Carpe Diem #200, Temperance (XIV)

Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,

We are going on with our quest for the divine meaning of the Tarot and I am sure we will find that divinity of the Tarot. In our quest we are taking our next step and I have drawn Temperance (XIV) for our next prompt. However ... this post will not be completed today, because of lack of time. Why? Well I am in the nightshift and therefore don't have enough time to prepare a complete episode, but hereafter follows a first part of this episode.

'Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God'. (John 3: 3 NIV).

I know a strange start of a new Carpe Diem episode in our journey through the Tarot in a quest to discover the divine Tarot, but I think this is a decent introduction to our next Tarot-card in which an Angel is depicted, Temperance (XIV).
Let us look closer to this Tarot-card and maybe we will come a step closer to our goal, finding the divine meaning of the Tarot. What do we see?

Temperance is almost invariably depicted as a person pouring liquid from one receptacle into another. Historically, this was a standard symbol of the virtue temperance, one of the cardinal virtues, representing the dilution of wine with water. In many decks, the person is a winged person/angel, usually female or androgynous, and stands with one foot on water and one foot on land.

This is the guardian Angel which accompanies as a faithful ally the divine image in man, just as visious inclinations have made their way into the human functional organism which was, before The Fall (Genesis 3: 1-24 NIV), the divine likeness. The guardian Angel undertakes the functions, destroyed by original sins, in the likeness, and fills the breacjh wrought by them. He substitutes himself for functions destroyed through The Fall.The guardian Angel acquits his charge in five ways:

1. he guards
2. he cherishes
3. he protects
4. he visits  (and)
5. he defends

Therefore he is a 'Flaming Star' in which we can find his connection with the first five cards of the Major Arcanum, in which we saw the Holy Trinity. Our guardian Angels are part of the Holy Realms of The Trinity, the 'Home of God' (The New Jerusalem) (Revelation 21: 1-5a NIV).
The guardian Angel is our advocate before Divine Justice, and they (the guardian Angels) are our intercession to the Lord saying: 'Forgive them their sins. If not, efface us from the Book of Life that you have written'.
The guardian Angel (female Angeline) defends his protege like a Mother defends her child, withour regard to whether he may be good or bad. It's the mystery of maternal love which lives in the heart of the guardian Angel. This is why traditional art presents them as winged females as we can see on this Tarot-card. This card openly presents the Angel as a winged female dressed in a woman's robe, half-blue and half-red.
Guardian Angels (or Angelines, because they're female) are the manifestation of high and pure maternal love. For this reason the Holy Virgin and Mother of God bears the liturgical title Regina Angelorum 'queen of the Angels'.
Angels, including guardian Angels, live and move exclusively in the Vertical. Ascent and descent constitute
the law of their life, their respiration. They ascend towards God; they descend towards mankind. As I wrote this a bible-verse came in mind. It's from Genesis and it tells about a dream which Jacob had at Bethel.

[...] 'Jacob had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the Angels of God were ascending and descending on it'. [...] (Genesis 28: 12 NIV)


THERE WILL BE MORE TO COME FOR THIS EPISODE

This prompt will stay on 'til May 22th 11.59 AM (CET) and I will post our next episode, The Devil (XV), later on today around 10.00 PM (CET).