Tower Moments Everywhere
Let's banish the dark of normality, shall we?
The Tower’s most common keywords are upheaval, chaos, destruction, tragedy, and loss. I grew up with a parent living with addiction and mental illness, so I understand Tower energy in my bones. Immediately upon my introduction to tarot, it became my favorite card.
It represents dark times that shake us loose from our moorings in this world—divorces, diseases, disasters, deaths. Break-ups and layoffs qualify, too. The Tower acknowledges that bad things happen to good people, sometimes relentlessly, and there’s a lot of comfort for me in that.
I knew there was another layer of meaning—revelation and waking up—but I found it hard to square with the card’s devasting imagery.
Then, in March of 2023, I took a class with the Tarot School that was solely about the Tower. The teacher, Wald Amberstone, described the Tower as symbolizing the big bang, a violent outburst with the energy to start a new universe. It is destruction that contains creation.
He said the Tower’s lighting bolt “banishes the dark of normality.”
The deck he used to teach this card was the Universal Rider White Smith deck. In my RWS deck, the sky of the Tower card is monochromatic black. In the Universal RWS, there are gradients of blue, black, and purple representing the known, unknown, unknowable, and impenetrable, according to Wald.
The Tower is the edifice we create with words, ideas, and “knowledge” to protect us from the staggering spiritual mysteries and the vast ocean of what is not simply unknown but unknowable. To have our Tower destroyed crushes our illusions about what we think we’ve got figured out and gets us closer to confronting the impenetrable. The Tower is the Tower of Bable.
To refresh your memory, the Tower of Babel is a myth from the Bible that explains all the different languages. In the story, humans had a single language that made it possible to do things like build a city with a tower. This made people think they knew it all and were all-powerful. God struck it down and created different languages to remind them that the human brain cannot know it all.
When life brings Tower moments, which it always does, it can reveal spiritual insights and bring awakenings that may never have happened any other way. But you do have to look for them.
Another unforgettable lesson from this Tower class I took last year was about the difference between what we see with our eyes and the storylines we make up in our minds. Look at the people in the Tower card. What is happening to them? What do you see?
If you’re anything like me, you see humans plunging to certain death. But Wald reminded the class that the world of the Tarot is not real life. It’s a magical realm. We see bodies falling, but there’s no motion. We decide they’re moving downward. But who’s to say they are not flying, floating upward toward enlightenment?
Now, whenever I see the Tower, or encounter a difficult event that forces change, I tell myself that even though it feels like I’m falling to my death, I am just as likely rising up.
Looking back on all my Tower moments, starting from childhood, when I developed the sixth sense necessary to read the minds and moods of unstable adults, I can see now that I was rising above. Today, I call that ability to mind read “empathy” and “intuition,” and it’s at the core of my tarot practice.
Last summer, when I got laid off out of the blue, I knew it was a Tower moment. I knew the structures I had been hiding out in were crumbling to dust. I knew the next steps would be ruin, ruble, rebuilding. I didn’t like it one bit, but having the perspective of the tarot helped me get through it.
In the deck, the next card after the Tower is the Star, a respite that signals hope. Every time the Tower surfaces in a reading, I remember that the Star, and its twinkling optimism will be there to navigate by when the smoke clears.
