Temperance: Spiritual Ableism, Healing, and Wholeness
image: a black person in neutral clothing and braids sits comfortably listening to their phone with headphones on a purple gradient background.
The way we talk about healing in spiritual spaces can be fucked up! At best, it's vague and sprawling. At worst, its just straight up ableism. No wonder it's unable to account for what cannot be healed, only accepted.
It is in these moments of radical, uncanny acceptance where we find tarot's Temperance.
I've met plenty of tarot readers who connect Temperance with healing. Healing is a symptom of the deeper wholeness and acceptance Temperance can facilitate.
Temperance appears between Death and The Devil--a complex place to be! Any healing that progresses where we find Temperance is due to our ability to integrate what we're going through.
This is why, to me, true wholeness of the body/mind, an end to unwellness, and final cessation of bad habits comes in Judgement, not Temperance.
There's no way to heap ableist narratives about cures and healing on Temperance, because The Tower is coming. What we can do when we reach Temperance is pause and take stock of who we are and why we're here.
That's the work of wholeness, of sitting with the beautiful nastiness of existence. Wholeness helps us implement whatever improvements are available out of a deep and abiding sense of self-regard. What can that self-regard teach us about wholeness that healing cannot?
Spiritual ableism isn't healing justice, it's the wellness to alt-right pipeline
Temperance asks us to be in and with the discomfort of having a body/mind. It invites us to consider if there are any possibilities for transformation even in the toughest times.
As summer ends, we're once again in the midst of a COVID surge. Everyone I come upon has something-not-covid. It's a something-not-covid pandemic. Which is to say COVID is still very much here.
Yet the ability to confront the massive changes the virus has wrought has yet to develop.
There's an acknowledgement that young people are dying from heart attacks and strokes. Must be the vaccine, others assures them, and they put it out of their minds.
Early Alzheimers, autoimmune diseases, and every manner of debility are on display. But perhaps it's because you're not doing enough to regulate your nervous system? Maybe you need a vacation, somewhere warm, to cope?
It's gone from cognitive dissonance to a failure to cogitate at all, lest one have to reckon with what's going on. The thing from which the body may not heal. COVID-19-24. The plague.
This is what narrow ideas of healing ensure. Everyone wants a quick fix, a cure. No one will admit there's a disease going around that's hard to stop.
There's not an adult autistic diagnosed in childhood who hasn't been subject to news of "a cure." Cure narratives are particularly dangerous for those with diseases and differences that "won't heal"
From veganism to bleach, the goal of the ableist is not to make sure that disabled and sick people can be comfortable and accepted. To sell their bullshit, they need to make sure we're reviled, suspected, and full of shame.
Everybody is looking for the magic bullet, the balm in Gilead. On Tiktok, the permasick drink laundry booster in hopes of healing. Some of the "cures" proposed to in the early years of the AIDS epidemic are stomach turning.
And yet, without the tools to even understand what's happening to our body/minds, let alone improve our circumstances, we are expected to heal.
This is how doctors, healers, and spiritualists push sick, disabled, and mad people into the wellness to alt-right pipeline. Each enforces their idea of "the good life" onto people who may or may not have any access to this contrivance.
So they look for healing elsewhere. When they can't find it, they reach for blame. When aimed at the system which targets certain bodies for disablement, this is a good thing. When it's aimed at ourselves, including our illnesses, it can be deadly.
Temperance's focus on deep self-transformation can help us accept ourselves in our complexity, whether we heal or not.
What many professionals and healers call "healing" mirrors Christian dogma
Tarot's Temperance offers a middle path during a difficult time, without insisting we did something to deserve our problems.
When I rapidly deteriorated as a fourteen year old, I have no doubt that some in my life presumed tarot the reason. I come from a religious community, and to very religious people, everything is a punishment.
Once the punishment is doled out, no on can stop it except god. If god stops it, then your whole life must be a testimony to that overcoming. To them, all illness is punishment, and all health comes directly from god.
While I do believe in unnatural illness, as well as unnatural exacerbation of illness, I also believe in perfectly natural illness. I believe the sociopolitical hellscape in which we live is the largest determinant of individual health.
Spiritual spaces, like Christian ones, often believe that health is a marker of divine favor. If not, why the ubiquitous conversations about disabled people's unfitness for spiritual leadership?
The idea that spirituality and disability are mutually exclusive, does nothing but serve a culture dead set on "fixing" disabled people.
Fixing disabled means hiding us away, pushing us to the side, rejecting our leadership, normalizing violence against us, killing us.
Spiritual ableism ramps up as emphasis on the moral imperative not to be sick, traumatized, or disabled does. The other side of these narratives about healing, the mandate of it, is cure rhetoric.
Illness and death are part of life. They can't be stopped. Accepting this helps along the wholeness Temperance offered.
You have a right to be alive and do your work, even if you're not "healed"
"Failure" to heal is seen as an attack on one's community, which believes it has been nothing but supportive. They take it as willfulness, as ego. And if you cannot heal, they insist, perhaps we should prevent people like you from being born at all.
Those who know me know I am usually a secretary of some group or another. In college, it was student counsel. Naturally, I had a serious crush on the student counsel president.
We'd spend a lot of time together. She was a leaderly, powerful Black woman on a mostly white campus.
One night after two meetings, a pizza, and several episodes of the L Word, we got to talking about why I used a cane. It was the year I was diagnosed with SLE, and hair was falling out in little clumps.
This powerful, analytical, and qualified Black woman turned to me and asked "why didn't your parents test for it before they had you?" A crush gone as soon as it took root.
If you've never been so sick everyone around you thought you were going to die, your view of healing probably does little for people like me.
For I have been this sort of sick. Too sick to keep my eyes open. Too sick to lie down in comfort, but with no choice but to lie down. Too sick to eat or digest food.
An illness so serious it rendered the rest of my life an open question. So sick that had I died then, that those closest to me would have celebrated my death as an improvement.
I know this because this summer, I ended a long friendship. There were many reasons, but one that stands out is that they told me they'd expected me to die. They'd figured I'd be their friend who would have already died by now.
What can healing mean to someone for whom such a "friendship" could span a decade?
I don't have a great fear of death. Death is natural and inevitable. But what can someone who has never been faced with living in spite of those who believe their life to be a kind of sub-life, of pre-death teach me about healing?
Some would also say that it’s in our nature to heal. I agree about some things, but the way spiritualists use the term “healing” is way more abstract than the healing of a wound.
A wound can heal, as in it’s possible, if you do not have an illness or disability that stops that. But the situation we’re in is like expecting a wound to heal with the knife still in it.
To heal from a major illness or trauma, it has to stop happening. You have to feel safe, or at least safe-ish, in saying you can prevent it from happening again.
Which reminds me of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz:
“If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. They haven’t even begun to pull the knife out; they won’t even admit the knife is there.”
Well the knife is there. It’s a complex conversation that goes beyond the smug ways that “healing” and the even more smug “healed” are said in spiritual spaces.
In my experience, the lesson of autoimmunity and Temperance is otherwise. What cannot be healed can still be faced. We can meet death again and again as a friend and smile, and say "not today, come back later."
Temperance reminds us that well, sick or even dying our humanity, purpose and self-work continue. Temperance reminds us you don't have to be some unattainable version of "fully healed" to be whole.
Further Thoughts
image: hey, i'm cyree jarelle. I run Collective Cartomancy. I help queers, feminists, and leftists connect with their intuition using tarot and cartomancy. More on me.
"The way we talk about healing in spiritual spaces can be fucked up! At best, it's vague and sprawling. At worst, its just straight up ableism. No wonder it's unable to account for what cannot be healed, only accepted.
It is in these moments of radical, uncanny acceptance where we find tarot's Temperance."