Tarot: Temperance
Fasting
I drew Temperance together with The Tower—an odd combination, it seemed. I’ve always had a difficult time interpreting this particular card, but in the moment, I took it to mean something like “fasting”. The word was at that point associated for me with something like forbidding oneself from indulging in any kind of pleasurable activity, perhaps because of its association with the so-called “temperance movement”, whose naming is ironic since total abstinence is as far from temperance as total indulgence.
The fasting did not go well: for the first few of days, I ate only a small meal each day. By day three or four, I was exhausted and had lost my appetite completely. I stopped eating almost entirely. Over the following days, I became more and more tired, nauseous, and started getting an odd vertigo sensation. I could barely think and couldn’t get anything done. My throat was so dry that I could barely swallow—actually this was the worst part, even though it doesn’t sound so bad. Amazingly, until this point, I had basically forgotten that I wasn’t eating anything. I had noticed that I was feeling much worse, but I interpreted it as having caught some kind of infectious illness.
After unsuccessfully trying to treat my “illness” with over-the-counter medication, it finally occurred to me that this fasting thing may not have been such a good idea, and I slowly started forcing myself to eat real food again, and, indeed, recovered from the illness. This whole endeavor ended up mostly being a useful lesson in what the virtue of temperance is not. (In retrospect, if I were to interpret the card with respect to eating habits, the more fitting interpretation it is not as a strict fasting schedule, but more like taking small, frequent meals instead of “saving up” for one large meal near the end of the day. An irregular eating schedule.)
Harmonic composition
The most basic sense of the word “temperance” is something like “proper mixture”—if something is temperate, then it is composed of different parts in harmonic ratios. There needn’t be any connotation of reduction, scaling back or showing restraint. Rather, the question is one of good taste in composition. Changes are made by increasing the proportion of one substance and decreasing the proportion of the others—increase and decrease are two sides of the same coin.
Loosening fixation
(WIP)
The psychosomatic κρητήρ
(WIP)
Etymology
It comes from Latin, and in fact does have a relationship with the similar-sounding words related to time (e.g. temporal). The connection is most proximately that time can be divvied up into periods, especially in the sense of “the right time” (Greek καιρός); something temperate is likewise composed of its parts in the right way.1
The term is the conventional translation of Greek σωφροσύνη. The meaning of this term is the subject of Plato’s Charmides.