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Temperance & Cerridwen · The Tarot Card Catalogue

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Hey and welcome back to the tarot card catalog, the show where we take one tarot card and one story from somewhere in human history and let them mess with each other's meaning for a while.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really glad you're here for this one because today's pairing is one I've been turning over for a while, and I think that it's going to do something genuinely interesting to both of them by the time we're done.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: The card is Temperance.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: The story is Caridwin, the Welsh figure of the cauldron, the brood potion, pursuit, and transformation.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I want to put those two together is that Temperance has a reputation for being gentle, kind of boring, calm and patient.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: And Caridwin is not that.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: So let's see what happens when we put her in the card.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so Temperance.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: If you spend any time with the Rider Waite Smith deck, and if you're listening to the show, I'm guessing you have, you know the image.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's an angel standing with one foot on land and one foot in water.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Robes, wings, a triangle inside a circle on the chest.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: And the angel is holding two cups, pouring liquid from one to the other in this slow, deliberate stream.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: In the background, there are irises, a winding path, mountains, a rising sun, or a crown of light on the horizon.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: The whole image has this quality of stillness and patience, things being carefully, unhurriedly managed.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: The word temperance comes from the Latin temperare, to mix and blend and moderate.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's actually closer to the card's real meaning than the more moralistic associations the word picked up over time.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't about being a killjoy or refusing a second glass of wine.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: The traditional upright meanings cluster around balance and integration and moderation and the kind of truest sense of the word, the right proportion of things, healing, alchemy in some interpretations.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that you can take two opposing things and find the mixture that makes something better than either one of them alone.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: The angel is often read as a figure of divine calm.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: The pouring between the two cups, some readers see this as a flow between the conscious and unconscious, fire and water, between what we want and what we need.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: The foot in the water and the foot on the ground is the same theme, not choosing one over the other, but standing in both.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: The path leading toward the light suggests that this patient measured work is going somewhere.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: The process has a destination, even if you can't see it clearly yet.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Most guidebooks will give you words like patience, calm, moderation, balance, healing, flow, synthesis.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Can you tell that I'm so bored with these words?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And all of that is genuinely the card.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not dismissing any of it.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a version of this card that gets read as almost passive.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like temperance is the card you get when nothing dramatic is happening or when the drama needs to slow down.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: When you're just waiting and breathing and managing.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now I want to be up front about something like I am every week.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: The story of Caridwin and Guyan Bach come to us primarily through medieval Welsh manuscript tradition, most significantly something called the Tale of Taliasin, which exists in a number of versions that developed over time and were later interpreted and expanded in the 18th century.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: The editor who made those changes in the 18th century is a figure who, to put it charitably, embellished things significantly.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: So when I tell this story, I'm working with a tradition that has genuine deep roots and also a kind of complicated transmission history.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'll tell you what the core of the story is and where things get layered, I'll say so.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the heart of it.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Caridwin has a son named Morphrin.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Depending on which version you're in, Morphrin is described as ugly or stranged or marked in some way that makes Caridwin fear for his prospects in the world.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: And Caridwin, who's this powerful figure, a kind of sorceress and keeper of transformative knowledge, decides to give him an advantage.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: She's going to brew a potion in her cauldron, and not just any potion.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's a potion called the Awen, or something that produces Awen, that word in Welsh tradition that means something like divine inspiration, poetic genius, the spark of creative and prophetic knowledge.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: She'll brew it for one year and one day.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And it requires constant tending, specific herbs gathered at specific times, unrelenting heat and attention.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: She sets a boy called Guyanbach, little Guyan, to stir the cauldron.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: He's a servant, has low status, and he's nobody particularly special.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: His job is just to keep the fire going and the cauldron stirring while Carudwin tends to the rest of what needs tending.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And then, near the end of the year, after all that work and all that time, three drops of the potion fly out of the cauldron and land on Guyan's hand.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: He instinctively puts his hand to his mouth, and in that instant, those three drops, that accidental taste, all that knowledge, all that inspiration, all the transformative power that was meant for Morphrin goes into him instead.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: The rest of the potion turns to poison.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: The cauldron cracks.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: A year of Caridwin's work completely gone.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: And she knows immediately what happened.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: What follows is one of the great pursuit sequences in world mythology.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Wian runs, Caridwin chases, and both of them shift multiple times.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: He becomes a hare, she becomes a greyhound.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: He becomes a fish, she becomes an otter.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: He becomes a bird, she becomes a hawk.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, he transforms into a grain of wheat and hides among other grains on a threshing floor, and she becomes a black hen and she eats him.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not the end.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: She becomes pregnant from eating him, and when the child is born, this child who is Guyambach reborn, she intends to kill him, but she can't bring herself to do it.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: She sets the infant in a leather bag and throws him into the water.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: He's found, and the person who finds him is so struck by his beauty and radiance that he gives him a name, Taliessin, which in Welsh means something like shining brow.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: And Tallyessen becomes the greatest poet of his age.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: His verses are still there and being read.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: He's a real presence in the Welsh literary tradition.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the connection between Guambach and the historical or legendary Taliessin is something that developed through the tradition, and different versions handle it differently.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: But that's the shape of the story, the arc of it.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: A potion brewed with fierce intent, accidentally received by the wrong person, followed by pursuit, destruction, transformation, and rebirth into something extraordinary and unexpected.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: So, where does this land next to temperance?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: In some ways, they're obviously the same story.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: There's a vessel, there's mixing, kind of a long, patient process.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Caridwin tends that cauldron for a year and a day.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: There's the blending of ingredients with a specific intention, something being produced that's greater than any single element that went in.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: Even the angel's two cups and Caridwin's cauldron are doing structurally similar things, holding a process, managing a transformation, serving as the site where change happens.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: But here's where it gets interesting.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: The temperance card, in its most common reading, implies that the one doing the pouring is in control.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: The angel is calm, the process is deliberate, nothing spills.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And Kurdwin's story is a story about what happens when the transformation cannot be controlled, when the three drops go to the wrong person and the vessel cracks, when the entire year of careful, intentional work produces something completely other than what was intended.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, and this is the thing I keep coming back to, the result is still transformation.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: The result is still Owen.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: The inspiration still gets into the world.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: It just goes into the wrong person instead of Morphrin, and it makes him into Taliesin.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: So here's the insight I want to sit with.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: Temperance, real temperance, the act of mixing, doesn't guarantee the outcome you planned.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: It guarantees that something will change, and the mixing is what does it.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_00: The vessel, the heat, the time, the combination of ingredients, those are what make transformation possible.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: But the transformation itself, that has its own momentum.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's not boring.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: It has its own direction.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can tend the cauldron with absolute fierce devotion, and the three drops can still fly out sideways and land somewhere you didn't intend.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Caridwin isn't a failure as a figure of temperance.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: She's its most honest face, because she's the one who shows us what mixing actually costs and what it actually does.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: The angel on the card is beautiful and serene, but the cauldron is real.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: The cauldron is what temperance looks like when it's working in the messy actual world where things spill and crack and pursue each other through animal forms and end up somewhere unexpected and extraordinary.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: So after Caridwin, how does temperance land differently?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: The phrases I'd reach for now are things like deliberate mixing, volatile integration, proportion under pressure, the chemistry of change, active alchemy.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'd reach for the word tending, not passive waiting, but the kind of attention Caridwin gave that cauldron, fierce and purposeful and completely unable to guarantee what it was going to produce.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd read the angel differently too, not as the embodiment of effortless calm, but as someone who has stood at a fire for a year, who's gathered specific ingredients at specific times and is doing something precise and consequential, and who knows or should know that the pouring between those two cups is not decorative.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's the transformation itself happening in real time.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: When this card turns up now, I think it's asking something harder than, are you being patient enough?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think it might be asking, what are you actually mixing right now?
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: What have you been tending?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And are you honest with yourself about the fact that once you put those things together in a vessel and apply heat, you don't get to decide exactly what comes out.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: The invitation I want to leave you with is this.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Think about something you're currently trying to balance or blend in your life, your work, a relationship, a creative project, anything.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: And ask yourself honestly whether you're tending that process or whether you're hoping it will manage itself.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because temperance isn't the card of things smoothing out on their own.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's the card of active, committed, sometimes volatile mixing.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the angel isn't calm because nothing is happening.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: The angel is calm because they know exactly what they're doing and they're doing it anyway.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's it for this one.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for spending time with me and Temperance and Caridwin and her extraordinary, ungovernable cauldron.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to go deeper into any of this, readings, courses, mentorship, I'm here for all of it, and I'd love to hear from you.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Just reach out using the information in the episode description.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And wherever you are right now, whatever you're in the middle of tending, keep the fire going.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: You don't always get to know what's going to come out, but the mixing is the point.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: See you next time.