When towers fall, expect an abrupt change of circumstance; all the comforts of well-built walls, homes secured and defended, and crowns assumed are blasted to pieces by divine light. Everyone walks away, but the past’s monuments to success are nothing but rubble.
I pulled Tower cards from the Rust Belt Arcana (RBA), Hermetic Tarot (HT), and Alchemical Tarot (AT) decks, to dig a little deeper into the card influences. Each lends a different flavor to the disastrous scenes.
RBA explains each Major Arcana card with a story about flor and fauna of the US Rust Belt. “Birds Rain Down From the Sky” corresponds to the RBA Tower card which features a scattering of dead Woodcocks. The shorebirds migrate through Cleveland and each year, hundreds die from anthropogenic causes: reflective building surfaces and light at night. The card offers the birds in monumental proportion, an ugly truth we can not ignore. The lightning in the card, is nearly swallowed up by the darkness of night. The buildings remain intact, and unstruck by nature’s divine energy. The strikes seem to suck all the light and color from the world.
In the vein of lacking color, consider the black and white HT Tower. The illustrations says it all: CALAMITY! You can nearly hear the rumble of all nine lightening bolts cracking the scene. The tower is blasted at its midsection as the sun presides in the upper right corner. The two trees of life are filled with energies of the most profound density and lightness and the sigil of Mars invokes a the fiery correspondence to the Tower. A lone human figure is propelled to ground, seeming to swim between the trees of life. The message: dramatic change is at hand, time to start again having learned some lessons!
All the dynamism of the HT Tower is a stark contrast to the fairly static AT Tower composition; the transformative business of alchemy can be quiet. A single lightning strike comes through two pillars of clouds, aimed at the alchemists distilling equipment. We do not see the moment of the strike, but we know it happened because the glass is cracked. We see the instant afterward, when the bolt is retreating. A single drop of blood and one of water, further evidence of the strike, are released despite the destruction of the vessels. Two supplicants are prepared to receive them. The moment of transformation is at hand. Divinity is manifest, becoming differently.
Together the three cards enriched my understanding of the incoming message from the Tower. All is lost, start again with faith in the divine. There’s no denying it, the disorienting feelings of abrupt endings are a shock. Move on. Do not mourn this destruction too long. Don’t sort through the rubble, let it lay and walk away carrying only a gratitude for surviving, and a faith in the possibly unimaginable ‘what’s next.’ Identify the spaces opened by new energetic manifestations, you won’t be able to ignore the lightning. Remain curious to unfamiliar forms. They can move you toward a creative and more sustainable future.
One more Tower
The Tower came up in my new moon reading this month and in various spreads since. Yesterday I drew cards for the Summer Solstice and what appears? The Tower. I used a lovely Midnight Magic deck by Sara Richard; each card features a different mushroom. Turning to the small guide book that comes with the deck, I learn a little bit about the stinkhorn. Richard’s readings of the fungi are brilliant: “The stinkhorn explodes from the ground with a force that can crack pavement, then decays into a horrific puddle – capturing the essence of the Tower card.”
