Major Arcana · XIV
♐︎ Sagittarius · ס Samekh · Thoth: Art
Blend the opposites slowly. The right amount, the middle way and time will produce something better than either extreme.
Samekh, the prop or tent-peg, supports: “The Lord upholds (somekh) all who fall” (Psalm 145:14). Its shape is a closed circle, and the Talmud says the Samekh of the tablets of the Law hung miraculously in the air. Its value is 60; Case gives it the faculty of wrath, which Temperance tempers.
The 25th path rises from Yesod straight up the Middle Pillar to Tiphareth. It is the path of the arrow shot upward (Sagittarius) through the rainbow of Qesheth (the bow, a word made of the letters of paths 29, 31 and 32), the mystic’s path of aspiration. The Golden Dawn’s Portal grade centres on it, and Crowley calls it the path on which the Holy Guardian Angel is first glimpsed.
Smith’s Temperance is a winged angel with a solar disc on the brow and a triangle in a square on the breast, standing with one foot in a pool and one on land, pouring water between two cups. A path leads from the pool to a crown of light between two peaks; irises grow by the water. Case’s key word is verification: testing and trying, as the 32 Paths text says, until the tempering is complete.
Crowley calls the card Art and makes it the completion of the Lovers: the black king and white queen of the 17th path have become one androgynous figure, white-faced and black-faced, pouring fire from one hand and water from the other into a cauldron, where a lion and an eagle exchange colours (red becomes white, white becomes red). A raven sits on a skull in the cauldron. On the rainbow arch is the alchemical motto Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem, “visit the interior of the earth; by rectifying you shall find the hidden stone” (V.I.T.R.I.O.L.).
Card image: Pamela Colman Smith, Rider-Waite tarot, 1909 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).