Temperance: Nature, Blending, Life and Death
If the Temperance card were natural phenomenon, it would be a rainbow. Part illusion, of the earth, and of the sky; an angel not made of separate, opposing parts, but a super-being, made of different elements and spectacular to view.
Some people claim to have seen angels. Is it not real because we can’t prove it? Similarly, is the rainbow that you see real because you can see it? What is objectively ‘real’, or not, to you? Temperance teaches us many things, and one of those things is that reality is more subjective than we realise.
Above: Temperance from the Marseille Tarot (Paul Marteau version)
On another note, see the way that the Temperance angel – she/he/they (it’s never really been clear) – mixes liquid between jugs, blending. They follow a middle way, like the Buddha. They don’t go to extremes. How can we take this into Nature with us? Perhaps we can realise that although we need to consume in order to survive (and sometimes just to enjoy life, too), too much consumption is denying the Earth and other species of their right to exist in good health.
On another note, I have recently started to walk a lot faster on my daily walks. I really didn’t want to do this, as I love to meander slowly and mindfully, noticing the details in the forest glen, paying attention to as much as I can. When I walk fast, my mind seems to speed up with my body, and I struggle to stay mindful. However, I was getting fatter. As my day already has so many other commitments (I really don’t want a gruelling exercise regime to add to my daily walk, daily meditations, daily writing practice, daily work etc – we have to stop somewhere, eh?) it made so much sense to simply start walking faster on my daily walks and to give my body more of a workout. (As well as swapping sweeties and chocolate for fruit, but you don’t need to know the details of my shopping list, do you!)
I must admit that I find it harder to connect with Nature when I’m walking with this new speed, but it’s not impossible. I’m learning how to do both at the same time – stay mindful of the beautiful forest and also look after my body. I’m that guy stomping through the quiet forest like an excitable troll – yes, that’s me!
This, for me, is the spirit of Temperance – learning to blend and to balance, for the good of the whole. Or, perhaps more appropriately, mixing. I could apply this theme to so many other ideas related to Nature – not least the key Buddhist teaching of the Middle Way – but right now I want to share more about the angel image. As I’m always saying, a Tarot card is not just a set of meanings to apply to a situation: if it were, we might as well just look at a written word on a piece of card, rather than gorgeous images bursting with symbols.
Now, this is a strange thing, but despite looking at that Temperance card for the last 20 years, the importance of the figure being an angel with wings (at least in most traditional decks) only became important to me lately. Someone very important to me passed away a few years ago, and – as I have experienced in previous bereavements – after a period of silence, I could feel their connection. I went through a stage of hearing their voice clearly in my mind, especially when sleepy, although whether this was ‘really’ them or my imagination providing comfort to me, I do not claim to know.
Either way, she is still present with me, but she is like the rainbow now – she has left almost tangible traces, but I can’t reach out and touch her anymore. I realised (or decided) recently – when repeatedly drawing this card in readings exploring her death – that she has become my angel. Whatever happens when we die, I don’t know, but I do know that nothing and no-one can disappear completely – even science itself doesn’t like that idea. When I experience her ethereal presence in my mind and in my body, I just allow myself to know that I am in the presence of my angel. I do not believe in angels per se, and I have not a jot of Christianity left in me, but I now believe in one angel, at least.
Like the watery liquids that the Temperance angel mixes to become one substance, her memories are held inside my mind and my body, blending with the physical state that I call me. Therefore, she is still here, still real in a way, taking form as the images and thoughts that come to me in sleepy moments or when I am quiet and still.
Above: Temperance from the Waite-Smith Tarot
So much in Nature is experienced in this way. We sense things, we feel things in Nature, we experience feelings and emotions strongly when we are in the presence of a certain view, a mighty tree, an enchanting animal hiding in the bushes. We take these memories with us, and we can access them whenever we need to. If we close our eyes when we are anxious or in need of comfort, they can be there with us. Perhaps they will be distorted, perhaps the tree has become something new as it blends and mixes with other trees in your memory bank, but there, in your mind, is a tree, something beautiful and yet not as solid as the ‘real’ thing you met outdoors – but new and blended with your incredible imagination and inner world. This is where I become a rubbish Buddhist, as Buddhism largely rejects thoughts and visions as delusion. I’m not sure about that – I just think it’s important to know what is objectively real, and what is in the mind-realm. Mixing up mind visions/imagination with the physical world can be dangerous for all sorts of reasons (look at the state of politics in the western world today – it is pure fantasy masquerading as reality), but I believe that both the antics of the mind and the physical world have substance if understood properly and not confused with each other.
This is the spirit of Temperance – two elements becoming one; the inner and the outer becoming one; the dead and the alive meeting and existing together. Perhaps we experience it in Nature when we deliberately read an enchanting fairy tale set in the forest and then go for a walk in the forest, taking the story with us in our mind, letting reality and the story-world blend. Two elements join each other to defy what we think of as objective reality, creating something altogether of its own.
And so for now, I say thank you to my own angel, whose voice I sometimes meet in my mind. It is not objectively real, no, but beautiful. Her voice influences my physical reality by reminding me of the wonder of this life, where people seemingly disappear from the planet completely, but where life and death might not be the clear-cut, separate phenomena that we assume them to be.
That’s all for now, friends. Thank you for being here – and please check out my Therapeutic Tarot Sessions and my courses embracing Tarot and Nature if you’d like us to work together. You can also sign up for the Tarot Blog newsletter (different to my main newsletter) below to receive occasional email updates (roughly monthly) with the latest posts.
Smiles from Scotland,
Stephen
