EP 58: The Tower Card

Join me today my ear bud coven because we are looking at the 16th card of the High Arcana

The Tower Card

To be totally honest with you the Tower is the only card in the tarot that makes me nervous. When it appears it comes up to tell us that we are in a time of deep transformation.

I was taught that when the tower presents in a reading a time of upheaval and excavation is coming. It’s time to go to the root of the issue. The tower is crumbling around us, we can no longer repair what we have built.

We have to let it fall, so that we can rebuild a brand new structure.

This is a time of deep healing and powerful growth

well at least it can be …

Because we can always not do the work. We have free will … we can spin around in this process and allow our lives to become more messy. And that is part of the towers message to us as well.

The Tower card holds an energy where the place you are currently in is difficult and the process to move forward has growing pains too. It is a very true reflection of the human condition.

That we tend to avoid change

That the process of self examination and changing our deep patterns can be so scary to us that we will stay in an unhealthy pattern

rather than move through the uncertainty of changing it

The Tower forces us to move forward

The illustration on the card of a person plunging out of a crumbling tower tells the story of resisting the sign that we need to take action, until we are forced to.

Now I usually get into the symbology, the occult history and why a card means what it means, but with the Tower card is pretty straight forward. It shows a tower, lightning is striking it and a person is jumping out the window to in an attempt to save their life.

It’s not cryptic at all – both ways forward have their difficulty 
          

             If you stay in the tower and have it fall down around you...
 
                                                    or 
           
            jump …   and you will suffer some injuries on the way down

The tower card defiantly reflects life and what it is to change and grow and break free of old patterns.

I feel that the simplicity of the picture really conveys the whole idea. I am sure you are familiar with the saying that people choose to stay with the devil they know rather than risk the uncomfortableness of change

The person in the image that represents us is jumping out a window to avoid being buried in the rubble of a collapsing tower. In many decks there is a little friend at the base of the tower, I like to think that this symbolizes the signs and warning we did not listen to. It is possible we could have left he tower earlier with less drama.

But we did not we stubbornly stayed in our comfort zone… ever though the tower was destined for ruin we stayed there.

Just for fun let’s have a look at what the image is symbolizing

Lets remember that this card is in the last set of seven card that make up the high arcana (we have talked about this in our other Tarot Talk episodes.) Those high vibe cards of the tarot the ones connected to our highest self and our life path. We often find that the work the tower forces us to do, is an echo of the lessons we have already had presented to us in previous cards, such as the the Chariot and Strength cards.

There are cards we can look to and lessons we can lean into that can help us to move through transition with grace. The High Priestess’s skills of looking inward and beyond the mundane and the Justice card’s lesson of following our heard and living from a hear centered space over our logic and ego space, can help us through the shock of the tower card.

Can we get out of shaming and blaming when we use the heart centered perspective of the Justice card. We can look for the truth to why the tower needed to fall. What is good what is true about a situation is not always lovely – even ugly truths are true

When we apply the inborn powers that we discovered in the High Priestess card to peer beyond the veil and see the bigger picture of the situation We can see the hidden strings that brought us to the tower card and how this lesson is connected to others.

We may even discover that the lightning strike was not so sudden after all, but something we could have seen coming if we did not choose to ignore the signs around us.

So what does this all mean to you client ?

That change is coming...

        Big change, that they have been avoiding for some time. 
        Either because they were in denial or because they were clinging to an out grown idea 
        that no longer serves them.

They will feel rocked

The way forward will seem as difficult and they will not enjoy the changes that need to be made

Like all things once through them, there will be deep understanding as to why it needed to happen.