. They are skilled at blending. They adapt and blend into various environments. Sagittarius, fiery as it is, is very active in this pursuit. Temperance is historically considered to be depicting a divine being engaged in the old science of alchemy. The takeaway is an idea of active experimentation with all extremes and everything in between, eventually arriving at a defined, concrete target.

When I was in the Army, my favorite training exercise was learning to operate and shoot machine guns. At a certain size (M240B and above), instead of aiming through crosshairs, you are just instructed to fire in the general direction of your target and "walk it in" based on observing the distance between the clouds of dirt kicked up by your bullets hitting the ground and what you're actually trying to hit. So you start shooting. At first maybe you're a foot and a half to the right and three feet in front of your target. So you swing your weapon on its tripod or bipod up and left to see that now the dust clouds are erupting about a foot and a half to the left of and two feet in front of your target. You go back and forth and up and down until you have adequately compensated for your initial error in judgement and are consistently hitting your target center mass. Big Sagittarius energy.

Temperance shows us experimenting with energies. Too much fire and you're burned and in pain. Too much water and you're cold and soggy. Get the balance just right and you're warm and comfortable. But before you arrive at that point of mediation, you have to gather information like a scientist. The scientific method tells us that failure is valuable because the information that we can glean from it gets us closer to success. So, in our attempts at reaching equilibrium, we start by swinging wildly back-and-forth like a pendulum. The Hebrew letter associated with Temperance is Samekh, a tent-peg or a prop. It conveys the significance a foundation, as in the foundation of a house. As a noun, its literal meaning is "quivering" or "vibration." This expresses the idea that the faculty of the mediation of energies represented by Temperance is foundational to Consciousness' pursuit of experience in its manifest form.

Some people, like yours truly, embody this energy in everything they do. Many other people, for better or for worse, are much more stable. But I'm not just talking about a collection of personality traits. We are talking about archetypes, and archetypes are multivalent.

The 14th of the Principles of Manifestation, according to the Tantras, is buddhi, the intellect or discriminating faculty of the mind. Like the fiery, mutable sign of Sagittarius, buddhi is active and mutable. The mind is always scheming and making plans. The mind is fluid and becomes like that by which it is surrounded and that to which it allots its real estate. The Bhagavad Gītā tells us, "You are what you think." This is the mind's capacity to discern what is beneficial and what is not. We are not necessarily the best judges of that. But to "sin" is literally "to miss the mark." It's an archery metaphor applied to living by a set of values. Our sets of values often miss the mark as well. The answer to the troubles that arise from these tendencies lies in the lessons of Sagittarius/Temperance. We just walk it in. We try something and see where we land. We adjust and try something else based on the new information at our disposal. It's not really failure as long as you make a point of "failing forward." That doesn't mean that we should simply careen haphazardly through life (although this is definitely a a disharmonious manifestation of this same energy to which Temperance might be pointing in a divinatory context). The archetype here is the intellect. So it should be understood that the directive here is to think as much as it is to do. Don't just continue re-enacting the same unconscious patterns of reactive behavior over and over again and say, "But that Tarot guy said this was the woke thing to do." I'll call you out and so will the Tarot. Yoga, the union of awareness with the divine Self of all, is contingent upon good discernment. Abhinavagupta, an 11th century Tantrik master, tells us that in this context, the most important form of discernment is the decision of what is to be held close and what is to be laid aside. Temperance asks three questions of us: "What do you value?"; "What brings you into alignment with these values?": and, "What brings you out of alignment with them?" Further, it prompts us to go forward and experiment with whatever answers are generated by all three of those questions.