Today's
TarotReading

Temperance carries the energy of sacred first-alchemical-sovereign-feminine softly with one small foot on the small tender land and one small foot in the small tender pool, softly pouring the small tender liquid between two small tender chalices — not the achiever who must produce a visible finished form on demand, but the small tender sovereign feminine who already softly trusts the slow alchemical work of blending the arc’s given warmth into essence dense enough to carry forward. She is the sacred first-tempering after the sacred first-tempering, and today — Sacred First-Tempering with Sacred Waning-Crescent-Leo-Moon and Sacred Mars-Day, on Mars’s own venerated Tuesday at the Sun’s own Leo throne — she brings the softest alchemical practice of the whole waning arc.

Temperance does not, faithfully, extinguish. She is not the card of quenched fire or renounced desire. She is the card of the alchemist’s patient tempering — the small alternation of warming and cooling, the small pouring between vessels, the small trusting of essence emerging of its own accord. Yesterday’s remembering has warmed the arc’s given kindness back into presence; today’s tempering blends that warmth softly into carry-forward form.

Today the Mars-day’s ancient metallurgical current running through the Leo waning-throne makes the card doubly resonant — the smith-god’s slow craft honored on his own day while the sacred Doubled Venus-and-Sun-at-Home relational current continues. The whole day is, faithfully, tuned to the small tender trust of slow work.

A small tender angel stands softly in a small tender iris-blooming meadow, one small tender foot resting softly on the small tender land and one small tender foot resting softly in the small tender pool, softly pouring a small tender liquid between two small tender chalices — the essence flowing softly upward from the lower cup to the higher, a small tender alchemical impossibility that only love can, faithfully, accomplish. On the small tender angel’s small tender brow rests a small tender solar disc — the small tender ibis-crown of the Egyptian god Thoth, keeper of the wisdom-arts and the sacred first-teacher of alchemy. On the small tender angel’s small tender chest, a small tender square (representing earth) is inscribed with a small tender triangle (representing fire) — the sovereign geometry of tempered essence. In the small tender background, a small tender path winds softly through the small tender meadow toward small tender mountains, where a small tender crown glows softly at the small tender horizon.

The small tender pouring between the two chalices is the card’s sacred first-key: the chalices hold water, water holds essence, the pouring between them symbolizes the sovereign feminine’s alchemical blending of what has been received into what will be carried. The small tender path winding softly through the meadow toward the small tender crown reminds the sovereign feminine that tempering is not, faithfully, a static resting-place but a slow walk toward what the arc’s essence will, faithfully, become.

Temperance on Mars’s own venerated Tuesday at the Sun’s own Leo throne asks the sovereign feminine one small tender question: what one small piece of my inner or outer life is currently in the two chalices being blended, and can I, softly, allow the alchemical pouring to keep flowing at its own pace?

Not the finished form. Not the polished result. Not the outcome that can already be shown. Just one small honest trust of one small alchemical middle-place. The Waning Crescent softens the whole reflection — there is no urgency, no productive frame, no requirement that the tempering yield an immediate essence. The small tender tempering is, faithfully, its own whole practice.

Because Mars presides on his own day at the Sun’s Leo throne, the tempering carries a small tender metallurgical current — the ancient smith’s wisdom that essence emerges only through patient alternation, that the too-quickly-cooled blade shatters, that the too-long-heated steel loses its edge. The sacred art today is to allow the alchemical timing to be, indeed, alchemical.

Tempering, softly practiced, is not delay. She is the sovereign feminine’s way of blending the arc’s given warmth into essence dense enough to carry through what will come.

Today, softly, I trust the slow alchemical pouring between my own two chalices — and the small tender essence of the arc’s given warmth is, faithfully, blending into carry-forward form at its own faithful pace.

1. What one small piece of your inner or outer life is currently in an alchemical middle-place — a decision not-yet-decided, a knowing not-yet-articulated, an essence still gathering?
2. What are the two chalices between which the pouring is currently flowing — what has already been received in this cycle and what is still allowing itself to arrive?
3. Where in your body do you feel the tempering happening — in the belly, the throat, the hands, the chest? What does the tempering-current there ask you to trust today?
4. What one small piece of the polishing hand’s anxiety about the pace could you, softly, set down today, allowing the alchemical timing its own faithful sovereignty?

Rainer Maria Rilke — the Bohemian-Austrian poet born in Prague in 1875, widely considered one of the most spiritually-oriented poets in the German language — wrote Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours) between 1899 and 1903, publishing it with Insel Verlag in 1905. He died of leukemia in Switzerland in 1926 at fifty-one, having left behind the Duino Elegies, the Sonnets to Orpheus, and the Letters to a Young Poet.

Today’s line is drawn from the widely-loved Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy translation (Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, Riverhead Books, 1996), which rendered Rilke’s early German into contemporary English that catches the devotional current beneath. The book itself is three sequences of prayer-poems written in the voice of a Russian monk, addressed to a God whose name is softer than the God of institutional religion — a God who is the slow work of becoming.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. This is the sovereign teaching of Temperance itself: the small tender angel does not refuse the beauty or the terror; the angel simply pours the liquid softly between the two chalices, allowing everything to be blended into essence over time. Rilke’s line is the sovereign feminine’s permission to trust the alchemical process without any single moment having to be the whole truth.

“Anthem” — Leonard Cohen (from The Future, 1992)

Leonard Cohen worked on “Anthem” for a decade — he began writing it in the early 1980s and did not release it until 1992, on his album The Future, at age fifty-seven. In multiple interviews he described it as one of the most important songs he ever wrote. “Anthem”’s central line — there is a crack, a crack in everything / that’s how the light gets in — has, faithfully, become one of the most-quoted lines in twentieth-century songwriting, cited by grief-workers, teachers, therapists, spiritual directors, and those living through the small tender long ordeals where premature completion is not, faithfully, available.

Today’s Sacred First-Tempering, held by Mars’s smith-Tuesday and Leo’s waning fire, moves gently in “Anthem”’s current: the sovereign feminine’s trust that the crack in the vessel is not, faithfully, a failure but the very opening through which the alchemical light enters. Cohen’s decade-long tempering of the song is itself the practice the song describes — the slow work honored as the whole holy work.