major arcana
Suit: Trumps Major Arcana
Also known as Art.
Temperance pours one current into another until both can share a vessel. Its balance is living and deliberate: adjustment, reconciliation and the patient making of a workable whole.
A card carries more than one history. Its place in the tarot pack, Golden Dawn path, Rider–Waite–Smith reading and later variants are kept beside their own sources, since the same name can do different work in different decks.
7 sourced claims: 4 traditional , 3 modern
The meanings are Waite's own words from The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. They belong to one influential school of reading and do not exhaust what the cards have meant in other hands.
A. E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith, Rider–Waite–Smith — Part III, §3, The Greater Arcana and their Divinatory Meanings.
Art · XIV · The Daughter of the Reconcilers, the Bringer-Forth of Life
An androgynous angel pours between chalices with one foot on land and one in water; a path rises toward light and a distant crown.
A concise paraphrase of Waite's published explanation of the Pamela Colman Smith design, not a universal description of all historical decks.
Upright, Waite associates Temperance with moderation, careful management, adaptation and the ability to accommodate different needs. Reversed, the card can indicate disunion, competing interests or a system that imposes agreement without achieving real harmony.
Waite himself warns that many fortune-telling allocations are artificial and arbitrary; these are historical Rider–Waite–Smith meanings, not assertions of fact.
Hermetic Qabalah
Book T establishes this Tarot-to-letter attribution. The path number and endpoints belong to this tradition's canonical Kircher arrangement.
Book T's formal title, Tree or elemental place, astrological attribution, and characteristic reading. This is the system used by the Hermetic Tree.
The Daughter of the Reconcilers, the Bringer-Forth of Life
The formal esoteric title printed in Book T.
ס · Samekh
A Golden Dawn correspondence, not a claim about the historical origin of the card or a universal Jewish letter-to-card system.
Sagittarius
Book T's attribution carried by the Hebrew letter and therefore by this path.
The combination of forces, realization, and action producing material effects that may be constructive or destructive.
Paraphrased from Book T's brief meanings; its dignity method reads a card in relation to neighbouring cards rather than as a fixed keyword.
Historical context and places where influential decks or occult systems differ.
One of the twenty-one figured trumps plus the Fool found beside the four ordinary suits in historical tarot packs.
Museum history dates the earliest documentary references to the 1440s–1450s in northern Italy and identifies tarot's original use as a trick-taking game. The occult-Qabalistic reading is later.
| Relation | To | First attested |
|---|---|---|
| Tarot trump of | Path 25 · Samekh | 1888 CE |
| Hebrew-letter attribution | Samekh | 1888 CE |
| Astrological attribution | Sagittarius | 1888 CE |