The Tower

The summer sun
It blows my mind
It’s falling down on all that I’ve ever known
Time to kiss the world goodbye
Falling down on all that I’ve ever known
Is all that I’ve ever known

A dying scream
It makes no sound
Calling out to all that I’ve ever known
Here am I, lost and found
Calling out to all

‘Falling Down’ (Chemical Brothers Remix) by Oasis (N. Gallagher)

Welcome to my circle of destruction!

The Tower is a Big Card. It has Big Phallic Energy, lol. I’ve heard it described as the anchor of the deck, the Tarot’s heaviest card. It’s certainly a chaotic card that shows the razing to the ground of all that was previously thought solid – jobs, homes, relationships. It represents the destruction of long-established situations. It is a card that exposes how things or people that we once held dear are not what they seemed, and that the status quo can no longer continue. What was once (seemingly) peaceful and secure will explode into flames. The destruction may appear as an external disaster, or we may call down the lightning of our own free will. But either way, the Tower will happen. As Rachel Pollack writes in ‘78 Degrees of Wisdom‘: “The universe, and the human mind, will not allow us to stay forever imprisoned in our tower of illusion and repression. If we cannot free ourselves peacefully, then the forces of life will arrange for an explosion”.

In traditional Tower imagery, we are normally shown a high tower in flames, crumbling against a dark sky. The black, starless backdrop represents the (metaphorical as well as literal) darkness enveloping the Tower and its inhabitants. Tower moments are normally Dark Times – this kind of violent change can often feel very bleak and hopeless. But the Tower is not an out-and-out dark card. In many renditions it is being struck by lightning – and what could be brighter than this pure, elemental fire from the sky? As Sallie Nichols writes, “to be touched by lightning is to be touched by the hand of God”.

As a result of this lightning strike, the Tower itself is frequently shown ablaze. This fire is representative of a cleansing process – while fire is destructive, chaotic, ruinous – it also removes the dead wood, and allows for new things to grow. Often we see two figures falling from the Tower, clearly lost and terrified. Historically postulated to be either the humbled King Nebuchadnezzar and his vizier, the inhabitants of the Tower of Babel, or a Pope (Hierophant) and a King (Emperor), these figures are stand-ins for the general arrogance of humankind. We are so smug in the tall towers we have built ourselves, so convinced of our rightness. But the lightning will come for us all at some point. The feminist mythographer Barbara Walker goes one step further, and explicitly identifies the falling figures as representative of the power and authority of men. As such, the Tower’s collapse visually prophesises the downfall of the partriarchal worldview, both religious (Pope) and political (King). Finally, while it’s not pictured here in this stunning card from the ‘This Might Hurt‘ Tarot, often the artwork shows golden drops falling from the Tower. These are taken to be yods – divine points of energy – and are a reference to the Tree of Life. They shows us the blessing of the Tower card – however painful the destruction is, it is also liberating. Out of the ruins of the Tower, something new will have a chance to grow.

What we see in the image of the Tower struck by lightning is a representation of the tension between “the structure of lies and the lightning flash of truth” (Thirteen). The lightning is symbolic of a shocking moment of truth that shatters our perceptions and makes us reassess our beliefs. It’s understandably a scary card. We don’t like upheaval, rapid radical change, or loss. In fact, we generally really hate losing things, even if we can see that the thing we’re losing might not be entirely positive/good for us. This is especially true when the loss is both surprising and rapid. This kind of loss invokes the primal stomach crunching feeling of falling (so perfectly captured in the first person POV Tower card from the Tarot of Oneness, below), and we’re terrified of that feeling. For me, this is the key to why the Tower card has a bad rep: most people just do not like change. Even change that makes us better, that helps us to grow as a person, and come back brighter and bolder than before. So it’s important to remember that while the Tower’s collapse is painful, it is necessary. Nothing built on a lie can remain standing forever. The Tower is dragging into the light things we really, really need to know. It exposes falsehoods and lies and things that aren’t as good as they seem. And until we know what these things are, we can’t fix them. It’s not a card I relish getting in a reading, as it usually means starting over, more work, or leaving something once-important behind – but it is always, always, better to know something is rotten than to carry on in ignorance, in my opinion.

The Tower, then, is at once fantastic, magnificent, and familiar, as is so beautifully depicted in these cards from the Morgan Greer Tarot and the DruidCraft Tarot. Its collapse stuns and shakes us, but also brings a strange clarity. The Tower is not just a breakdown, but a breakthrough, when the darkness embodied in the Devil card is dragged, kicking and screaming, out into the light of consciousness. The Accelectic Tarot website reminds us that we have previously torn down resistance to change (the Hanged Man), come to terms with death (Death), and learned about moderation and synthesis (Temperance) and power (the Devil) – “but here and now is what is hardest: destroying the lies we tell about our lives”. As Bakara Wintner notes, the Devil’s barbs are deep, and the Tower will “rip us open to our core to extract them”. However, what is left will be the foundations of truth, on which we can rebuild ourselves.

“Enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It’s seeing through the facade of pretence. It’s the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.”

Adyashanti

Looking at the Tarot from a psychological perspective, Jessica Dore likens the Tower to emotional defence structures we build that seemingly protect us, but actually end up harming and limiting us. She notes that if our personality, our Tower, is built with bricks of behavioural patterns that make us feel protected from what we perceive as threatening – including the feeling of anxiety itself – when the bricks are violently torn away we feel vulnerable and exposed. But, over time, we can perhaps see this was a much needed act of destruction: “When we come to understand that yes, our psychological defence structures have served a protective function, but no, we don’t actually need that particular kind of armour to survive, a new life becomes possible”. This interpretation is beautifully reflected in the below two cards. In the Interim Tarot, the creator Linda Benjamin has drawn her Tower built upon a pair of lungs, and describes how “the ragged panic of shattered belief can suffocate”. However, as she goes on to note, “the asphyxiation felt now is a symptom, not cause, of an inbalance finally too toxic for the collective biome to ignore, and though the water element rules fear, it also rules hope at the opposite end”. And while the Slow Tarot shows the anxiety and destruction of the card (the amount of work to build a house of cards that tall!), I think it is also meaningful that the architect of the card tower looks like they are choosing to destroy it.

Grief will come to you.
Grip and cling all you want,
It makes no difference.

Catastrophe? It’s just waiting to happen.
Loss? You can be certain of it.

Flow and swirl of the world.
Carried along as if by a dark current.

All you can do is keep swimming;
All you can do is keep singing.

Untitled by Gregory Orr (in ‘How Beautiful the Beloved’)

As with much of the Tarot, while we can’t control events that befall us, what we can control is our reaction to them. Bakara Wintner points out that sometimes when our lives are ablaze, the only thing we can do is “offer ourselves to the fire”. Likewise, Jennifer Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt discuss times when we might welcome the Tower’s destructive force and be like: BURN IT! BURN IT ALL TO THE GROUND! “Sometimes you are done – finished, fin! – with something. Sometimes destruction can be positive… The Tower… can represent a moment of phenomenal courage and conviction, the act of seeking out the truth of something, and the relief that you feel when you find it, when you are able to be honest with yourself and the world”.

“All corners of the false self – every pretence, disguise, and empty ideal, every foundation built on illusion – must be incinerated, brought to rubble before spiritual renovation can begin… The Tower card depicts the lightning-flash moment when the roof blows off our illusions and lets the light in”

Paul Quinn, ‘Tarot for Life’

If we see the Tower as a lighthouse, such as in the Healing Waves Tarot, instead of mere destruction Tower moments also act as beacons of light or knowledge. Especially those revelatory moments, where one is smacked inside the head with a sudden lightbulb of realisation.

Most people are not going to enjoy Tower moments. But with hindsight, it may be more possible to see the gift of this card. When we have stepped out of it, and got some distance from the original catastrophe, we may find ourselves grateful, or at the very least proud of who we have become. Seneca the Younger said “fire proves gold, adversity proves men”, and “in the Tower we walk through the fire… It scorches off everything flammable, all that did not truly belong to us. Everything false is destroyed. We are left only with ourselves” (Wintner, WTF is Tarot?). As such, Bakara Wintner points out, “the Tower is best appreciated in hindsight, because in this urgent space we cannot reflect or search for greater meaning”. Jennifer Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt have some lovely reflections on the Tower, and note that “this is one of the moments where the Tarot doesn’t offer advice: its gift is simply that it allows that person’s story to be heard, and opens a door for them to sit with their feelings, alone or with others, for a while”. It’s important to remember here that the next card in the deck is the Star – the Tarot itself positions painful destruction as a necessary precursor to renewal and hopefulness. It is the vulnerability engendered by the chaotic violence of the Tower that allows the Star’s soothing light to nourish us.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you”

Rumi

Jennifer Cownie & Fiona Lensvelt point out that sometimes in a reading the Tower might appear to warn us of the dangers of catastrophic thinking, as opposed to an incoming catastrophe itself. They argue that the “final lesson of the Tower is that you shouldn’t live your life in its shadow. It comes for us all once in a while, for good or for ill, but it is always, by definition, unexpected”.

Addi Miyako writes about how the Tower is a very personal & emotional card for her, as she’s chosen to represent it with a drawing of a tower from the Japanese internment camp at Topaz where her grandma was held during WWII, even while her grandad fought for the US as part of the 442nd Infantry Regiment. She writes, “the guard tower is empty, a symbol of powerless fear, abandoned but left standing as a reminder. Flowers reclaim the structure, just as I reclaim my family’s story to be a vehicle for a more just future”.  Eric Maille‘s card is super powerful, though nuclear war scares me so much with its all-out devastation that I find it hard to see how you come back from this image (where is the Star in a nuclear winter?) However, as the creator himself reminds us, “some things in the world must be destroyed. This card could well indicate the destruction of something that oppresses or harms you. Some forces are meant to be toppled”.

The Archetypal Tower

I try to avoid going too esoteric on this blog (much like in my lectures, where the students eyes just glaze over), but there is so much cool stuff going on with the Tower that my weird little academic brain just can’t resist. I was also schooled in Experimental Psychology at Oxford, where they looked at you as if you’d just taken a shit on the floor of the tutorial room if you even mentioned the words “Freud” or “Jung” (‘junk psychology!‘), so it’s not that I buy wholesale into Jungian perspectives on humanity and collective consciousness. But I do think it’s a really fascinating way of trying to understand the human condition (and that much of academic psychology misses a trick by refusing to meaningfully engage with it in the name of being perceived as A Proper Science (‘We’re just like Physics! No, for reals!‘)).

He destroys the Tower, and scatters the people of the Earth, giving them different languages, so they will no longer be able to understand and collaborate with each other. Thus God punishes man’s hubris by destroying his proudest accomplishment and removing the possibility for him to ever achieve something so miraculous again. Bible scholars have argued that this is a metaphor for the inner fragmentation of man. Instead of oneness, we now find duality – good and evil, male and female etc. So we can see here strong echoes of the Tarot’s focus on both duality and attempts to (re)achieve oneness.

The Tower card often features a crown falling from the top of the Tower (or, indeed, a literal king being beheaded, like in the Ellis decK below) which has been interpreted as the role of ‘Tower moments’ in the dethroning of ego. Again, this is very Biblical/Babel-esque in its message: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). And in terms of the positive changes that can result from experiencing the Tower, the Bible scholar Anne-Marie Wegh writes, “only for a person who is willing to die to himself does the door to God open”. We can see a similar message in Fyodor Pavlov‘s Tower card, which depicts a falling winged figure that the artist has explained can either be seen as Icarus (“a fitting symbol of hubris brought low”) or Lucifer (“a proud angel defying God, and brought low by challenging the established authority”).

These strong links to our various cultural histories make the Tower card, for me, appear to be a particularly clear example of the Tarot as a system of archetypal symbols. Carl Jung contended that we are all born with archetypal symbols already in our unconscious minds. These collective representations reflect universal human experiences and the cosmic forces that impact on all human lives: birth, love, separation, death, loss, disorder, achievement, change, victory, defeat. Archetypes obviously vary a little from culture to culture, and change over time, but the fundamental ‘core’ of the archetype remains the same across individuals, cultures, and history.

To this extent, I think of archetypes as a little bit like psychological work on metaphor – there’s something about metaphor that seems to transcend culture and be a core part of human experience. Nearly every society will have metaphors for happiness that involve the concept of ‘up’ (‘I was on cloud nine’, ‘I was so happy I floated out of the room’), and for sadness that involve the concept of ‘down’ (‘I was down in the dumps’, ‘I was at rock bottom’, ‘My heart felt like it was made of lead’).  You just don’t see this metaphor reversed. Ever. So there is some fundamental way that we experience – and then talk about – happiness as lightness/upwards movement, and sadness as heaviness/downwards movement. In a similar way, archetypes carry meanings that we intuitively understand. Denmans Wehr writes that archetypes are like “a vortex of energy… [and] are accompanied by much emotion”.

Jung argued that the experience of touching archetypal energies is life-changing, and provokes feelings he describes as “numinous”. Luminously, intensely spiritual. Jane Caputi maintains that archetypes “inspire shock and awe because they are akin to the sacred – which is always creative and destructive, spiritual and mundane, light and dark – reflecting the complementary dualistic nature of nature, psyche, and cosmos”.

For me it is impossible to look at the Tower card and not immediately think of two major events from my lifetime that impacted on me greatly, partly because they felt like something already seen, already known about in my bones: the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 and the catastrophic fire at Grenfell Tower in the summer of 2017. Writing on Acelectic Tarot about the collapse of the Twin Towers, dangerdork observes that, “for the entire world to witness a mythic event made real… burned the images of the Tower, the fire from the skies, and the falling bodies, even more indelibly into the collective consciousness”. For, as Professor Galina Sinekopova notes, “the similarity between the Tarot image of the Tower [in the RWS deck] and the photo of the destroyed towers after 9/11 is strikingly uncanny”.

While the creator and artist Poppy Palin did not explicitly link her artwork for the Tower card (below) to the Grenfell Tower fire, there’s simply too much similarity for me not to think that this is what is being depicted. Poppy was English, and her deck feels like one of the most ‘English’ decks I own (even more than all the twee hedgehogs in woodlands type ones!), in its warm yet unflinching portrayal of everyday British life. The devastating fire at Grenfell happened in June 2017, and The Everyday Enchantment Tarot came out in 2018. Writing ‘as’ the woman on the card, Poppy explains, “Being out here with smoke in my eyes and the cries of my stranded neighbours in my ears gives me a taste of being a refugee escaping a war-torn land. I’d never really considered such people before, but now my heart goes out to them. Losing the things that make you secure is appalling, but losing those you love and the home your family had for generations is far worse… What matters most in this moment of crisis isn’t the work that I believed was my life, but life itself. All life matters! It’s as if I’ve been sleep-walking towards a selfish goal, and I’ve been picked up and spun around… Did I say [this was a] calamitous catastrophe? I meant to say remarkable revelation. This event has opened my eyes… what a wake-up call!”

I also can’t help but see echoes of Grenfell in the card from the 78 Tarot Ecological, illustrated by Shelby Nichols (although unlike Palin, I doubt this was Nichols’ explicit intention – just the power of the archetype at work!) It is firmly my belief that the tragic loss of life (and livelihood) at Grenfell was caused by a series of corporate and government failures, and that these were mainly precipitated by greed and callousness. Both a desire by developers to cut costs when building and refurbishing the tower, and a reluctance by the council to invest money in adequate safety measures. “People died in that tower block simply because they were working class and brown, Black predominantly, and the local councils and authorities didn’t think their lives were worth spending the money to get safe insulation, safe cladding for,” explains podcaster and director Kelechi Okafor. And Nichols’ card just perfectly summarises for me the dangers of valuing profits over people, of “chas[ing] greed and vanity built on an unsteady foundation”.

Caputi argues that part of the intense trauma caused by 9/11(and arguably more local events like Grenfell) – and the effect it had on people across the globe, even those who were in no way directly affected by the attack – is because of the archetypal meaning of the image of ‘a tall tower struck by lightning’. She points out that many people, even those who have never really had much interest in Tarot, will have absorbed Pamela Coleman Smith’s image from the RWS deck, and will have an awareness of the card’s meaning: the abrupt and usually painful end of illusion, a cataclysmic change, a radical restructuring of the social order, a moment after which nothing will ever be the same. She writes, “the vision of the struck, burned, and destroyed World Trade Centre Towers that we all witnessed over and over uncannily manifested this ancient archetype and, as such, contributed to the trauma we felt”. 

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