A Midweek Newsletter (Day 40, 2022)

Some notes on Temperance/Time + a 4D update . . . .

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Temperance card, due to a temporary focus on the role of my right hand in managing everyday life. (If you missed it last week, a Foolish accident put my thumb out of action for a while.)

And as often happens, the result of looking more deeply into Tarot imagery has been a serendipitous—and highly informative—journey from something I knew to a lot of things I didn’t. Bonus: the clarification of an idea hovering just on the edge of my thought process.

Let’s start on the practical level, with me realizing that I couldn’t manage getting into the Time Capsule drawers to come up with a Tuesday post. Actually, I can do most activities, but everything takes longer. And using muscles in an unaccustomed way—to compensate for structures that aren’t doing their proper job—always creates some physical stress. Plus, you have to think about ordinary motions that are usually performed unconsciously.

Since it’s not my first rodeo/barbecue/whatever, none of this is a big surprise. But—there are new things to be discovered each time around. And in this case, I discovered I hadn’t given enough thought to stories that can be found deep within the history of Tarot imagery.

Here’s a recap:

• I planned to start today’s newsletter by saying I’d been overly optimistic about getting back to “normal,” hand-wise. Temperance seemed like the right image—but I truly dislike Rider-Smith’s overwhelming angel, and it dawned on me that I either didn’t know or couldn’t remember how giant wings came into the picture.

• So I went straight to the indispensable Tarot Wheel, to find out more. And it’s a great story! I had forgotten (repressed?) the traditional idea that 15th-century versions of Ms. Temperance were pouring water into jugs of wine, to dilute the alcohol content. These Italian ladies were often adorned with a sort of hat/halo that identified them as representations of a moral virtue.

• The wings came along later, in France’s Marseilles-type cards. Why? According to Tarot Wheel, “In giving Temperance wings, she is promoted from a virtue to an (arch)angel, thus justifying that Temperance (card number 14) trumps over Death (card number 13).”

• Wings came and went intermittently for a while, but in the early 20th century, esoteric decks expanded them to fill the entire card. There was undoubtedly a theoretical reason—but I didn’t try to find out what it was. By then, my visit to Tarot Wheel’s Temperance history had produced another piece of information relevant to my current situation: very early connections between Temperance and Time. Here’s the first known representation of an hourglass, depicted in a detail from Lorenzetti’s “Allegory of Good Government,” 1338:

  

• In Lorenzetti’s time, apparently, the virtue of Temperance was linked to keeping proper time. And in the case of my own situation, failing to acknowledge that it takes time for injuries to heal has created an intemperate amount of frustration! But I’m struck by a more general point—the degree to which our now-familiar Rider-Smith images drown out older and perhaps more significant aspects of Tarot iconography. To be continued.

• Another discovery along the Time/Temperance pathway was an image from Maxwell Miller’s “Universal Tarot,” published by Samuel Weiser in 1996. I’d never heard of this deck before, and couldn’t find out much about deck or artist, beyond what’s in Bonnie Cehovet’s helpful review. But I love this card:

So that’s the story of how thinking about today’s newsletter led me into several interesting by-ways.

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And this is the story of what’s next. Here on EP, Time Capsule picks up again next Tuesday, with a page of notes I apparently wrote while flying back from California, after one of the first Bay Area Tarot Symposia. Reminiscences and ruminations, including this note-to-self: “not the history of an object but the history of an idea.”

For Sunday’s newsletter, I’ll be writing about tabletka, the Tarot/Kabbalah connection, and the unusual life of filmmaker Lorne Blair.

Between now and then, you can check out a lightly detailed overview of my new project: Tarot | In Four Dimensions. Due to recent delays, I’ve adapted the originally planned schedule—so the first post in the series will arrive on Monday, February 14. But in the meantime, I’ll be adding something of interest to the 4D Library: a lecture on “Shuffling” by famed astronomer/mathematician/philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington.

The remarks came while Eddington presented Scotland’s prestigious Gifford Lectures, from 1926 to 1927. And even though “deck of cards” was used in a generic way, much of what he said connects imaginatively with the process of divination.

By co-incidence, Eddington’s lectures took place in the same year that Paul Foster Case published his influential book on Tarot. A fact that seems to resonate with the context of then-emerging ideas, discussed in Transforming Tarot: 1925-1950.

If you’d like to be notified when the Eddington piece is posted, just become a free subscriber to Tarot | In Four Dimensions. The paid option is ready, if you want to join this four-month series. But I’ll also be sending some brief previews and occasional updates to free subscribers.

Speaking of the “paid option”—Substack requires me to offer an Annual subscription amount, and unfortunately, it appears as the default. But 4D will be a limited series, so just choose Monthly. You can easily cancel when the series is complete, or for that matter, any time.

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As always, thanks for reading! C