Tarot · Major Arcana
Temperance
Key XIV - Fire
Correspondences
- Element
- Fire
- Planet
- Jupiter
- Sign
- Sagittarius
- Number
- 14
- Yes / no
- Yes upright, No reversed
Traditional Golden Dawn attributions. The yes / no value is a convention for single-card questions, not a prediction.
Upright
Patience and a careful blending of opposites will bring this into alignment.
Temperance. Patience and a careful blending of opposites will bring this into alignment. Fourteenth: the slow blending of opposites into something neither could have been alone. Measure, proportion, and time that cannot be shortened. Its sign is Sagittarius, which travels: the wider view, the honest and untactful answer, and meaning sought beyond the immediate. Being Fire, it resolves through action rather than deliberation. Its keyword range runs through balance, moderation, patient blending, purpose, and harmony of opposites.
Reversed
Extremes have taken over where balance was needed.
Temperance reversed. Extremes have taken over where balance was needed. Under Jupiter, it enlarges whatever it touches: opportunity and generosity, together with the excess that arrives with both. Reversed here, it has overrun its own measure, the same force carried past the point where it served you and into the point where it costs you. Its keyword range, to be read here as difficulty, delay, or a lesson not yet learned: imbalance, excess, impatience, discord, and poor moderation.
About the Tarot
A 15th-century Italian card game that was turned to fortune-telling only 350 years later.
The upright and reversed meanings here follow the mainstream Rider-Waite-Smith reading tradition. A reversed card is treated as the same force blocked, turned inward, or overexpressed - not simply as its opposite.
Full history →Meanings are a guide to a symbolic tradition, offered for reflection and entertainment. They do not predict the future or describe real people or events. See the Terms.