Temperance is everything to be found lacking in this world. And indeed, when we speak of the world -- the collective -- we must first speak of the intemperance that inculcates self-discipline in women far more than it does in men. All of the gender-bending quotations from the ancient Gospel of Thomas refer to this fact: that male and female must temper themselves in accordance with what makes them subjective, for the sake of objectivity. Temperance, self-started by intemperance as Jesus imagines there, could potentially resolve an entire universe full of evil into a valuable, perfect clockwork. Yet temperance is everything that is to be found lacking in this world. When we refer to the collective, we generally refer to a bunch of extremists: there are those to the right, and there are those to the left, but it's impossible to be a centrist-extremist. And this is why almost every religion includes some idea of temperance. As a Tarot figure -- not simply as a page in this Book of Thoth, but as a form -- I hope the reader will see why Temperance is the hardest to depict. Sure, someone dressed like The Magician can juggle some fluid between a pair of cups; but the fact is that Temperance is everything to be found lacking in this world. We seem to engineer vortices wherever we go, and not true windows.
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