An angel stands with one foot on land, one foot in water, pouring fluid from one beaker into another. In the background, we see the sun setting. The angel is often said to be mixing opposites, unifying them by sheer will and belief and thus synthesizing something even more valuable.

 

For me, this card illustrates how we see boundaries, categories, and opposites in the world (water and land, day and night, water and wine) when these concepts may ultimately be void. We sometimes seem desperate to divide the world around us in clear-cut binaries - good and evil, black and white, male and female, life and death - while conventiently ignoring the countless shades of grey in between. Why do we blind ourselves? All of reality is fluid. Everything is endless - at least until the universe ends. Our very sense of Self is an illusion.

 

These ideas make us infinitely small yet infinitely connected, in a way that has parallels to religious experience. It is no wonder then, that they are so popular in this increasingly secular age. Those of us that still long for a bit of reverence can look up in awe to the cosmos and contemplate that we are, indeed, stardust. Every atom in our bodies has passed through millions of forms, and so it will continue. We are already taking in new and shedding old atoms from our body, day after day, and after death (remember that Temperance is the first card after Death) we will fall apart altogether. And by fully dissolving our Self and dispersing our atoms, we achieve the ultimate connection to the world - merging with it once again.

 

And we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos, we’ve begun, at last, to wonder about our origins. Star stuff, contemplating the stars, organized collections of 10 billion-billion-billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps, throughout the cosmos.

 

- Carl Sagan

 

Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made.

 

- Richard Dawkins

 

Our story is the story of the universe. Every piece of everything, of everything you love and everything you hate, of the thing you hold most precious, was assembled by the forces of nature in the first few minutes of the life of the universe, transformed in the hearts of the stars or created in their fiery deaths. And when you die, those pieces will be returned to the universe in the endless cycle of death and rebirth. What a wonderful thing it is to be part of that universe. What a story, what a majestic story.

 

- Brian Cox

 

If you watched a rock your entire life it would never look different. But if you were God and could observe the rock over fifteen billion years as though only a second had passed, the rock would be frantic with activity. It would be shrinking and growing and trading matter with its environment. Its molecules would travel the universe and become a partner to amazing things that we could never imagine. By contrast, the odd collection of molecules that make a human being will stay in that arrangement for less time than it takes the universe to blink.

 

- Scott Adams in his novella 'God's Debris: A Thought Experiment'

 

People they come together

People they fall apart

Nothing can stop us now

'cause we are all made of stars

 

- Moby

 

Reality is an insane paradox, but only if you try to categorize it in human terms. A Serbian proverb suggests that you "be humble, for you are made of earth" but that you also "be noble, for you are made of stars." This blending of false opposites is exactly what Temperance seems to suggest to me. We are not one or the other; we are both and yet none.