"There Is No Limit To What You Can Transcend..."

What's this, a booze-themed Temperance card? Am I taking cues from Aleister Crowley, who notoriously turned the Strength card into Lust?

Hardly. Though I did discuss this with Tarot author Robert M. Place during a recent interview. "What Crowley did was perverse," says Place. "He took a vice, and he made it a virtue. People get confused about virtue -- they think it’s all just that stuff they were taught in catechism that tells you 'Don’t do this, don’t do that.' That’s not what virtue is! A virtue is a way to balance out certain parts of your soul and bring them into harmony and balance. So a vice isn’t evil, it’s just an imbalance or sickness. And that’s what Crowley’s whole life was about -- imbalance. If you 'embrace' a vice, you’re just embracing a sickness and you’re going to make yourself miserable."

Unlike Crowley, I've never been much of a drinker, but last year I fell in love with green Chartreuse. The herbal flavor is extremely bold and complex; it's definitely what some might consider an acquired taste, though I was enslaved from the first drop. Fortunately it's almost impossible for me to abuse it; first of all, it's pretty damned expensive -- about $50 a bottle. And second, it's 110 proof, which means that if I drink any more than a single shot served over ice, I'll start seeing hobgoblins in the corner.

The formula comes from an ancient alchemical recipe that was originally thought to be the elixir of everlasting life, and it also happens to be a hell of a digestive tonic; it's been produced by monks in France's Carthusian mountains for centuries. In fact, it still is:

"Only two Chartreuse monks know the identity of the 130 plants, how to blend them and how to distill them into this world famous liqueur. They are also the only ones who know which plants they have to macerate to produce the natural green and yellow colors... The Green Chartreuse is the only liqueur in the world with a completely natural green color."

So you see, the product itself is not just blameless in intention but actually appeals to our virtue, a contribution to one's physical and spiritual well-being, as well as one's enjoyment of life. That's not something most of us are taught to look for in a beverage. (I met a girl the other night who can't touch the stuff because on her 21st birthday she drank seven shots of Chartreuse in under an hour and spent the rest of the night painting the bathroom green.)

Everyone's idea of drinking "in moderation" is different, because we each have our own relationship with alcohol. The term simply implies a person is fully aware and in control of their behavior. Some people find (through trial and error, unfortunately) that alcohol is a threat to their physical and/or mental wellbeing, and ultimately they moderate their drinking by not having any at all. Moderation has less about how much is imbibed and more about the control that one exerts over oneself, regardless of all other factors. Moderation requires us to dispel our illusions, to focus on the truth, rather than what merely feels true or sounds true.

There are two other cardinal virtues on display in the Tarot as well -- the aforementioned Strength, and also Justice. Together they add up to three totally different approaches to overcoming personal imbalance. Strength's approach is to endure the imbalance by sheer force of will, eventually overwhelming or outlasting it. Justice offers a different strategy: by judiciously altering your own position to compensate for the imbalance, you can bring everything back into harmony.

Of the three, Temperance presents the most challenging approach: by accepting and rising above the imbalance, you undermine its power to harm you. You simply accept all the factors as they are, for better or worse -- by embracing them, you gain a complete view of reality as it truly is.

In order to do this, you have to be willing to transform. That's what "tempering" is: changing the make-up of something by adding other ingredients to it, or by applying changes in temperature or pressure. The final product bears little similarity to the prima materia, but it has new uses, new value. As Djuna Barnes says in her novel Nightwood, "A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself."

This card is meant to remind you of that wholeness. The angel we see in the Waite deck studies the properties of water, pouring it back and forth between two cups. Learning from its observations, it has gained the power to transcend the water's properties and actually stand with one foot upon it. The other foot remains grounded on the earth, an important reality check. Once you begin mixing, measuring, and observing your essential qualities, there is no limit to what you can transcend, no limit to what you can create, and no limit to what you may become. Compared to the perfectly linear balancing act than we saw in the Justice card, this is practically a Mobius strip: when taking control of the process of relinquishing control, where do you begin?

We prefer for our vices and virtues to stay unambiguous; we want to know what's good and what's bad, and to be able to choose between them plainly and confidently. However, we each eventually reach a threshold that requires a wider, deeper glimpse of ourselves and our options. It's at those times when we learn what the angel of Temperance already knows: we cannot remain what we are -- not if we are ever to become truly ourselves.

Previously On Arcanalogue: Temperance